Trashing Teens

Although this isn't a homeschooling article, it discusses schools and school-related problems in ways that will be very revealing and freeing for homeschoolers.

Psychologist Robert Epstein spoke to Psychology Today's Hara Estroff Marano about the legal and emotional constraints on American youth.

HEM (Hara Estroff Marano): Why do you believe that adolescence is an artificial extension of childhood?

RE: In every mammalian species, immediately upon reaching puberty, animals function as adults, often having offspring. We call our offspring "children" well past puberty. The trend started a hundred years ago and now extends childhood well into the 20s. The age at which Americans reach adulthood is increasing—30 is the new 20—and most Americans now believe a person isn't an adult until age 26.

The whole culture collaborates in artificially extending childhood, primarily through the school system and restrictions on labor. The two systems evolved together in the late 19th-century; the advocates of compulsory-education laws also pushed for child-labor laws, restricting the ways young people could work, in part to protect them from the abuses of the new factories. The juvenile justice system came into being at the same time. All of these systems isolate teens from adults, often in problematic ways.

Our current education system was created in the late 1800s and early 1900s, and was modeled after the new factories of the industrial revolution. Public schools, set up to supply the factories with a skilled labor force, crammed education into a relatively small number of years. We have tried to pack more and more in while extending schooling up to age 24 or 25, for some segments of the population. In general, such an approach still reflects factory thinking—get your education now and get it efficiently, in classrooms in lockstep fashion. Unfortunately, most people learn in those classrooms to hate education for the rest of their lives.

The factory system doesn't work in the modern world, because two years after graduation, whatever you learned is out of date. We need education spread over a lifetime, not jammed into the early years—except for such basics as reading, writing, and perhaps citizenship. Past puberty, education needs to be combined in interesting and creative ways with work. The factory school system no longer makes sense.

http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/index.php?term=pto-20070302-000002&print=1

Dependence Nurtures Independence

A researcher at Carnegie-Mellon University has shown that attachment theory (referred to in La Leche League and among Unschoolers as "attachment parenting") works with married couples too. Things we've been discussing among unschoolers for years has research now! How cool. Part of my purpose in posting this here now is so I can find it again more easily when my world finally settles from this upcoming conference and Kirby's move to Austin (he's going to Sacramento with me; we get back Monday afternoon; he leaves town Wednesday morning).

The Thinkers: CMU prof shows benefits of emotional support

By Mark Roth, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Monday, June 04, 2007

Brooke Feeney has discovered that the same thing that works for
crying babies also works for adult couples and for parents and their
teenage children.

http://www.postgazette.com/pg/07155/791406-51.stm

There are audio files at that site too, as described below:

Carnegie Mellon relationship researcher Brooke Feeney says parents'
emotional support of children is more important than giving them things.

Ms. Feeney explains why people's behavioral patterns are hard to
change.

Ms. Feeney talks about why people who avoid emotional involvement
often pair with those who are anxious about relationships.