Re: Must respectfully disagree

So how is this fundamentally different than modern compulsory education, in terms of intergenerational relationships? Today, students learn from teachers who are often times decades older than they are.

It wasn't compulsory back then. The need for a job and learning a trade was essential for these young people in order to be able to afford to live and raise a family in the future.

Do you have a source for these contentions? Not that I doubt it, I'm just curious to know about exactly which cultures were like this.

It wasn't connected to specific cultures, it was connected to the material and economic reality of the time period. Back then, people didn't have the life spans that they enjoy today. Hence, it was extremely important for girls to marry and produce children as soon as they were sexually mature. Since many older men were financially solvent back then, it was logical for young girls to marry them. Younger people in general were expected to enter the adult world as soon as possible, because they didn't have the luxury of waiting until they were 18 to do so. The type of ageist ideology we have today is a conceit that you will not find in pre-industrial civilizations. The concept of arbitrary age restrictions as we know them today did not exist until the 19th century, and occurred as the result of the many material changes that took place in that fateful century. If you would like to learn about the media factors that resulted in the AoC laws as we know them today came about, I highly recommend the book The City of Dreadful Delight by Judith Walkowitz. And to learn about the material and economic factors that resulted in the infantalization of young people as we know it today, I highly recommend the book The Case Against Adolescence by Robert Epstein, and I also recommend Epstein's follow up book TEENS 2.0, which is scheduled for release on April 14th, 2010.