Autonomy and Youth Liberation
In the west, especially in America, we like to consider our home “the land of the free.” Freedom is value at the core of America—At least in theory. But how free can any nation be when the rearing of its young is the exact opposite? The nature of adult’s develop in youth, and the way we treat our young is completely the opposite of “freedom.” What we teach them is submission to authority, so we end up with subordinate adults.
Youths are legally owned by their parents and their state. Teenagers who run away because they’re mistreated and unhappy are returned by law to their parents. This is only prevented when there is physical evidence of abuse—as though emotional abuse doesn’t have just as bad, sometimes worse, outcomes. And then, they’re not helped in building a stable situation for themselves, they’re given to another adult. One who also may be abusive!
Even in cases where there is evidence of CA or CSA, sometimes the child is still kept with the parent. In some cases, CPS worker’s don’t even interview or examine the child. Parents are seen as the client (and the person), the child is seen as belonging to them. Here’s a youtube channel which documents many cases of that nature (a warning for other MAPs, they tend to demonize abusers, and they use “pedophile” interchangeably with “sex offender”). In 2022, nearly 2,000 children died from abuse and neglect.
From the very moment children are born, they’re regarded as belongings and treated as such by the society we’ve built. For a society that claims “protecting the child” is its first priority, we instead abandon children to any person who is capable of conceiving one, and to teachers who are stretched-thin and underpaid. We all say “it’s not our problem” at the same time as we say “protect the child.” What are we actually doing, other than looking away from all the problems? We’re pretending we’re better than we are.
For parenting and education, we spread the idea that young people require control because they’re incapable of reason, caution, and learning on their own. I’ve covered most of that on page 4, but to go further into the element of learning, here are some excerpts from John Gatto’s, Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling:
Was it possible I had been hired not to enlarge children’s power, but to diminish it? That seemed crazy on the face of it, but slowly I began to realize that the bells and the confinement, the crazy sequences, the age-segregation, the lack of privacy, the constant surveillance, and all the rest of the national curriculum of schooling were designed exactly as if someone had set out to prevent children from learning how to think and act, to coax them into addiction and dependent behavior.
Good students wait for a teacher to tell them what to do. This is the most important lesson of them all: we must wait for other people, better trained than ourselves, to make the meanings of our lives. The expert makes all the important choices; only I, the teacher, can determine what my kids must study, or rather, only the people who pay me can make those decisions, which I then enforce. If I’m told that evolution is a fact instead of a theory, I transmit that as ordered, punishing deviants who resist what I have been told to tell them to think. This power to control what children will think lets me separate successful students from failures very easily.
Good people wait for an expert to tell them what to do. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that our entire economy depends upon this lesson being learned. Think of what might fall apart if children weren’t trained to be dependent: the social services could hardly survive—they would vanish, I think, into the recent historical limbo out of which they arose. Counselors and therapists would look on in horror as the supply of psychic invalids vanished. Commercial entertainment of all sorts, including television, would wither as people learned again how to make their own fun. Restaurants, the prepared food industry, and a whole host of other assorted food services would be drastically downsized if people returned to making their own meals rather than depending on strangers to plant, pick, chop, and cook for them. Much of modern law, medicine, and engineering would go too, as well as the clothing business and schoolteaching, unless a guaranteed supply of helpless people continued to pour out of our schools each year.
If you’ve ever tried to wrestle into line kids whose parents have convinced them to believe they’ll be loved in spite of anything, you know how impossible it is to make self-confident spirits conform. Our world wouldn’t survive a flood of confident people very long, so I teach that a kid’s self-respect should depend on expert opinion. My kids are constantly evaluated and judged.
A monthly report, impressive in its provision, is sent into a student’s home to elicit approval or mark exactly, down to a single percentage point, how dissatisfied with the child a parent should be. The ecology of “good” schooling depends on perpetuating dissatisfaction, just as the commercial economy depends on the same fertilizer […] Self-evaluation, the staple of every major philosophical system that ever appeared on the planet, is never considered a factor. The lesson of report cards, grades, and tests is that children should not trust themselves or their parents but should instead rely on the evaluation of certified officials. People need to be told what they are worth.
I assign a type of extended schooling called ‘homework,’ so that the effect of surveillance, if not the surveillance itself, travels into private households, where students might otherwise use free time to learn something unauthorized from a father or mother, by exploration or by apprenticing to some wise person in the neighborhood. Disloyalty to the idea of schooling is a devil always ready to find work for idle hands.
The meaning of constant surveillance and denial of privacy is that no one can be trusted, that privacy is not legitimate. Surveillance is an ancient imperative, espoused by certain influential thinkers, a central prescription set down in The Republic, The City of God, The Institutes of the Christian Religion, New Atlantis, Leviathan, and a host of other places. All the childless men who wrote these books discovered the same thing: children must be closely watched if you want to keep a society under tight central control. Children will follow a private drummer if you can’t get them into a uniformed marching band.
Our form of compulsory schooling is an invention of the State of Massachusetts around 1850. It was resisted—sometimes with guns—by an estimated eighty percent of the Massachusetts population, the last outpost in Barnstable on Cape Cod not surrendering its children until the 1880s, when the area was seized by militia and children marched to school under guard.
Schools were designed by Horace Mann and by Sears and Harper of the University of Chicago and by Thorndyke of Columbia Teachers College and by some other men to be instruments for the scientific management of a mass population. Schools are intended to produce, through the application of formulas, formulaic human beings whose behavior can be predicted and controlled.
To a very great extent, schools succeed in doing this, but in a national order increasingly disintegrated, in a national order in which the only “successful” people are independent, self-reliant, confident, and individualistic (because community life that protects the dependent and the weak is dead and only networks remain), the products of schooling are, as I’ve said, irrelevant. Well-schooled people are irrelevant. They can sell film and razor blades, push paper and talk on telephones, or sit mindlessly before a flickering computer terminal, but as human beings they are useless. Useless to others and useless to themselves.
The daily misery around us is, I think, in large measure caused by the fact that, as Paul Goodman put it thirty years ago, we force children to grow up absurd. Any reform in schooling has to deal with its absurdities.
It is absurd and anti-life to be part of a system that compels you to sit in confinement with people of exactly the same age and social class. That system effectively cuts you off from the immense diversity of life and the synergy of variety; indeed, it cuts you off from your own past and future, sealing you in a continuous present much the same way television does.
I have a compilation of more excerpts from the book here.
People learned to read and write before compulsory schooling, even in childhood, and it didn’t take them very long! Old text books were more advanced than textbooks given to our young today, their learning is intentionally limited so that it can be stretched over a longer period. Further, not many people actually remember what they learned in school growing up! So what is it actually teaching? The only results that seem to stick are “listen to authority/experts,” and “your worth depends on others, especially the approval of people above you, based on what you produce and how well you conform.”
If this is the way we treat our young—as belongings who must follow commands, conform, and learn what we decide they should learn (even though the methods through which we’re expecting them to learn are ineffective and produce poor results)—then how are we free?
As adults, we’re not free. We submitted to authority in our youth and we were brainwashed, as was intended. Now, we continue the cycle on young people growing up today. We’re complicit in their oppression and abuse by upholding the very systems that harm them, all the while claiming those systems grant protection and benefits. Similar to the slavery of African-Americans and women. “It’s for their own good, they need to be controlled.”
Sexuality is a part of youth rights that even many youth rights advocates overlook—nobody wants to be called a predator. But it’s a core piece of youth oppression. How can we regard someone as equal and deserving of rights over their own body and life, if “those rights” are unacceptable? We can’t lift up youth rights while also parroting “they can’t make decisions” or “they’re too impulsive and risky” or “they’re not smart enough to spot risks or know what they want!” All of which are false statements to begin with.
Sooner or later, every youth rights activist has to address the elephant in the room if they really care about the ways young people are impacted by (sexual) oppression. You can’t be for youth liberation in all areas except one, that’s not liberation. And it will always be used by oppressors to retain control and harm young people by deciding “in their best interest”—Which will always actually be in the adult’s best (ideological) interest.
[Edit: I wanted to add an example of this that all progressives know very well.
Religious conservatives consistently use the belief that children and adolescents aren’t capable of reasonable thought or decisions to push their ideological agendas—such as keeping LGBTQ+ information out of schools (potentially also youth-led LGBTQ+ clubs), restricting access to media with gay characters from young people, etc.
This argument is based almost entirely on the premise that young people aren’t mentally competent (the other part is based on the assumption being queer is wrong/unnatural).
If you invalidate that premise, then you significantly weaken the tool they use to push their ideological preferences. This will make it harder to ban things from youths, including queer media and birth control.]
I think more of us would come to the conclusion that limiting the autonomous rights of teenagers is an overreach on their personal freedom, by parents and government, if we would take the time to remember being a teenager ourselves. Many of us fall into the trap of reaching eighteen, the magic unscientific number, and deciding we are no longer “that” person. Everything we felt before the magic number becomes irrelevant, because now we are an “adult.” We abandon our younger selves—but we aren’t any wiser for it.
We tell ourselves we’re free, but we aren’t. We tell our young they’re free, all while enforcing their oppression. We aren’t wise. Age grants us nothing but time lived.
Those who haven’t been brainwashed yet may be the wisest of all.
Thank you for reading. Make sure when you say “for the children” that you’re speaking in their best interest, not your own. That means always recognizing diversity of individuals and listening to their experiences, not just deciding for them.
Have a nice day. 💙