Though education is customarily described as “preparation for life,” the ways and works of high schools and colleges are so irrelevant to “life” that their prime achievement remains perforce the prolongation of infancy. They make adulthood harder to reach, not easier.
What, socially, adulthood consists in, varies a good deal from civilization to civilization and from age to age. But everywhere, and at all times, it is grounded upon sexual maturity and maintained on personal responsibility for winning food, clothing, and shelter, and defending one’s self against enemies and disease. Among primitive people, adulthood is initiated by puberty and established and confirmed by means of certain cruel and terrifying rites through which boys and girls are inducted into the society of men and women. Of these rites there survives among us today only that form of sadism and schadenfreude known as hazing, practiced by upperclassmen on newcomers and by fraternity brothers on neophytes. In the school tradition these cruelties are meaningless, but in the rites of the primitive they compose a part, perhaps a major part, of all the formal direct “education” the young savage ever gets. They impose bitter fear and exquisite pain which the elders require shall be unflinchingly endured. During three weeks, more or less, primitives torture their young. When they have finished, the young are utterly initiate, finally and completely adults, fully responsible members of their communities.
Classical antiquity prolonged and rationalized this initiatory period. Pain and endurance were imposed less directly but, in one way or another, they were exacted. The boys of Sparta were segregated from their women folk in their seventh year and made charges of the state. From their twelfth year to their eighteenth, they were in the constant company of their elders, often their elders’ favorite company. They collaborated in purveying food, in hunting and in worship. In what time remained, they prepared to practise war, the primary vocation of the citizen. At eighteen, war became their exclusive concern. In Athens, as in Sparta, formal schooling began at the age of seven and ended with puberty at about sixteen. Then the boy was presented at the Agora. He associated freely with his contemporaries and elders, he trained at the gymnasium, attended the law courts and the theatre. He was an ephebus, and after two years he took the oath of the ephebus and his name was written on the list of free citizens. He had thereby left the jurisdiction of his parents for the jurisdiction of the state. In Rome, a boy entered upon the responsibility of manhood when he doffed the toga praetexta and put on manhood’s dress. This was during puberty, at about the age of fifteen. Before then he had learned at home and in the Forum the arts of war and the law of the Twelve Tables. After Roman life became Hellenized, schools acquired a vogue; but unless a boy was destined for public life, schooling ended at puberty. Otherwise, a boy entered the Rhetoric School and trained for his vocation. Among the Jews, a boy assumed adult responsibility (he still does so, though it is now merely religious) upon entering adolescence. He was then Bar Mitzvah. He, and not his father, had become responsible for his fulfilling the law and the commandments. He underwent a short, formal, preliminary training, and on the Sabbath following his birthday his father took him to the synagogue and formally renounced responsibility for his son’s life and works.
So, among the primitives and the ancients, physiological maturity was the occasion for signalizing and establishing social responsibility, of entering into adulthood. This is still the case among the churches. Ecclesiastical citizenship is reached at puberty. Puberty is the time when Catholic boys and girls are initiated by the priests into the mystery of salvation and are endowed with the responsibilities of the adult members of the religious community. They undergo confirmation. Puberty is the time arranged for the young of the evangelical sects to be convicted of sin, to enter into grace, and to join the church. Puberty is the time when secularized Jews celebrate Bar Mitzvah as a merely religious event. In the definition of adulthood, the churches are at one with the ancients.
Almost equally so are the military establishments of states. Military duty comes at a much earlier age than civil responsibility. Modern industrial nations continue to conscript their young at from sixteen to eighteen. Also, the taxing power defines the young as self-supporting members of the economic order at eighteen; at that age exemption on their account ceases. For tax gatherers and armies, as for religious sects, adulthood and sexual readiness lie close together.
And this readiness is recognized in women by custom and law, which set the “age of consent” at puberty and raise it nowhere beyond sixteen. Moreover the readiness finds its purpose more largely than we imagine in marriage. The United States census of 1920 shows that nearly a quarter of all young people from fifteen to twenty-four were married, and the proportion has not grown less since then. Nor are these marriages confined to the poor. The rich signalize their daughters’ readiness by “presenting them to society” at from sixteen to eighteen; and there is much rivalry among “debs” about getting married or at least engaged during their first year “out.” The men of this class, on the other hand, tend to marry much later, while the average age of marriage for the “college bred” of both sexes is unnaturally higher. The whole contrasts sharply with the early marriage age of a hundred years ago.