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Entry: Adolescence: A Heresy Link: http://www.takimag.com/site/article/the_case_against_adolesence#10752 Post contents: There is much truth in this essay, but some flaws need to be pointed out. 1. The traditional age of majority in the English-speaking world was always 21 or thereabouts. (In Britain, for reasons unknown to me, it was traditionally 21 years minus one day; in America, it was, more logically, the 21st birthday itself.) In some other societies, such as classical Rome, the age of full majority was even higher. This has actually gone down rather than up in the last century (to 18 in most states). 2. "They married shortly after puberty began, sometimes as early as 14 or 15." This statement is true for some traditional societies, but it has not been true in the English-speaking or Western European world for five or six centuries at least. By Shakespeare's time, 13-year-old brides like Juliet, while not unknown, were rarely the norm, and were relatively common only among the upper classes (where youthful marriages were often forced for dynastic reasons). In early modern England, the average age of marriage was only slightly lower than it is today. It was lower in the American colonies of the seventeenth century, but still around twenty for women and somewhat higher for men. It fluctuated greatly in the U.S. over the following centuries, reaching a historic low in, of all periods, the 1950s, after G. Stanley Hall and Jane Addams were long dead and shortly after the word "teenager" was coined. It did begin to rise again to its present levels in the 1960s. 3. I have more than a few doubts as to whether child soldiers, even if they sometimes did grow into great men like Jackson and Farragut, are a phenomenon that it would be particularly desirable to revive. Sent at: 2008 12 01