Of course there’s such an age, but since I didn’t have any claim for the “right” age in front of me, all I could say was “a certain age.” Maybe I should have said that children X age can’t understand Y.

But the main point of this discussion is to recognize the temptation of taking generalizations at face value, which is what we do when we assign rigid age norms. That temptation has been around with us for a long time; Arnold Gesell and Frances Ilg warned against it in 1943 in Infant and Child in the Culture of Today. But since then the focus of psychology has shifted from the mind to the brain, and that makes those age norms even more tempting, and the responsibility of experts to point out the limits of generalizations even greater. If they don’t, we get silly pontifications such as that teenagers make foolish choices because their brains aren’t fully formed.

The question is not how much they are educated compared to other countries. The question is how educated they are compared to not having a (US) education at all. For a start, they can read, and count – a not completely insignificant difference. Internationally, countries with decent education systems tend to fare much better than countries without them.

Why do adults not benefit from the same thing? From what I’ve heard, the reasons we require children to attend school were first to prevent immigrant children from avoiding assimilation and later to remove the young from the workforce and thereby increase wages.

Adults do benefit from the same thing, but it does seem that most adults who do not acquire certain skills early in life never acquire them (at least not to a good level). Teaching them when they are children is the then the sensible thing to do. Secondly, children are of virtually no economic value today (the absence of high-paid child labour indicates this). So removing them from the workforce when they are young is a sensible thing to do.

I’ve never heard of removing the children from the workforce to increase wages though; do you have any evidence for that? Would seem a ridiculous thing to do today, for the reason mentioned above; as for that being the case in the past, since an educated adolescent would be more in demand than a standard seven-year old, this should result in greater competition for bottom of the skill mountain. There might be nuances to this picture (aspirations may increase as well); but increasing wages through compulsory education would be a very uncertain way of doing so.

All this brain talk seems to be the result of the way the mind-body problem has been resolved. If the mind is simply a manifestation of the brain, and the brain is part of the body, then cognitive development is bodily development, like musculoskeletal development, and a child below a certain age can no more be skeptical about a TV commercial than a 3-month-old baby can walk. Psychologists may take a more nuanced view, but if they don’t communicate these nuances to laypeople, how are the latter to know that these nuances exist?

And why is the baby-boom generation reckoned from 1/1/46? Those who were born in 1945 from V-J Day (August 14) to Dec. 31 were subject to the same cultural inflences as those born the year after. If they’re not baby boomers, what are they? They’re certainly not war babies.

I’ve never received a straight answer from anyone in the news biz; only speculations by those just as ignorant as I am.

Education in the United States does not work. Forget for a moment all the complicated reasons why it does not work, or why it shouldn’t work, or why it should work but doesn’t; just look at it as a black box system. In come four and five-year-olds. Out come eighteen-year-olds. The goal of education is to produce an educated populace. Is the populace educated? No. I would bet cash that 90% of the population cannot pass a basic high school science or math test. 50% of the population still believes that the Earth is six thousand years old. We can’t even beat out Lithuania in math and science literacy (http://mwhodges.home.att.net/education.htm). Clearly, something somewhere is not working, or is not working well enough.