#Education #Teens #SocialMedia: "I’m a believer that as a parent, and for all the parents out there, that our biggest responsibility is to socialize young people into the world. And that socialization doesn’t happen on a certain birthday, that socialization doesn’t happen overnight. That is a constant negotiation that’s about helping young people make mistakes and learn from them. And your goal is to hopefully end up with bruises, not broken bones, let alone something worse. But it’s about this constant working and negotiation.
So first, the way that I always approach problems is going back historically. So one of my favorites is to think back about how we created compulsory high school in the United States. This is actually a pretty modern invention. It was first proposed in the 1880s by moral reformers. Moral reformers were very concerned that young people as they were hitting teenage years were being corrupted by older folks. And so they wanted to create a bubble of innocence for young people as long as possible. The idea was that high school as a compulsory requirement would be a way to protect them from the sins of the older population.
They got nowhere in the 1880s, but in the 1920s, labor unions started panicking that there was not enough jobs available for older men. It was all about men. And so they ended up teaming up with moral reformers to create compulsory high school as a way of shielding young people from the adult world in order to protect the available jobs. And this is sort of a weird thing to think about. You’re like, oh, it turns out that high school is jail in the United States by design."