Starting at the Beginning

The yesterday in class Mr. Mitchell asked us to contemplate what it means, in general, in our society, personally etc., to "come of age". I started my writing with law.

Legally, an individual is no longer a minor after their eighteenth birthday. At that point they can be tried as an adult, sign up to serve in the military, buy cigarettes, and gamble however you still can't rent a car, drink alcohol or even get into bars. It's kind of like a holding period, easing you into adulthood; turning you into a pseudo-adult before you're full fledged. So then maybe 21, is where we should put the marker, but you still can't rent cars from many companies AND if you go to college, you're still in school. This definition quickly gets squishy.

Science is equally unsatisfying. Biologically, we think about starting to become an adult in the teenage years, in the midst of the changes that come with puberty. However, your body continues to change throughout life, never exactly reaching the point where your body is completely "of age".

Socially, popular rights of passage include getting a driver's license, thereby increasing independence, experimentation with drugs and alcohol, and loss of virginity.

However, in class, maybe by virtue of being academically-minded people, we honed in on education as a way of measuring coming-of-age-ness. I would say that as college started becoming more accessible and higher education a normal phenomenon, the process of coming of age in America has become far more convoluted. In a certain time, most kids graduated from high school, got a job, got married, and moved out. It's different now. Now, especially for students like us, college is not abstract it's very real and even expected for some of us. This continuation of schooling prolongs the coming of age process for a great number of years. People can be in grad school for an obscenely long time.

The question soon becomes, "is school a more or less valid way to 'come of age'?" In a way it seems like the more educated person should come more of age, seeing that they spend years and years pondering introspective questions in the safety of schools. However, the case can also made one becomes an adult when they go out into the world and get a job. Also, the degrees that students receive could be considered milestones in aging or immaturely needed pats on the back to motivate students.

It's an interesting debate at whether education facilitates coming of age or is an institution to postpone it but at Uni, it is in many of our futures. Some people didn't like that our discussion was primarily focused on higher education but in a class that is so current and introspective, it only makes sense that we come back to our personal definition of what it is to come of age.