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Bruce Charlton's new idea
Formal education slows down our process of growing up. Isn't that...er...the opposite of what it is supposed to do? Bruce also notes that this process is more likely to be helpful to women, and harmful to men. Which may be why, in some big cities, women are now earning more than men are.
Posted by Tyler Cowen on August 9, 2007 at 06:05 AM in Education | Permalink
Comments
Isn't that...er...the opposite of what it is supposed to do?
Right, which is why it isn't all that efficient at the task it has evolved into. An education specifically designed to create neoteny would look very different from what we've got now.
Posted by: Dave at Aug 9, 2007 6:49:33 AM
I think that things that go along with this delayed growing up, like exclusion from adult society through child labor laws and just pressure to not hire youth and social pressure to not marry young are very bad for some people and IMO increase certain social pathologies like gangs and drugs. This may be part of the reason why second generation Mexicans do less well than immigrants. I think that apprenticeship should be an encouraged option for some youth who are not inclined toward school. For a group that avoids these long delays to adulthood look at the Mennonites and the Amish. They do not do poorly.
Posted by: Floccina at Aug 9, 2007 9:54:12 AM
Actually, formal education is partly designed to remove young people from the labor force for a period of time - it wasn't until the Depression that most children went to high school, and that was a deliberate policy choice - it employed more teachers, and it kept teenagers from competing for jobs with men supporting families.
In some other sense, formal education is designed to slow our process of growing up - we don't require children to show as much responsibility, in exchange for giving them the tools to do better when they do accept adult responsibilities.
Lastly, the paper is buncombe. Psychological Neoteny is not so much a function of increasing higher education, as college students of an earlier generation were expected to show a fairly great amount of responsibility (in a limited domain), and many (most?) would marry shortly after graduation. The increasing wealth of society and the Pill are the factors which allow psychological neoteny to be viable.
Posted by: Anthony at Aug 9, 2007 12:10:00 PM
"Theorists from Plato to Rousseau to our own Dr. Inglis knew that if children could be cloistered with other children, stripped of responsibility and independence, encouraged to develop only the trivializing emotions of greed, envy, jealousy, and fear, they would grow older but never truly grow up." -- John Taylor Gatto
Posted by: Don Marti at Aug 9, 2007 12:42:38 PM
I suspect that Dr. Charlton is right about formal education as a contributing cause but I'm not so sure about the benefits. In particular, his identification of certain desirable intellectual traits with childlikeness seems hasty. (That's why I recommended ROTC in Advice on College - inspired by the thread here a few weeks ago.)
PS Anthony, thanks for the new spelling of buncombe.
Posted by: Timothy at Aug 9, 2007 1:08:40 PM
" 'Theorists from Plato to Rousseau to our own Dr. Inglis knew that if children could be cloistered with other children, stripped of responsibility and independence, encouraged to develop only the trivializing emotions of greed, envy, jealousy, and fear, they would grow older but never truly grow up.' "
I am in agreement with the above quote, and therefore am quoting it again. The pill certainly enables greater PN, but PN seems to be more than just an optimization given preferences and constraints. Rather, PN seems to mean delaying the transition to the next stage of the life-cycle, which may be best described as altering your preferences entirely.
PN is about preferences, not optimization.
Feel free to poke this full of holes, because I can already see some glaring ones in my line of thought myself.
Posted by: Robert Olson at Aug 9, 2007 2:11:16 PM
These changes correspond to different advantages and disadvantages for men and for women. To name an important way modern life disadvantages women compared to men, delayed childbirth (for education and career) means the typical man and woman will go through many more short-term and long-term sexual relationships in their young adult and adult lifetime before finally "settling down" in their 30s or 40s.
But, on average, an increase in both short-term (PDF) and long-term sexual relationships have a negative psychological effect on women and a positive psychological effect on men.
(For more on the plight of the modern woman, see the "two best posts" Dr. Cowen ever read)
Posted by: Jason Malloy at Aug 9, 2007 3:47:14 PM
"Of the best" rather.
Posted by: Jason Malloy at Aug 9, 2007 3:50:26 PM
The author states "I put forward the hypothesis that the major cause of PN in modernizing societies is the prolonged duration of formal education. Here I present a preliminary empirical investigation of this hypothesis of psychological neoteny"
However, no consideration is given to endogenous effects, competing hypotheses, or how one would actually formalize and test the hypothesis.
It's a nice idea but the article is horribly weak.
Posted by: jonm at Aug 9, 2007 8:34:31 PM
Let me think about my grandparents. Neither of them went to high school, so both of them should have
shown signs of early maturity. Let's see, they engaged in premarital sex, we know that from the birth date of their first child. They frequently beat each other and beat their children. They had eight children. The surviving children were put to work in factories at the age of 14. My grandfather's hobby was getting drunk. My grandmother's hobby was domineering people. My grandfather drank himself to death and my grandmother spent the last three decades of her life watching TV. I guess that makes them more mature than kids these days.
Posted by: Dutch Boy at Aug 10, 2007 6:39:14 AM
Doesn't it seem reasonable that as life spans increase, people will start to remain youthful longer? If increased my life span tomorrow, I'd definitely rather extend my period of youth and take my time growing up as opposed to having a short youth and then tacking on the extra years when I am old and physicially infirm. Why is it a bad thing that people aren't "growing up" at the same rate (whatever that means), when they'll probably have many more years of "adulthood" than their grandparents did and plenty of time to experience what their grandparents did, and more?
Posted by: jojo at Aug 11, 2007 11:44:04 AM
If your life span was increased, the increase wouldn't be concentrated in one area, but spread out across the life.
The problem is the behaviors that arise from youths with too much time and too little to do. We don't let youth grow up anymore. We lock them up in schools until they turn 16 (or 22 if they are well off). Yuck.
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