Extended Adolescence and Higher Education

[coberst]

Extended Adolescence and Higher Education

 

Virtually all of our political leaders have a college or university education. Many of our political leaders have an Ivy League education which often means six years of higher education; four years getting some kind of undergraduate degree followed by two years for an MBA.

 

Often the student receiving a higher education does so while being supported by his or her parents. This means that often adolescence extends beyond the mid-twenties.

 

In other words many of our political and industrial leaders have had a much extended adolescence.

 

I would say that a child lives from birth through adolescence in a state highly dictated by the pleasure-principle and accepts the reality-principle as the sign of maturity. Extended adolescence means that many individuals do not become mature adults until well into their twenties.

 

Can a culture survive such a situation?

[Buffy]

So we'd be better off if no one went to school? Or if we at least favored (elected, promoted) those who had less schooling?

 

When did you become anti-intellectual?

 

It is better, of course, to know useless things than to know nothing, :hyper:

Buffy

[coberst]

Why Young Men Delay Adulthood to Stay in "Guyland" | Newsweek Culture | Newsweek.com

 

"What used to be regressive weekends are now whole years in the lives of some guys," Kimmel tells NEWSWEEK. In almost 400 interviews with mainly white, college-educated twentysomethings, he found that the lockstep march to manhood is often interrupted by a debauched and decadelong odyssey, in which youths buddy together in search of new ways to feel like men. Actually, it's more like all the old ways—drinking, smoking, kidding, carousing—turned up a notch in a world where adolescent demonstrations of manhood have replaced the real thing: responsibility. Kimmel's testosterone tract adds to a forest of recent research into protracted adolescents (or "thresholders" and "kidults," as they've also been dubbed) and the reluctance of today's guys to don their fathers' robes—and commitments. They "see grown-up life as such a loss," says Kimmel, explaining why so many guys are content to sit out their 20s in duct-taped beanbag chairs. The trouble is that the very thing they're running from may be the thing they need.

[minna]

We now live longer than before. They do say forty is the new thirty...so why not twenties is the new teens? LOL