In your initial reply to me on this thread, as to my comment where inter alia I raised the relevance a Supreme Court landmark precedent that middle-school students have no Eighth Amendment right not to be beaten to the point of serious injury, your “crank-ass” remark was as ambiguous as it was indifferent to what I have just restated. Now, it is unambiguous.

Whence I come, “crank” is a serious charge—utterly discrediting if true, a peculiarly vicious ad hominem fallacy if false. Should you wish to accuse me of being a crank, please tell me where I’m batshit off-in-the-weeds unglued from reality—a prerequisite to earning the title of “crank”.

This is not a “prove me wrong!” gambit, which I deplore. I’d prefer to stand on the facts out of the gate, and to show upfront at least a little bit of evidence for any potentially questionable or extraordinary claims; here, however, I am trying to avoid the vagaries of a moderation robot which yesterday permanently vanished a short comment about Ohio politics (re Buc-ee’s) with two links—one to a reputable newspaper, the other to Wikipedia. If I thus must do this piecemeal… It would be helpful if you’d challenge some particular point where you’d like to ask me to support my assertions as to fact. I’d also prefer to expand into a coherent, logically-connected essay what I thereby compressed into a bullet-list and a few logical inferences.

At this juncture, I’ll prioritize some background as immediately warranted.

The Social History of Childhood

To avoid a long essay, I’ll kick out a name to start with: Philippe Ariès. Although Ariès is known to have overreached in places (and the popular press stupidly likes to bash him), his theory of the social construction of childhood is basically sound, and it founded a new body of academic study of the history of childhood.

(Incidentally, I think it’s interesting that Ariès was an independent political maverick who dabbled in French right-wing politics, but who worked with lefty icon Michel Foucault. That said, Ariès was always anti-authoritarian.)

Nutshell version: Childhood is not a natural fact. By analogy, just as there have always been anatomical differences of biological sex, there have always been small, biologically immature humans before puberty, and humans in the biological process of puberty. Just as gender is constructed with some more or less tenuous relation to biological and anatomical differences—and just as we tend to perceive gender as “natural”, and even as “obvious”—and just as gender cannot be understood without studying its history, so, too, with the social perceptions of what we call “childhood” and “adolescence”.

Empirically, to suggest that “childhood” is biologically deterministic would be ridiculous. Cultural perceptions of the young are wildly variable across cultures, and across time within cultures. Although there are some common themes, there is no human universal “childhood”.

This is not fringe. Liable though it is to evoke controversy, as does every social construction theory, it is well-founded and accepted as a school of thought. It is nowhere even close to “crank” territory. I suggest that if you are unaware of that, it is not exactly my fault.

In my foregoing comments, I present an approximate capsule summary of my own independent take on current events—as informed by the history of childhood, which is not my invention! I do find it irritating when people act as if political economy, race, disability, gender, sexuality, and childhood do not have histories.

Of course, to avoid being blown off into the weeds with some real crankiness, we must define a term that is so oft misunderstood in popular discourse.

What is a social construct?

A word of caution: Contrary to right-wing propaganda, “social construct” does not mean “not real”. No serious thinker treats it that way!

Ask your friendly local feminist how “real” are the limitations of women who internalized as girls the cultural notion that their whole lives must be centered on dependency on a man. Or, mutatis mutandis, I refer you to a short open-access 1830s abstract “On the Brain of the Negro, Compared with That of the European and the Ourang-Outang”, which finds that “the apparent inferiority of the Negro is altogether the result of the demoralizing influence of slavery” (p. 399). Not “not real”.

On a topic that I think you’ll find amenable to your advocacy efforts: The modern theory of disability rights reads “disability” as a social construct. Disability is not an essential attribute of the individual. An impairment is made a disability by social and legal oppression which dis-ables the impaired person—literally depriving them of the use of their abilities. I need not remark that a disability isn’t “not real”.

That’s the nutshell version, which should not be taken as an oversimplified absolute! In my opinion, much nuance is required. There exist some people with extreme impairments and no discernible abilities, whom no social allowance can much help. But for one of my favorite pet examples of this theory in practice, throughout most of his career, Stephen Hawking would have been literally dis-abled to nothingness, if not for the social support and allowances by which he continued to exercise his extreme abilities. Ableist prejudice against Professor Hawking would have been a tragedy.

It requires much nuance indeed to parse all of this, and to distinguish “nature” from society. I’m not preaching dogma—much less a popularly caricatured oversimplification of “social constructs”. Also, by the way, I do think that sociobiologists and evolutionary psychologists (real ones, not the armchair cranks on manosphere websites) are respectable and worthy of consideration; orthodoxy is no more amenable to me than “purity”. That said, I give no credence whatsoever to idiots who dismiss history and society as irrelevant.

Apropos hereof, much of the stereotypical modern “teen” behavior is irritating to me. It’s not “not real”. I argue that it is mostly caused by learned helplessness, internalized oppression, the mental habits of involuntary irresponsibility—the acceptance of enforced infantilism. Whereas biologically-mediated rates of developmental maturation are highly variable—and there do exist 14-year-olds who are more mature and responsible than I myself was at age 21, such as, for an extraordinary historical example, future-President Andrew Jackson when he was a 14-year-old functional adult. For a biological determinist to suggest that that’s physically impossible is a delusion, as ignorant as it is patently absurd.

It is why I include in my comments a message for intelligent young people: Be what you can be, not what you are told you are. It is the number-one most important advice that I wish someone had given me when I was in my mid-teens. “If you act like a child, I’m gonna treat you like one”—but I won’t treat you like a child, so as to make you act like one.

The Present and Future of Childhood

In my prior comment’s bullet-list, I sketched the bare outlines of a culture of adults who treat the young as chattel to be managed and/or disposed of as convenient, while morally posturing as noble “think of the children!” protectors of the young.

Methinks it’s unwise to dismiss that as a “crank” idea, in reply to my commentary on an article about electric torture-gloves applied to the young—in which my very first words remarked on how the SCOTUS says it’s peachy for a public school to BEAT THE HELL OUT OF A 14-YEAR-OLD.

Is it “crank” for me to point out that aside from myself, no commentator in this thread seems even to know, or (except also perhaps one AC) even to care about the Ingraham precedent and its cultural and legal relevance to the article?

That is the present of “childhood” in America. Meanwhile, as I have not yet pointed out in this thread (but I did in another one), the age of effective “adulthood” has been ratcheted upwards for decades of ever-expanding, legally enforced infantilism.

What, praytell, does all of this portend for the future?

Pardon me for positing a question that’s so very uncomfortable, most adults would rather stick forks into their own eyeballs than consider it.

I urge intelligent young people to ponder that question now. After all, this is their world, too—and this will be their world, and they will need to cope with it, when you and I are way too dead to be bothered by such trivialities.

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“Because it’s the Internet” notice: I am not affiliated with any organized advocacy group (though it’d probably be wise for me to found one). I do not claim any credentials or authority. I speak hereby only for myself, and I will response my arguments on their own merits.