WAREHOUSING THE YOUNG | 2002-06-08
The same people who created the homeless problem by de-warehousing the mental cases also warehoused the young.
There was a time when the age of fourteen was a critical time in the process of moving toward adulthood. That was the age at which a king "came into his own" if his father had died during his childhood. Even today, the Amish want their children to leave school at fourteen.
In earlier ages, a boy about fourteen would be apprenticed or he would be "reading law" in a real lawyer's office and witnessing a real practice. Aspiring doctors studied under real doctors. Very few went to colleges, and colleges at that time were openly Fantasyland. Young men studied Latin and Greek and Mythology. They did not pretend they were learning about The Real World in some sociology class.
Today, fourteen is the age at which kids begin eight years of warehousing. They sit through four years as freshman, sophomore, junior and senior in high school and repeat the same thing and call it college.
Where do children sit during the required eight-year extension of their childhood? They sit in modified high chairs, with a single adult sitting at a desk in front. And this, ladies and gentleman, is Reality to twentieth century young people.
During this century, the single adult who represents the only reality to these hopelessly overgrown babies have taught generation after generation of young people that professors should rule the world. The kids in their high chairs have been fed words like Revolution and Liberation, but it always comes back to the same bottom line
Professors should teach bureaucrats who will go out and run everything from criminology to the government-planned economy.
In other words, the kids in their high chairs learn from the permanent adolescent who teaches them that he and they should rule the world.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is all there is to the so-called "political left."