• AutistoMephisto@lemmy.world
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    10 months ago

    This isn’t so much about intellectual growth, as it is is about contract law. How many kids ended up over $100k in debt before 25 because they didn’t fully read and understand the pieces of paper they were told to sign to go to college? The biggest lie on the Internet is, “I have read, understood, and agree to the Terms of Service.” I think, for some kids, it’s too much to ask that they learn how to read a contract, unless you want to make it a graduation requirement, but that’s a whole other conversation.

    • Vespair@lemm.ee
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      10 months ago

      It sounds to me like that’s an issue of predatory lending and business practices; why don’t we attempt addressing those issues rather than arbitrarily deeming people too underdeveloped to understand such things for literally a third of their estimated life-span

      • AutistoMephisto@lemmy.world
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        10 months ago

        I think education is part of the problem. The legal age of adulthood is 18 in the US, but we don’t teach kids to be adults before then. We teach them how to pass standardized testing so the schools can say they’re not failing and continue to receive the most state and federal funding they can. Public schools in the US got really bad a teaching actual life skills along the way, mostly because we had a bunch of conservatives saying it’s the parent’s job to do that. I haven’t kept up with education for a while, so I don’t even know if kids are learning how to balance a checkbook.

        • Vespair@lemm.ee
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          10 months ago

          I fully agree, and would argue that this is all part of the infantilization efforts I’m describing.

          • AutistoMephisto@lemmy.world
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            10 months ago

            Our priorities are ass backwards when it comes to education. “Bean counters see a school whose students aren’t passing the standardized testing? Slash their funding, that’ll make them work harder!”