Who Will Be the Grownups?

A recent Time article described the difficulty teens are having finding employment. Today only 17% of high school students have jobs, whereas only 10 years ago, as many as 45% of teens were working. In the 1970's, 9% of the people employed in the U.S. were teenagers. Now the number has dropped to 1/3 of that value.

The main culprits are adults who, by necessity, are out-competing teens for jobs. Of course, the implicit tragedy in all of this is that adults--many with families and crippling financial obligations--are now working the lower-paying jobs without benefits that formerly went to teens. All-around it's a bad situation for everyone involved as well as for society as a whole.

The article gives interesting statistics about people's future earning potential based on the economic climate during their first job. Basically, if you started working in a rotten economy, you'd most likely earn less money than if you had started in a thriving economy. The article also explains some of the negative social consequences of teen unemployment, such as higher rates of teen pregnancies and single-parent households. The only upside to all of this is that teens are staying in school longer than ever before, either to build technical skills or to gain higher credentials. Having better-educated adults in society is the only silver lining in all of this mess. Or is it?

According to an essay from a recently published book entitled This Will Change Everything: Ideas That Will Shape the Future, extended schooling prolongs the helpless, dependent stage that humans go through as children. Author, Alison Gopnik, describes childhood as a time when flexible, limitless learning yet helplessness and dependence on caretakers occurs, whereas adulthood is when less learning, but more planning and active mastery of knowledge (as well as independence) takes place. The positive result is that all this learning may result in the Flynn Effect where we'd see an increase in absolute IQ scores across the population. But if all this learning arrests independence and the ability to plan and act on mastered knowledge, Gopnik believes there may be a negative consequence to all of this and thus ends her essay by asking, "When we are all babies forever, who will be the parents? When we're all children who will be the grown-ups?"

I'll tell you who: The trust fund babies whose parents' connections can secure them positions of influence and wealth or whose allowances can support them until they can financially support themselves. They'll become the so-called "grownups" making the decisions for the rest of us so that the gap between the have's and the have-not's can widen even further.

That's who! Isn't that how the system was designed to work?