Top Tweets for #LongMemory

"Teenagers" didn't exist until the twentieth century. Before that, young people joined adult life by twelve or thirteen. They worked the farm or apprenticed in a trade. They weren't coddled or warehoused. You rarely see adolescent rebellion in a traditional village because there are no adolescents. There are children and adults. Children become adults by doing adult work. What we call "teenage rebellion" is often a reaction to being told to sit still through years of meaningless, compulsory schooling. Lock proud young men in a room and ask them to copy vocabulary words, and they're going to rebel. Then we call their rebellion a "problem," diagnose them, and funnel them into the school-to-prison pipeline. We create the behavior we claim to fear, then punish kids for it.