That’s a good point. The longer the government can keep our kids in public schools, the longer they have to indoctrinate them. Nowadays - every single child is being pushed to go to college. What’s going to happen in a few years when EVERYBODY has a college degree? I would guess you’d have to have a degree to work at McDonalds then.
I don’t like thinking about the future trends we’re looking at now. A permanent third-world class of people that provide labor and manufacture for us. The rest of us working our whole lives away in the pursuit of consumerism - how big of a house? How many cars? The latest electronics? The latest fad fashions? This kind of lifestyle does nothing to build character in people. We will be like Play-doh in the wrong hands.
This is not good.
The signers of the Declaration of Independence ranged from 26 (Edward Rutlege, South Carolina) to 70 (Benjamin Franklin, Pennsylvania). Jefferson was 33, Adams 41. I think that's a pretty similar range to Congress or most state legislatures today, but with more older folks because people are living longer, staying healthy longer and staying in office longer.
Some of the "senior" military officers, most notably Alexander Hamilton (21 when the war began) were a bit younger; Washington's preferred leadership style was to surround himself with bright young men, more formally educated than he, whom he created like surrogate sons.
It was in the working class that, as a matter of necessity, adulthood started earlier. Children in the middle and upper classes had schooling, at home or in a formal setting, then college or an apprenticeship. They embarked on their careers at about the same age as adults do today.
What public schooling has done is make the middle- and upper-class version of childhood available to the working class. And it's created a grade system with mileposts at 5,14,18,22 where in the days of private tutoring, homeschooling or one-room schoolhouses, kids just started when they were ready and finished when they were done.
But to me, that's not the heart of the issues West raises (I haven't watched the whole interview -- is there a transcript?). That's a result of the sheer size of the baby boom, which gave rise to the youth-targeted marketing culture; the GI Bill, which opened up college as an option for millions in the middle and working classes (which then led to more colleges and the expansion of existing ones, which meant there was a lot of capacity for the Boomers); and the general prosperity of the '50s and early '60s, which allowed the World War II generation to provide for their children the kind of extended childhood that was previously reserved to relatively few.
And a whole lot of the "peter pan" phenomenon comes not from the schools at all, but from the home. The low birth rate of the Depression and war years meant that Baby Boomers didn't have a passel of younger siblings to help care for. Prepared food and kitchen machines meant Mom was spending less time cooking; and other machines drastically cut the time required for everything from laundry to yard maintenance to household repairs. More people shifted from farming to other fields of work, and on the farm, too, automation led to a reduced need for labor. Family farms wiped out in the Dust Bowl years came back as consolidated large-scale farms.
Put simply, Boomers grew up doing fewer chores because there were fewer chores to do. Before World War II, the only children who didn't perform at least a few hours of labor per day were those whose families could hire domestic help. After the war, that became the norm. Many kids still had after-school jobs, but it was for luxuries, not to help sustain the family. For kids younger than about 16, summer camp replaced summer jobs. The WWII generation had its kids hitting the books or hitting a ball rather than pushing a plow - something all parents for many generations back wanted for their kids, but a vast umber more could now provide.
I remember inwardly cheering at the word “crusade” and then wondering why he would back down on it. That’s when I realized how dangerous the pc culture had made our world.