“In your vastly more advanced system, youngsters graduate from your school system at age eighteen, and their survival value is virtually zero. If the rest of the community were to vanish overnight and they were left entirely to their own resources, they’d have to be very lucky to survive at all. Without tools—and without even tools for making tools, they wouldn’t be able to hunt or fish very effectively (if at all). And most wouldn’t have any idea what wild-growing plants are edible. They wouldn’t know how to clothe themselves or build a shelter.”
“That’s right.”
“When the youngsters of your culture graduate from school (unless their families continue to take care of them), they must immediately find someone to give them money to buy the things they need in order to survive. In other words, they have to find jobs. You should be able to explain why this is so.”
I nodded. “Because the food is under lock and key.”
“Precisely. I want you to see the connection between these two things. Because they have no survival value on their own, they must get jobs. This isn’t something that’s optional for them, unless they’re independently wealthy. It’s either get a job or go hungry.”
“Yeah, I see that.”
“I’m sure you realize that adults in your society are forever saying that your schools are doing a terrible job. They’re the most advanced in the history of the world, but they’re still doing a terrible job. How do your schools fall short of what people expect of them, Julie?”
“God, I don’t know. This isn’t something that interests me very much. I just tune out when people start talking about stuff like that.”
“Come on, Julie. You don’t have to listen very hard to know this.”
I groaned. “Test scores are lousy. The schools don’t prepare people for jobs. The schools don’t prepare people to have a good life. I suppose some people would say that the schools should give us some survival value. We should be able to be successful when we graduate.”
“That’s what your schools are there for, isn’t it? They’re there to prepare children to have a successful life in your society.”
“That’s right.”
Ishmael nodded. “This is what Mother Culture teaches, Julie. It’s truly one of her most elegant decep
tions. Because of course this isn’t at all what your schools are there for.”
“What are they there for, then?”
“It took me several years to work it out. At that stage I wasn’t used to uncovering these deceptions. This was my first attempt, and I was a little slow at it. The schools are there, Julie, to regulate the flow of young competitors into the job market.”
“Wow,” I said. “I see that.”
“A hundred and fifty years ago, when the United States was still a largely agrarian society, there was no reason to keep young people off the job market past the age of eight or ten, and it was not uncommon for children to leave school at that age. Only a small minority went on to college to study for the professions. With increasing urbanization and industrialization, however, this began to change. By the end of the nineteenth century, eight years of schooling were becoming the rule rather than the exception. As urbanization and industrialization continued to accelerate through the 1920s and 1930s, twelve years of schooling became the rule. After World War Two, dropping out of school before the end of twelve years began to be strongly discouraged, and it was put about that an additional four years of college should no longer be considered something only for the elite. Everyone should go to college, at least for a couple of years. Yes?”
I was waving my hand in the air. “I have a question. It seems to me like urbanization and industrialization would have the opposite effect. Instead of keeping young people off the job market, the system would have been trying to put them on the job market.”
Ishmael nodded. “Yes, on the surface that sounds plausible. But imagine what would happen here today if your educators suddenly decided that a high-school education was no longer needed.”
I gave that a few seconds of consideration and said, “Yeah, I see what you mean. There would suddenly be twenty million kids out there competing for jobs that don’t exist. The jobless rate would go through the roof.”
“It would literally be catastrophic, Julie. You see, it’s not only essential to keep these fourteen-to-eighteen-year-olds off the job market, it’s also essential to keep them at home as non-wage-earning consumers.”
“What does that mean?”
“This age group pulls an enormous amount of money—two hundred billion dollars a year, it’s estimated—out of their parents’ pockets to be spent on books, clothes, games, novelties, compact discs, and similar things that are designed specifically for them and no one else. Many enormous industries depend on teenage consumers. You must be aware of that.”
“Yeah, I guess so. I just never thought of it in these terms.”
“If these teenagers were suddenly expected to be wage earners and no longer at liberty to pull billions of dollars from their parents’ pockets, these youth-oriented industries would vanish overnight, pitching more millions out onto the job market.”
“I see what you mean. If fourteen-year-olds had to support themselves, they wouldn’t be spending their money on Nike shoes, arcade games, and CDs.”
“Fifty years ago, Julie, teenagers went to movies made for adults and wore clothing designed for adults. The music they listened to was not music written and performed for them, it was music written and performed for adults—by adults like Cole Porter, Glenn Miller, and Benny Goodman. To be in on the first big postwar clothing fad, teenage girls scavenged their fathers’ white business shirts. Such a thing would never happen today.”
“That’s for sure.”
Ishmael fell silent for a few minutes. Then he said, “A while ago you mentioned listening to a teacher explain how a bill passes Congress. I assume you have in fact studied this in school.”