My circumstances were special, not me.

Teenager's have significantly different levels of cognitive ability compared to adults. There is a reason most people look back on their teenage years and say "why was I so stupid" and honestly it's because your brain was less developed on a biological level.

Cognitive differences do not preclude all responsibility. As it currently stands, most teenagers are provided with none at all, despite their historically demonstrated ability to shoulder considerably more than our institutions provide.

I was not special -- I did quite a few phenomenally stupid things as a teenager -- but I also learned how to be an adult sooner.

[Edit] One of the dangers of expressing this opinion is that it triggers cognitive dissonance amongst those who did follow the standard protocol.

So, allow me to reiterate -- given the proper circumstances, I believe all teenagers are well capable of accepting quite a bit more responsibility than they are currently allowed, but most never have the external encouragement or motivation to do so.

I started working at 17, mailroom boy at first, worked my way up to systems programmer then started my own business. By the time my friends graduated I had a nice little business going. But I doubt if that would have been possible in the period after I got started and before the whole www thing happened.

The barrier to entry was pretty high for a long time.

I attribute most of what happened to luck and the little bit that's left to plain old fashioned hard work. But then again, I like my work. That really helps.

Consider spending less than you make (i.e. not going into massive credit card debt). I highly suspect most people can do this - they certainly did just fine up until the 1970s. But many people don't - at least, enough that the savings rate was negative until the current financial crisis.

I've heard a few people argue that this proves people are constitutionally incapable of managing money. I think this is bullshit. They're incapable of managing money because the environment and incentives around them provides them no reason to manage their money. If you stopped handing out credit like candy, you'd find that people could very easily manage their finances.

So it is with school. Just because 99.99999% of the population doesn't drop out and support themselves while building their career doesn't mean they can't. It just means they find it easier and more imaginable to stay in school.

As far as I can tell, that pattern holds for at least another decade.

Randomly sample a bunch of kids, hook them all up to monitoring devices, put them in different schools and societies that involve transitions into adulthood at different rates and onsets, set up a control group (Lord of the Flies setup), do the longitudinal study, and write it up. An associate professor and his 5 grad students would get a bunch of solid papers out of it. Theorists would have fun defining "optimality" in this context (to be fair, the philosophers have been gnawing at it for a while..)

This is unethical .. right? Then, you have to ask yourself: wouldn't it be more ethical to do the study, figure out how best to raise kids, and let all human young for posterity (or at least 'til the results are invalidated) benefit from the wisdom?

Hmm.. :)

In contrast, most capitalist democracies (all that I can think of anyway) are centered on individualism... the only ethically allowable sacrifice is the voluntary sacrifice... and children (anyone under 18) are not considered sentient enough to make decisions about their own lives and futures.