Imagine if the entire social construction of your youth were created top-down by a hostile clique of elites. High school, college, prom night, Shakespeare, parents, your first job, teenage love – everything was a mirage, a Matrix-like prison environment, totally artificial. What a grand use of power that would be! A book attempting to prove this could be an excellent study of power. Luckily, such a book exists and, though obscure, it was advertised on a forum I frequent, falling into my lap.

Its thesis-statement reads:

This book contains an empirical examination of the history of youth norms, the reality of youth development, and the history and function of the American education system. It seeks to establish empirical facts that nobody of any honest persuasion should disagree with: for instance, that puberty ends around the age of 15 years on the average for boys and 14 for girls, that the best psychometric and neurometric data reveal the brain finishes developing by the end of puberty, that those who claim otherwise do so wrongly or even misleadingly, that youth norms varied much less extremely from adult norms in the past, even while puberty finished later on the average, that the current norms largely came about in the last 50 to 100 years after the establishment of the modern education system, that the modern education system was unpopular among the masses and was constructed by the elite class, that education does not increase intelligence, and that starting roughly no later than when students enter youth (7th-9th grade), the education system becomes dramatically economically exploitative, with no returns to either the economy or people able to be measured.

The book contains five chapters: A Summary of Historical Youth Norms, Education, Development, The Teen Brain Meme, and Applications. The first chapter provides evidence that post-modern youth is largely ahistorical – this chart on Ancient Roman marriage sums it up well:

The author thoroughly argues that Ancient youth was essentially young adulthood. While aristocrats considered those under 25 too immature to rule the Roman Republic, virtually no other responsibilities were off-limits starting with the assumption of the adult garment around the age of 15. Youth in their mid-teens would marry, live alone, travel for education, work for a living, hold minor office, serve in the military, and more.

In the middle ages, youth turned exploitative. Average marriage ages increased to the mid-twenties because the young were expected to be house-slaves for older masters until that age. As this arrangement thawed, the age of 21 gained significance as the age of majority – the rationale was that parents or economic-guardians were entitled to a youth’s labor for his first 7 years of adult-ish labor capacity.

Only in the mid-twentieth century, in the US after the creation of the high school, did the age of 18 gain any special significance. As the hip twitterati say, it ain’t lindy. Only two ages are: the beginning and end of Youth, specifically, which, for the author, correspond to roughly 15 and 25 for males.

The continuous historical significance of these two approximate ages is apparent from the first chapter of the book. The third and fourth chapters confirm the significance of the first and inform us on the reasoning behind the significance of the second. In these chapters, the author argues that the “teen brain” is a myth and that the brain is actually mature by the end of puberty, which occurs at the beginning of youth.

I was hesitant about this hypothesis at first, but the author proves his case. The research is intense and meticulous. His take-down of establishment scientists is ruthless. Many pages are devoted to actually catching brain researchers in nearly endless mistruths. Though their mouths may lie, their data is evidently undoctored, because it contradicts their public claims. On virtually every measure of brain function, youth achieve adult scores. When it comes to brain structure, all major development milestones have been surpassed by the end of puberty. The author explains that many false claims about the brains of youth actually comes from the fact that the brain changes until death. For instance, from the beginning of puberty to the end of life, the brain prunes grey matter. In the early 2000s, scientists claimed that the loss of grey matter during the teen years proves the immaturity of youth. What they omit is that older people lose just as much grey matter in as much time – one study Bronski cites shows that a person’s age can be predicted with an accuracy of plus or minus two and a half years using grey matter imaging at any point in adult life.

For me, the real core of the book is chapter two and the second half of chapter four. In these parts of the book, Bronski argues that youth as we know it is largely a consequence of the creation of the youth-education system, which is comprised of the high school and the college. Those who created this system are the same people who spread lies about young brains, and who support infantilizing age restrictions whether they be for or against youth themselves. For example, Bronski highlights that the MacArthur foundation states on its website that the biggest issue in juvenile justice is not systemic corruption, nor abuse of minors, nor unconstitutional court proceedings, nor the locking up of young people for bullshit crimes, but rather it is the fact that 18-20 year olds are not, at present, considered juveniles by the courts.

As Bronski reveals, virtually everyone who controls the MacArthur foundation works at a university – in other words, they are upper-level members of the “Professional Managerial Class,” the “brains of their rich employers.” Therefore, he says, they support increasing the age of immaturity perpetually as to make a larger and larger segment of youth into schoolboys under their supervision.

The implications for my area of interest are large. Bronski proposes that the construction of the education system can be explained by a “dialectic” occurring between the capitalist ruling class and their PMC underlings. Because the latter are essentially paid to think for their masters, they possess special powers that other, more replaceable employees lack. Specifically, they can trick their employers and, when unified, strongarm them. A clear example of the latter that Bronski cites is when NEA’s Committee of Ten, composed of professors and deans and college presidents, gave the Rockefellers and their friends four options for the curriculum of the high school. All flattered the PMC, making their knowledge of bullshit like poetry part of every option. The rich, wanting to offload the cost of training onto taxpayers, leaned towards the most practical, and this synthesis is what was instituted and is what is essentially still in place today.

The example Bronski provides of the PMC strongarming the capitalists is the 1993 Student Loan Reform Act, which established direct loans provided by the federal government and consequently attempted to cut bankers out of the student-loan equation. The bankers struck back – Sally Mae became a beast, armed with tax dollars, Republicans allowed it to go fully private and today it feasts on students’ blood like … [not allowed to say it]. Importantly, this backlash was enabled by PMC defectors – Sally Mae has been immensely successful at persuading university loan departments to shill for it and mislead students into financial predation.

Bronski is essentially making a claim about who is in power, and by extension, what they want. The who is a money-rich ruling class, and importantly, their hired brains, and what they want doesn’t always align. Sometimes this seems to produce a push and pull, but usually a synthesis is realized that satisfies both classes. This is an interesting, empirical claim that warrants further investigation pending its generalizability. The claim itself may in fact be a synthesis; though Bronski may not be familiar enough with elitology to realize it, the two main camps when it comes to the Class Question are Marxists and Moldbuggers. The former says it’s the billionaires, and the latter says it’s the college professors. It being both, at first glance, seems like an elegant solution. I will have to see if said solution can explain the curious happenings of the 20th century. Perhaps my next writing will be on that question.

The book ends with Bronski’s recommendations. Most importantly, he argues that the high school should be abolished, and that only ten to twenty per cent of people should attend higher education. The case is persuasive. By estimating both the per cent of useful classes for those who should attend and the per cent of people who need any higher-ed knowledge, Bronski concludes that “high school is, then, on average, about 97.8% exploitation.” That is to say that literally 97.8% of time spent in high school is a waste of time. Some useful skills are learned, yes, but very little and only for certain people.

Overall, I recommend this book. While almost all mainstream books get an A for typographical matters, I do have to say that I give this book a B due to some harmless, but ugly spacing and other errors here and there. By no means is the book illegible or hard to read. Whereas mainstream books might receive a C for content, this book receives an A+. It is extremely well researched and argued and puts even some books published in academic presses to shame. You can find out where to get it here.