While time and accident bring these kinds of troubles to us all, we can bring thing on a lot faster with stupidity and abuse. And while teenagers generally feel immortal, they can look around the neighborhood and conclude that a pack-a-day might be uglifying.
College is not a typical neighborhood. You find three groups: the old rulers and maintainers, overworked apprentices, and the bulk of the rest are the undergraduates, who are always young.
They are always young because they’re always being replaced; and they disappear either because they graduated or failed. Never mind those who failed academically (or because they ran out of money)—some fail because they did something stupid.
If the effects of some abuse (alcohol, promiscuity, what have you) don’t manifest right away, they won’t appear. If the effects are severe, they typically won’t linger because the students will fail or be asked to leave. Maybe some are shocked for a few weeks, but they pass on in a few years and nobody remembers—because there’s nobody to remind them. A new class comes, and there is always youth and opportunity and no sign of any consequences.
They get lectures about drug abuse and sex safety (like the "always get consent" mantra; as though consent were the sole criteria of goodness), but the community of the undergrads has no integral adults or living warnings and the lectures’ effects seem to last about as long as those of Algebra I.
They form a kind of standing wave of youth and sunlight with "Do as you please" as their motto, without Rabelais’ assumption of honor or Augustine’s “Love God” prefix.
Luckily some of them please to volunteer and spend part of their life out in the rest of the world, and some please to become deeply involved in the life of the mind and find a new community of all ages in some field of study.
But not for all.
How many other social environments do we have where people are induced to behave badly and when problems arise the problem people are "sanitized" away?
We used to do it some. When a co-worker mentioned that we never needed bicycle helmets when we were younger and got along fine, the older psychiatrist countered "Those children were sent away to institutions and you never saw them again."
ReplyDeleteI think it is developmentally proper for youth to hit a point where they stand or fall on their own actions, unshielded by adults. But why do we think that this should be at 18 (or earlier for temporary unsupervised hours) and in situations separated from reality.
Yet even with examples right in front of them, such as their own parents or siblings, children may not trim their sails. Incomplete myelination and hormaonal drive are powereful.