Now, in terms of the mechanics of the social economy, infants are parasites upon the body politic. They are sheer consumers, producing nothing; and in the world of nature they absorb the time and attention of adults only until they are ready to produce for themselves what they consume. The more complex the organism, the more highly organized the nervous system and the social life of a species, the longer the period of gestation, and the more prolonged the dependence of the new-born and the young on the parents. A dog will reach adulthood in about a year. A human infant takes from eleven to fifteen years, if we mean by adulthood what constitutes it biologically—namely, sexual maturity. Birds and animals are ready and able to fend for themselves some time before sexual maturity sets in, and data are not lacking in the record that manchildren—like Russia’s bezprizorny or waifs—also can if need presses. But for all species alike, puberty sets a term. It is the very latest season for the young to leave the parental nest, to live their own lives and build their own nests for themselves. This holds true also for the vast majority of the human young, even under the protection of industrialized society. At puberty they leave school and go to work like their fathers before them, and it is not long until they are entirely on their own, and found families and repeat the cycle again like their fathers. If the practice of society carries their social infancy over into their physiological maturity, it does not do so for very long. In essentials they enter into the heritage, such as it is, of adulthood, while custom compels the young of the privileged residual population to remain in personal and social swaddling clothes.
This compulsion is usually identified with “having advantages.” It is exercised upon the young of the rich and protected, not of the poor and unprotected. But because the notion prevails that education is the chief if not the sole instrument of democracy, and that every man, if he has a chance, can be as good as his betters and is entitled to the same rights and privileges, the number whom the compulsion reaches has increased, since the beginning of the century, well-nigh geometrically. Thus, between 1900 and 1930 the high school population has multiplied ten-fold; the total number of pupils today is between five and six million. And more than a million young men and women are enrolled in the colleges and universities. High school and college are considered “advantages,” and the essence of the advantage is a social infantilism imposed upon a biological maturity.