(HOST) Now that the school year is well under way, commentator Mike Martin is thinking about what it takes to navigate the sometimes dangerous transition from child to adult.
(MARTIN) In more traditional societies, it’s easier to figure out when you’re a kid and when you’re a grown-up. In many cultures, young people go off in a group, face up to a challenge, and then return to their community, where they’re welcomed as new adults. For example, the Malang of Afghanistan have an initiation rite where the boys fast in seclusion. In Kenya, the Turkana people make their youths wear blue ochre mud caps. The Masai have a coming-of-age tradition where mothers shave their sons’ heads before the young warriors pull an animal horn from a fire. To become a man in Ethiopia you have to run over the backs of bulls in front of the whole village.
And the rites of passage in some places are downright harsh; they include scarification, tattoos, lip plugs, circumcision, ritual scourging, insect stings. Still, when you consider the mixed messages we send young Americans about childhood and adulthood, it almost makes you crave the simplicity of some of these tough traditions.
It makes you think about how confusing coming of age is for young Americans now. You can vote when you’re 18, but, with your parents’ permission, you can get married at 14 in some states. However, the age of consent is still 16 in most states – unless you’re married, that is…. You can drive a car at 16, and as soon as you’re 17 you can join the military with parental consent. At 18, you can buy cigarettes and pornography – but not alcohol.
If this doesn’t seem perfectly clear to you, it probably seems even less so to your children.
I remember when Vermont raised the drinking age from 18 to 21. I was 17 then, and Governor Madeleine Kunin visited my high school at an assembly. She’d come to have a public forum, and she provided statistics about drunk driving and highway funds. But not all the high school seniors in the audience behaved maturely; and, I’m ashamed to say, the young audience booed the Governor. But before she left, somebody asked that tough question: how can you ask young Americans to die for their country before they can have a beer? At the time it was hypothetical, but that was before so many of our best and brightest were dying in Iraq.
Middlebury College President Emeritus John McCardell has opened a new public debate with a national campaign to lower the drinking age. His group Choose Responsibility argues that since we’ve made alcohol a forbidden fruit, binge drinking has become a dangerous rite of passage for our young people. Instead of taking their first drinks in the context of a meal, young Americans drive somewhere away from adult supervision – the woods, a party, a parking lot – and drink to excess, often with disastrous consequences.
Maybe we should spend less time regulating vices and more time teaching our young people about what adulthood means. Maybe our young people will act more responsibly if we tell them, clearly, when they have become adults – and when they need to act accordingly.
Mike Martin writes about issues of culture and education and teaches French at Champlain Valley Union High School.