What if you have never heard of the most important book written in the last year, if not the last ten?
Who is the most abused, subordinated, derided, slandered, and destitute group in the modern West? When does the brain develop? Do we only use 10% of our brains? Who has power and what do they want? What do all of these questions have in common?
The answer to the last one is that one book answers them all. Its back says the following:
Everyone has heard that "we only use 10% of our brains" is a myth perpetuated by Hollywood. Here we add another myth to the pile: that the brain develops until the age of 25. This groundbreaking new work exposes the institution of Science as unfaithful to its own data, existing in a subverted state subordinate to the political aspirations of the class that controls it. Bronski tears the narrative apart piece by piece, ripping through and debunking every major writing that supports the myth of the teen brain. In addition, he shows that the ideology regarding youth which exists today is totally ahistorical, and that the US education system is massively exploitative and was founded by the ruling classes against the will of the people. The work's culminating thesis is that the class which resides at the top of the education system, the paid brains of the rich, have proliferated wrong ideas about youth in order to strengthen then influence over the minds of young, their pocketbooks, and the pocketbooks of their families. No dogma regarding contemporary youth survives this devastating, piercing work; it is a must-read for anyone who wants to be knowledgeable on youth development and education -- anyone who has not read it is officially behind the times as of this moment.
Bold claims. You have probably never heard of this book. Neither had I before its author made a post about it on a forum I browse routinely. The blurb piqued my interest; my parents told me growing up that everyone believed that we use 10% of our brains. Some movies, like Limitless, spread this myth. The problem is that it’s obviously not true if you know anything about evolution.
So it goes for “the brain develops until 25.” Why would you have a dangerous, adult body years before your brain reaches maturity? Why would you stop growing a decade prior? Based on the 10% myth, why should I trust this claim? Recall Gell-Mann amnesia:
“Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them.
In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.”
– Michael Crichton (1942-2008)
The book in question is little-known author Joseph Bronski’s An Empirical Introduction to Youth. I was interested, so I read the book. Reading it convinced me that it’s the most important book written in 2021; it may even be the most important book of the decade. Neither a psychoanalytic, pseudo-fictional drama about agency, nor a book comparing healthcare systems , nor an overly optimistic literature review on rapamycin, nor any sort of tome of antiquated pseudoscience, nor any book of anecdote or fiction could be argued to be more important. In calculated terms of utilitarian impact, this book could massively improve the lives of at least 1.2 billion people right now, plus countless more in the future. All of that with just a few positive policy changes that cost nothing, (less than nothing, even, they have negative cost) policy changes which repeal and replace certain social systems which were founded on greed and ignorance. Let me explain.
The reason why it’s so important is as follows: imagine if it was all fake, if the entire social construction of your youth were created top-down. High school, college, prom night, Shakespeare, parents, your first job, teenage love – everything was a mirage, a Matrix-like prison environment, totally artificial, not at all natural. Now imagine that every age restriction, every punishment, every coercive demand – what if you were essentially the same as a 25 year old? Would it not be a massive human rights violation to demand that 25 year olds sit in certain government-run facilities for 40 hours a week, that they must not be allowed to own anything, that older people must tell them what to do at every moment, at home and at the facility? Such a policy applied to 25 year olds would be seen as the most massive human rights violation in the entirety of Western civilization, were it applied in a Western country.
Bronski’s book shows that this is what is happening, just to slightly younger people, who have fully developed brains. Let’s start with the thesis-statement of the book:
This book contains an empirical examination of the history of youth norms, the reality of youth development, and the history and function of the American education system. It seeks to establish empirical facts that nobody of any honest persuasion should disagree with: for instance, that puberty ends around the age of 15 years on the average for boys and 14 for girls, that the best psychometric and neurometric data reveal the brain finishes developing by the end of puberty, that those who claim otherwise do so wrongly or even misleadingly, that youth norms varied much less extremely from adult norms in the past, even while puberty finished later on the average, that the current norms largely came about in the last 50 to 100 years after the establishment of the modern education system, that the modern education system was unpopular among the masses and was constructed by the elite class, that education does not increase intelligence, and that starting roughly no later than when students enter youth (7th-9th grade), the education system becomes dramatically economically exploitative, with no returns to either the economy or people able to be measured.
The book contains five chapters: A Summary of Historical Youth Norms, Education, Development, The Teen Brain Meme, and Applications. The first chapter provides evidence that post-modern youth is largely ahistorical – this chart on Ancient Roman marriage sums it up well:
The author thoroughly argues that Ancient youth was essentially young adulthood. While aristocrats considered those under 25 too immature to rule the Roman Republic, virtually no other responsibilities were off-limits starting with the assumption of the adult garment around the age of 15. Youth in their mid-teens would marry, live alone, travel for education, work for a living, hold minor office, serve in the military, and more.
In the middle ages, youth turned exploitative. Average marriage ages increased to the mid-twenties because the young were expected to be house-slaves for older masters until that age. As this arrangement thawed, the age of 21 gained significance as the age of majority – the rationale was that parents or economic-guardians were entitled to a youth’s labor for his first 7 years of adult-ish labor capacity.
Only in the mid-twentieth century, in the US after the creation of the high school, did the age of 18 gain any special significance. It ain’t lindy. Only two ages are: the beginning and end of Youth, specifically, which, for the author, correspond to roughly 15 and 25 for males.
The continuous historical significance of these two approximate ages is apparent from the first chapter of the book. The third and fourth chapters confirm the significance of the first and inform us on the reasoning behind the significance of the second. In these chapters, the author argues that the “teen brain” is a myth and that the brain is actually mature by the end of puberty, which occurs at the beginning of youth.
I was hesitant about this hypothesis at first, but the author proves his case. The research is intense and meticulous. His take-down of establishment scientists is thorough and complete. Many pages are devoted to actually catching brain researchers in nearly endless mistruths. Though their mouths may be mistaken, corrupted by the need for grant money, their data is evidently undoctored, because it contradicts their public claims. On virtually every measure of brain function, youth achieve adult scores. When it comes to brain structure, all major development milestones have been surpassed by the end of puberty. The author explains that many false claims about the brains of youth actually comes from the fact that the brain changes until death. For instance, from the beginning of puberty to the end of life, the brain prunes grey matter. In the early 2000s, scientists claimed that the loss of grey matter during the teen years proves the immaturity of youth. What they omit is that older people lose just as much grey matter in as much time – one study Bronski cites shows that a person’s age can be predicted with an accuracy of plus or minus two and a half years using grey matter imaging at any point in adult life.
Let me summarize this more extensively:
What you probably think about the “teen brain” is a myth. The brain does not mature at the age of 25; it matures about 10 years earlier, by the end of puberty, as evolution predicts. As such, high school aged youth are not mentally inferior like you have been led to believe. These youth are best seen as young adults, who are wired the same as their slightly older, much freer compatriots aged 21-25. The common misconceptions that are debunked here arose because the foundations that fund teen-brain research are biased towards infantilizing youths for the purpose of expanding the education system, from which those who run said foundations profit.
You probably believe some version of the following statement:
It doesn’t matter how smart teens are or how well they scored on the SAT or ACT. Good judgment isn’t something they can excel in, at least not yet.
The rational part of a teen’s brain isn’t fully developed and won’t be until age 25 or so.
In fact, recent research has found that adult and teen brains work differently. Adults think with the prefrontal cortex, the brain’s rational part. This is the part of the brain that responds to situations with good judgment and an awareness of long-term consequences. Teens process information with the amygdala. This is the emotional part.
In teens' brains, the connections between the emotional part of the brain and the decision-making center are still developing—and not always at the same rate. That’s why when teens have overwhelming emotional input, they can’t explain later what they were thinking. They weren’t thinking as much as they were feeling.
This statement is a copy-pasta that can be found on multiple college websites, including Stanford, UC San Diego, and Rochester. The attentive reader should notice that this constitutes academic plagiarism:
Plagiarism occurs when you use another's words, ideas, assertions, data, or figures and do not acknowledge that you have done so.
The “medical reviewer” listed at the bottom of the Rochester and UC San Diego versions is not even cited on the Stanford website, and copying someone’s essay even with citations still constitutes plagiarism. The punishment given to a college student for this behavior is generally very severe; it can end or severely disrupt a student’s academic career. So already we see a very blatant “rules for thee and not for me” attitude from the people who wrote this copypasta. In other words, their credibility should be lowered in your mind, dear reader. This is the first of many signs that we are not debunking a credible discourse. We are debunking an un-credible discourse.
So either plagiarism happened or the same person controls the website for all of these schools, which would be spooky coordination. Even if that were the case, it’s still plagiarism. Turning in the same essay for two different assignments is plagiarism. My English professors could not have been clearer.
The second obvious thing about this copypasta is that no references are cited. That’s an F in any class run by the same people who wrote it. Rules for me but not for thee, young man. This is a common problem in this field, and, in fact, when they do cite sources, their citations are nonsense. In an essay co-authored by the then-head of the NIMH, lead teen-brain scientist Jay Giedd, not a single citation among dozens actually provided evidence for the authors’ statements.
This was shown in An Empirical Introduction to Youth via the only way that it can be: going through every citation. Still, here are a few examples. Let’s just look at the first three citations, a fair random sample:
Like I said, this is only the first three citations. Every citation is like this. Every. Single. One. And Bronski goes through them all in An Empirical Introduction to Youth.
One last thing to note about this paper before moving on to a general look at the data is that it was funded by the “National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy,” which was initiated top-down by Bill Clinton in one of his State of the Union addresses. So right on the cover of the essay we can see that these guys were motivated to portray teenagers as mentally inferior to older adults, regardless of what the evidence says. They were being funded to prevent 15-19 year olds from getting pregnant. They are not going to say that, actually, 15-19 year olds are young adults with developed brains, and that by the age of 15, pregnancies reach their plateau in safety and quality (Loto et al. 2004 and Makinson 1985). (They actually don’t talk about pregnancy safety or quality at all, they only harp on the brain).
That’s enough on the credibility of the people we’re dealing with here. You should have little reason to expect the news articles you have read are a fair representation of the evidence. Let’s look at what the data actually says.
It’s impossible to go over all of it here. An exhaustive review is performed in the book. Here it should suffice to debunk the Rochester Paste and then to fill in the gaps to my thesis on when the brain develops with some choice studies.
The Rochester Paste says teens have an undeveloped prefrontal cortex relative to the amygdala, so let’s look at the prefrontal cortex first. The structural development of the prefrontal cortex beyond infancy is well researched; one great paper on this subject is a 2004 study led by Dr. Jay Giedd. The study was longitudinal, following a group of thirteen people from 1994 to 2004 with ages at the end of the study ranging from 4-21 years old.
The study found that “Overall, the total [gray matter] volume was found to increase at earlier ages, followed by sustained loss starting around puberty … Frontal and occipital poles lose GM early, and in the frontal lobe, the GM maturation ultimately involves the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, which loses GM only at the end of adolescence.”
Except Giedd obviously thinks that adolescence concludes at 13 or 14, based on the scatter plots he was nice enough to provide:
Even his line hits its low point at like 15. Earlier than that even. Look at the dots though. Look at those things. LOL? (Y axis is GM and X axis is age by the way).
While we’re here, I will mention that this is The Study from which the “the brain matures at 25” claim came. How is that possible when the oldest participants were 21? Well, as we have seen, Giedd is very loose with his citations, and this is what he cited (if he cited anything at all) when he started going on the news and other media claiming that the brain develops until 25. Bronski traces all of this in chapter 4 of An Empirical Introduction to Youth.
Next let’s look at the myelination of the frontal lobe, aka the development of white matter. In all parts of the brain, myelination begins in infancy and continues until the mid forties.
In contrast, gray matter accumulates during childhood, and starting at puberty, it starts to be lost, and will continue to be lost until death.
For the frontal lobe is particular, one study reports that “white matter volume increased until age forty-four years for the frontal lobes [which includes the prefrontal cortex] and age forty-seven years for the temporal lobes and then declined” (Bartzokis et al. 2001).
So basically teens’ frontal lobes are losing gray matter and gaining white matter. 25 year olds’ frontal lobes are losing gray matter and gaining white matter. 35 year olds’ frontal lobes are losing gray matter and gaining white matter. Once you get old, you start to lose white matter too. When is the brain “mature?” My answer is when the gray matter pattern reverses during puberty. You could maybe say it’s at the age of 45 using similar reasoning, but you can’t say it’s at the age of 25. We consider 20-somethings as “mature”, so Bronski picks the lower age. The brain matures by the end of puberty. It changes throughout life. If you think this seems arbitrary or wishy-washy, maybe it is. But it’s good that you think that, because it means that you now know that brain scans did not prove that the brain develops until the age of 25. Psychometrics will fill in the rest for us. Direct measurements of behavior show that teens are young adults and indicate that the changes we see in the brain after puberty are indicative of aging (atrophy) and experiencing (myelination, see Sampaio-Baptista & Johansen-Berg 2017), not maturation, i.e. the acquistion of mental capacity. The increase in gray matter and surface area complexity tracks what we see in psychometrics, which is the acquisition of greater brain function until the end of puberty, upon which function plateaus and then degenerates. As any teen with older parents knows, young people are actually sharper than older people, not mentally inferior to them.
Before moving on to psychometrics, let’s look at one last study on the amygdala. The Rochester Paste explicitly references the connection between the amygdala and the rest of the brain. These connections are mature by the end of puberty: “Unlike results based on chronological age, which showed significant development during childhood, all the tracts except one cluster (localized in the left IFOF) [this was mature by mid-puberty] demonstrated continued immaturities in midpuberty and only became adultlike by the postpubertal stage. This finding suggests that pubertal changes may be more tightly coupled to white matter maturation than had been previously considered.” (Asato et al. 2010) Puberty stages were determined “by Tanner staging.” In 1970, white boys reached the last Tanner stage, the postpubertal stage, on average at the age of 14.9 years (Marshall & Tanner 1970). As a side note, I want to thank the authors of Asato et al for staging the 13-17 year olds. In every other study, they are not staged and are simply given as an amorphous blob known as “adolescents.” This is unacceptable and the fact that this is so common is yet another indictment of the researchers around these parts.
Moving onto psychometrics, Bronski defines judgment as“the ability to avoid bad decisions.” I find this eminently fair and reasonable. When people say youth have poor judgment, they mean that they have a hard time avoiding bad decisions. I find it compelling to look at some “field data” first, as opposed to laboratory data. In the wild, do youth make bad decisions? Or is that just a stereotype?
Let’s look at some real emotional stress-tests. First, behavioral data regarding condom usage and STD rates. Teens use condoms at a higher rate than older people: 60% for teens and about 45% for unmarried older men. STD rates paint a similar picture: “In 2017, the rate of reported chlamydia cases among men aged 15–19 years was 924.5 cases per 100,000 males” while “men aged 20–24 years had the highest rate of reported chlamydia cases among all men (1,705.4 cases per 100,000 males)” It seems that older people actually display inferior ability to avoid bad decisions compared to teens when it comes to sexual activity, a very emotional situation. Does someone need their rights taken away?
Driving is another high pressure activity. Are teens innately bad at it? Of course, driving is an activity that is highly responsive to experience, so teenagers do in fact crash more than older drivers. But this is not due to innate judgment deficiencies: beginning teenage drivers do just as well if not better than older beginners (Wayne & Miller 2018).
The finding that teens are at least equal in driving abilities when compared older people with the same level of experience is replicated by a 2015 study:
British driving data backs us up further. Youth are more likely to pass the driving test, possibly indicating greater mental fitness compared to more aged participants.
Also of interest are British drunk-driving figures. One major justification for raising the drinking age to 21 all across the United States was to destroy “blood barriers,” areas on state borders where youth would, allegedly, frequently drive drunk due to having to drive to another state to go to a bar, as some states had 21 as the drinking age and others had it at 18. This begs the question though, why not, in keeping with the spirit of the 26th amendment, require a uniform drinking age of 18 instead of 21? The common answer was that, supposedly, 18-20 year olds are immature and therefore more likely to drive drunk even if they have legal, local access to alcohol. Britain allows us to test this idea, since anyone over 18 can drink alcohol and have a driver’s license.
It appears that 25-29 year olds are the most likely age group to drive drunk in the UK. Hm.
We now move on to laboratory literature mainly focused on “adolescent risk taking.” This literature is somewhat well developed and attempts to measure “hot judgment ability.” One study in this literature measured the ability of teens and older people to delay a $1000 dollar award by offering them cheaper rewards immediately. A “discount rate” was calculated based on how little money they were willing to go to get the money immediately.
The results show that maturity on this metric is reached by the age of 16, indicating that 16 year olds can handle full financial rights.
Another study used a driving game where the risk of crashing was ambiguous and drivers were rewarded for driving through lights. While younger teens exhibited riskier driving behavior, the 16-17 year old age group experienced mature levels of risky driving on par with those of adults (Steinberg et al. 2008).
We’ll end with IQ data. Ryan et al. (2000) found that “scores on Matrix Reasoning are at a peak for persons at 16 to 17 years of age and differences [decline] first become evident for persons 45 to 54 years of age.” 16-17 is a dogwhistle for “the end of puberty” (15 year olds are usually grouped with 13 and/or 14 year olds, but we know when puberty ends on average). 16-17 is nowhere near “25.”
For me, the real core of the book is chapter two and the second half of chapter four. In these parts of the book, Bronski argues that youth as we know it is largely a consequence of the creation of the youth-education system, which is comprised of the high school and the college. Those who created this system are the same people who spread lies about young brains, and who support infantilizing age restrictions whether they be for or against youth themselves. For example, Bronski highlights that the MacArthur foundation states on its website that the biggest issue in juvenile justice is not systemic corruption, nor abuse of minors, nor unconstitutional court proceedings, nor the locking up of young people for bullshit crimes, but rather it is the fact that 18-20 year olds are not, at present, considered juveniles by the courts.
As Bronski reveals, virtually everyone who controls the MacArthur foundation works at a university – in other words, they are upper-level members of the “Professional Managerial Class,” the “brains of their rich employers.” Therefore, he says, they support increasing the age of immaturity perpetually as to make a larger and larger segment of youth into schoolboys under their supervision.
An example is in order. The President of the MacArthur Foundation, Johnathon Fanton, had a wife, Cynthia Greenleaf, who worked for an education corporation known as WestEd as a senior research scientist. WestEd’s catchphrase is “Improving learning, healthy development, and equity in schools and communities.” They are apparently an educational research organization devoted to expanding or universalizing education: “Success for every learner is WestEd’s main goal and has been for more than 50 years.” Greenleaf’s research in particular focuses on youth, and not children: “for two decades she has conducted cutting-edge research in adolescent literacy and translated it into powerful teacher professional development. … Her work codeveloping the Reading Apprenticeship® Instructional Framework has changed classrooms for hundreds of thousands of secondary and college students and their teachers. Three large-scale randomized controlled studies of Reading Apprenticeship have validated its effectiveness in improving students’ subject area engagement, literacy, and achievement.” So we have a guy who is the President of a foundation that controls billions of dollars and which is known to fund teen brain researchers, who profits off of anything that gets more “kids” into “school.” Curious.
This man was also the President of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Under his Presidency, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences did nothing less than push the idea that undergraduate education must be expanded in such a way that everyone completes it. In other words, Fanton promotes universal higher education. Such a thing is obviously easy to implement when people believe that those under 25 are children. What are kids going to do from 18-24, child labor? No, they should obviously continue education because the brain develops until 25…
The implications of this for how power works are large. Bronski proposes that the construction of the education system can be explained by a “dialectic” occurring between the capitalist ruling class and their PMC underlings. Because the latter are essentially paid to think for their masters, they possess special powers that other, more replaceable employees lack. Specifically, they can trick their employers and, when unified, strongarm them. A clear example of the latter that Bronski cites is when NEA’s Committee of Ten, composed of professors and deans and college presidents, gave the Rockefellers and their friends four options for the curriculum of the high school. All flattered the PMC, making their knowledge of bullshit like poetry part of every option. The rich, wanting to offload the cost of training onto taxpayers, leaned towards the most practical, and this synthesis is what was instituted and is what is essentially still in place today.
The example Bronski provides of the PMC strongarming the capitalists is the 1993 Student Loan Reform Act, which established direct loans provided by the federal government and consequently attempted to cut bankers out of the student-loan equation. The bankers struck back – Sally Mae became a beast, armed with tax dollars, Republicans allowed it to go fully private and today it feasts on students’ blood like … [not allowed to say it]. Importantly, this backlash was enabled by PMC defectors – Sally Mae has been immensely successful at persuading university loan departments to shill for it and mislead students into financial predation.
Bronski is essentially making a claim about who is in power, and by extension, what they want. The who is a money-rich ruling class, and importantly, their hired brains, and what they want doesn’t always align. Sometimes this seems to produce a push and pull, but usually a synthesis is realized that satisfies both classes. This is an interesting, empirical claim that warrants further investigation pending its generalizability. The claim itself may in fact be a synthesis; though Bronski may not be familiar enough with elitology to realize it, the two main camps when it comes to the Class Question are Marxists and Moldbuggers. The former says it’s the billionaires, and the latter says it’s the college professors. It being both seems like an elegant solution.
All of this answers our question, who gets it the worst in the West today? The answer is that if you are 15 to 17 years old you are an adult, but you are treated like a 10 year old. 15-17 year olds, and 18-20 year olds, and 21-24 year olds for that matter, are as mature as 25 year olds. So what we have are essentially 25 year olds who are told, for no reason other than profit and power, that you may not open a bank account, you may not get a real job, you may not decide to do something other than learn poetry so some PMC member can have a sinecure, your parents may spank you, confine you without due process, and worse. What could be worse than giving all 25 year olds masters who can beat them for not wanting to write essays on The Great Gatsby all day? What could be worse than making all 25 year olds have to get permits to be fry cooks if they have any free time outside of the State obedience facility?
Well, unlucky, misbehaved 25 year olds would be sent to punishment camps! Youth with fully developed brains today are regularly sent to prison camps that resemble Soviet gulags, where they are deprived of an education and put to punitive labor. Starvation is a common punishment for misbehaved slave-teens in these camps. Collectively, this sadistic gulag-archipelago is known as the “Troubled Teen Industry,” or TTI for short. Camps are often located in the wilderness, in polities such as Utah, Jamaica, and Costa Rica. Bounty-hunters are often hired to “transport” victims to these places. Here is one of hundreds of testimonials about the abduction process:
I look up and bang 2 massive guys are entering my hotel room. So many thoughts rush through my head, my first instinct was that I’m being taken away, I had a feeling but didn’t think they would do this to me ON MY BIRTHDAY! Immediately I clutch my phone tightly and grab the lamp to my left. HELP HELP IM BEING KIDNAPPED, I shouted over and over, people were knocking on the door trying to find out what was going on as I wrestle these behemoths. I ended up destroying as much property as possible over these guys besides the tv, fucking monsters they were, glass bottles didn’t even phase them. Eventually a lady keys the door open to see fat albert sitting on my arm as I continue to clutch my phone. “CALL THE COPS” I tell her knowing it’s a futile effort, I was not going to make this easy, that was my philosophy. Eventually the bigger guy put my arm in such a painful hold I couldn’t bear the pain any more. Thinking back I should’ve let him break my arm. I coughed up my phone and agreed to work with them when the 2nd guy pulled a taser out saying they don’t want to cause any more commotion. I got into the car and willingly flew 5 hours out to Utah.
My parents had sent me to a Wilderness Therapy program on my birthday. Yep, this is my life now I thought as the workers take all of my belongings and zip them up into bags, giving me some used and some new clothes that I would be wearing for the next 60 something days. I’m going to stop this here but if anyone wants to hear about how my wilderness went / how I’m doing today I will make another post.
The camps are extremely abusive one the victim arrives. Anal penetration is common upon first arrival, in order to “check” for “illicit items.”
I was 13 years old when I entered Straight. I was there more than two years before I finally graduated. When I was released, I was 16 years old and mentally broken. My education was denied me. I couldn't speak clearly about the tortures I suffered and witnessed. After leaving, I could barely hold a normal conversation. I couldn't put the words together. I was angry and afraid. I was confrontational but most of all, I was lost.
Some camps use a Kapo system:
I was thrown into a small intake room which was probably about 10x10 with 7 girls. They confronted me about not following the program and told me to go ahead and leave if I wanted to. They then preceded to beat me, pull my hair, restrain me on the floor for hours upon hours at a time. I'm talking about 4 girls holding you face down with your arms behind your back, like the police do. They would sit on top of me. One on each leg, and one on each arm. Every hour or so they might be nice enough to stretch your arms out for me, but the physical pain of those restraints was unbearable. I turned into a violent person, because I was defending myself from fights where I was far outnumbered. These fights happened daily in Cincinnati and the fact that NO adult at that facility saw anything wrong with that behavior blows my mind.
Sleeping conditions resemble those of gulags:
I don't think my mom knew they locked us in rooms at night, sometimes up
to 8 girls sleeping on mattresses or the floor. The 'oldcomer' would
push their bed in front of the door so there was no escaping. There
were alarms on the doors and windows
Teens often die in rural camps after being starved. See this re-enactment of the death of Aaron Bacon, who died on a death-march through the desert:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rJz5pghLagY
Many other videos and testimonials can be found here.
And before you think that all of these teens deserved it, they are not criminals. They have never been convicted of anything. These places, ironically, are where teens who don’t go to jail are sent by their hateful, abusive, slave owner “parents” without due-process. The conditions in these torture camps are extremely cruel and unusual — in a word, unconstitutional. American jail is much preferable to said places.
They get away with all of this because teens are considered property under US (and, more generally, Western) law. A teenager has no medical rights; if a teen does not want a vaccine, but his parents do want him to have it, he can be restrained and inoculated against his will. If a teen does want a vaccine, but his parents do not want him to have it, he is not allowed to receive it. In medicine, the need for a patient to agree with a procedure is called assent. The legal requirement for a responsible party to sign off on a procedure is called consent. Teens are neither afforded assent (the right to veto a procedure), nor consent (the right to sign off on a procedure).
“Runaway” teens are hunted down and captured like slaves. Imagine hunting down a runaway 25 year old to return him to a master. Is that not just slavery? Imagine if marital vows were still literal and runaway wives could be tracked down and returned to their husbands. Wouldn’t that be awful? This is worse, assuming romantic marriage, because teens never entered an agreement for that to happen in the first place. If the marriage is arranged, it’s at best the same.
All of this, and how is it justified? The same way slavery was justified. Teens are alleged to be inferior. But they aren’t; the brain is fully developed by the end of puberty at 14 or 15, as demonstrated in An Empirical Introduction to Youth.
As an Effective Altruism, I see it as my duty to work to stop anti-youth ageism. The oppression that young people face is uniquely horrific because it is State enforced.
Not only is ageism everywhere, permeating every space, infesting every mind, even those of the oppressed — this oppression is still enforced by the State. Imagine if we still had forced racial segregation. What teens face from the State every day is similar. And we no longer have State enforced racial oppression. Since the 1960s we have had the opposite.
So, what should be done?
The book ends with Bronski’s recommendations. Most importantly, he argues that the high school should be abolished, and that only ten to twenty per cent of people should attend higher education. The case is persuasive. By estimating both the per cent of useful classes for those who should attend and the per cent of people who need any higher-ed knowledge, Bronski concludes that “high school is, then, on average, about 97.8% exploitation.” That is to say that literally 97.8% of time spent in high school is a waste of time. Some useful skills are learned, yes, but very little and only for certain people.
The reason why Bronski prioritizes abolishing the high school is that he says that the real reason why teens are subjected to these horrors is the high school. The “cult of the 18th birthday” developed because of the high school, just as the “cult of the 21st birthday” develops because of the university (there was an older cult of the 21st birthday, which existed for the purpose of economic exploitation of youth by parents, dating from the 18th century, but its customs were different).
To abolish the religion around the 18th birthday, the material institutions must be changed, says Bronski. Only when young adults are given full responsibilities can they be given meaningful full rights. This makes sense; what is the right to vote when you have to ask Ms. Smith to use the bathroom? And so on for the right to drive, or “work”, or anything else.
Overall, I recommend this book. While almost all mainstream books get an A for typographical matters, I do have to say that I give this book a B due to some harmless, but ugly spacing and other errors here and there. By no means is the book illegible or hard to read. Whereas mainstream books might receive a C for content, this book receives an A+. It is extremely well researched and argued and puts even some books published in academic presses to shame.
