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Entry: Adolescence: A Heresy Link: http://www.takimag.com/site/article/the_case_against_adolesence#10739 Post contents: I have also long believed that adolescence is a bogus concept. My late maternal grandmother was trained to be a seamstress. I doubt that she even finished elementary school. Yet, she raised two fine daughters after being widowed at an early age, helped keep a rural bank afloat during the last Depression, did a fine job as a college registrar and librarian, and was still taking college classes for fun well into her 80's. I could cite other examples of being tossed into life at an early age and working one's way to success. While being a young man in the military, I was thrust into positions of tough responsibility before my 21st birthday. Necessity is a mother all right, but to keep people in a state of frustrated and retarded development for many years mainly to keep otherwise unemployable "educators" busy is a terrible waste of human capital. From my experience, most of secondary schooling is a wasteland. I was reading at a college level in mid grade school, and after that, until graduate school started, life was grim. to my mind, we should scrap the entire adolescent fantasy, let people mature in their early teen years through the responsibilities of living their own lives, and then when education becomes necessary they can go to the best educational invention in the 20th Century, the community college and pick up whatever they need or desire at a modest cost. As a cartoon I once admired said, "Teenagers! Leave home and go off on your own and live the way you wish. Do this now, while you still know everything!" Sent at: 2008 12 01