Word: teens
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...insight that biology has greatly exacerbated the complications of the teen-age years indicates that our social system and our anatomies have been working at cross purposes. Although children are maturing earlier and earlier, we are detaining them in high school as long as ever. As a result, people who are ready and able to assume adult lives continue to be treated as children...
This broad social measure would force teens to support themselves at an earlier age, encouraging them to marry younger. Teens' mental growth would be in closer harmony with their physical growth, so that "education" would not hinder the maturation of teen-agers into adults...
These, however, are short-term problems. Condensing and improving school curricula would be a long-term solution to increasingly pressing social problems. Granted, any exercise in social engineering carries with it certain risks and costs. But the alternative solutions to today's teen problems, which emphasize the inculcation of morality and responsibility, rely on abstractions that are even less subject to human control and, in any case, do not deal directly with the issues at hand...
...Allowing teen-agers to assume the responsibilities of adulthood when they are biologically ready will reduce the length of the "teen" years and encourage the formation of responsible adults at a younger age. Ironically, this measure can itself further the cause of social stability which moralistic social critics seek to strengthen by mere rhetoric. Certainly, an educational system which complements and responds to physical maturation must be superior to one which ignores or seeks to contradict that growth...
...Typhoon Lagoon, a 50-acre water park where visitors will be able to slide down a 95-ft. mountain, surf on 6-ft. waves and snorkel in pools filled with tropical fish. Opening this fall is the Pleasure Island night-life park, complete with rollerdrome, comedy warehouse, teen video club and jazz saloon. Eisner hopes customers will not remember too well the Pinocchio story, in which visitors to a place called Pleasure Island were turned into donkeys...