BradSpangler.com

Back in September of 2002, National Review Online published Frederica Mathewes-Green’s magnificently controversial “Let’s Have More Teen Pregnancy“. The author persuasively argues that several social ills are derived from the delayed recognition of adulthood (a relatively recent development in historical terms).

• Most of the negative associations people have with the term “teen pregnancy” are actually in connection with unwed teen pregnancy.
• By typically having a number of romantic involvements and breakups before marriage, young adults actually train for divorce, in psychological terms.
• And so forth, enumerating other points in favor of her position.

The author then answers objections, perhaps the most common being the matter of ability/inability by young people to earn an adequate income:

“The age that a man, or woman, can earn a reasonable income has been steadily increasing as education has been dumbed down. The condition of basic employability that used to be demonstrated by a high school diploma now requires a Bachelor’s degree, and professional careers that used to be accessible with a Bachelor’s now require a Master’s degree or more. Years keep passing while kids keep trying to attain the credentials that adult earning requires.”

I would agree that the dysfunctional state education system shares a great deal of the blame for this. Furthermore, anti-state trends such as homeschooling and unschooling point the way toward a more effective educational system — a system that, depending on your preferred terminology, could be described as either an ecology of wholly voluntary educational systems or a “free market in education”. At the very least, true seperation of school and state are needed rather than corporate monopoly “privatization” schemes or religion subsidizing voucher programs. Of course, any anarchist worth her salt will tell you that the most effective way to seperate anything and state is to abolish the state.

Additionally, there’s the matter of bureaucracy and economic centralization. Large scale authoritarian social arrangements nearly always depend on the hollow credentialism college degrees often exemplify. Abolishing government will transform the provision of educational services for the better because people will only support what they perceive works — and that goes for voluntary communal arrangements just as well as profit-seeking (and therefore tending to be customer service oriented) education enterprises. It takes a coercive state to subsidize large-scale dysfunctional systems, such as the prisons that are called “schools” these days.

Let me add that I find the authors apparent traditionalist bias toward a heteronormative conception of marriage a tad unfortunate. The economic logic of strong and genuinely healthy family groups works just as well for queer couples, and more power to them when it does. Don’t let that shortcoming of the author distract from the logic of her overall argument.

Tags: Cultural Notes, Politics //