Wanting the age for being an adult to be lowered from age 18 in all countries

You know when I was a teenager I felt I ought to be treated like an adult and frankly My views haven’t changed. Allow me to explain why. The mental health capacity act says the government can come along and take away an adults legal autonomy if they don’t have the capacity to make their own decisions. It defines the capacity as the ability:

• to understand the information relevant to the decision,
• to retain that information,
• to use or weigh that information as part of the process of making the decision, or
• to communicate his decision (whether by talking, using sign language or any other means).

Now how many 16 or even 14 year olds do you think could pass this test for most every day decisions? Ah but you may say some decisions are harder than others and you’d be right. How many adults understand pandemic modelling? Or vaccine production? How many adults even know what mRNA is? How many can weigh up all the pros and cons medically in a rational balanced way? Not many. But you wouldn’t say that they lack mental capacity to decide whether or not to take a vaccine would you? When the act talks about the ability to understand, retain, use and communicate information it means to the standard of the average adult. I suspect most teenagers could meet this standard. So if there is a mechanism where by the government can take someones adult independence away why shouldn’t a teenager be able to go to the court and say “I believe I have mental capacity and want the rights and responsibilities of an adult.” Other countries have emancipation laws that effectively allow for something like this.

There are plenty of reasons to think that in terms of intelligence teenagers are functionally close to adults. IQs are supposed to be normalised for age so that a persons IQ will, on average, not change much as they age. An 8 year old with an IQ of 100 should grow into an 18 year old with an IQ of roughly 100 (on average). But the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale, arguably the most widely used IQ test, doesn’t even make an adjustment after 16. Prior to 16, 14-15 the adjustments aren’t very big.

There is of course the vulnerability argument. That teenagers are more easily manipulated or intimidated. However this point is also applicable to many adults. Our system is quite poorly designed in that if you want to add additional protections to a vulnerable adult often the only tool the system has is to take away their legal autonomy and as autistic people, a class that is more commonly considered vulnerable than others, this should concern all of us. On the one hand it means vulnerable autistic people who are deemed to have capacity do not get the protection they need and other vulnerable but otherwise rational autistic people, people who are perfectly able to understand things, are having their legal autonomy taken away because doctors see it as the only way to protect them. There needs to be a 3rd legal class of person. A legal class of vulnerable adult with mental capacity, For whom a series of laws provide additional duties and safeguards for those interacting with them without taking away autonomy. I humbly suggest that many teenagers belong in this category. It should also be pointed out that in many ways giving teenagers the rights of adults, such as the right to earn and control their own money, would make them substantially less vulnerable.

The reason under 18s are treated as children rather than adults has much more to do with the pragmatic concerns of compulsory education rather than their capacity, intelligence or vulnerability. Prior to the education act of 1918 any child under 13 needed an exemption to be in work saying they had been educated to sufficient standard. The purposes of compulsory education was not the protection of children from work but the protection of the poor from ignorance. Poor parents who could not easily turn down the money their children could earn in the mills. By making education a requirement the idea was to ensure poor children got the benefit of an education that could lift them out of poverty in later life. Although working conditions were dangerous for many the purpose was to protect children from a lack of education not to protect them from work.

The education act of 1918 recognised that education to be more than just the 3 Rs, that a post industrial revolution world needed engineers, clerks, accountants, skilled men and more of them. So the the age for compulsory full time schooling was raised to 14 and a new age for compulsory part time schooling was created an set at 18 to be phased in. Everyone under 18 but 14 or over would be required to do 49 days worth of schooling throughout the year and would be free to work the rest of the year. Now in the end that phasing in never happened for a variety of reasons (in the end they raised the age to 16 instead) but suppose it had? Suppose in 1969 when they reduced the voting age to 18 there had been 16 and even 14 year olds working to support themselves while attending school part time? Would the voting age have gone down further, to 16 or even 14? And with the voting age lowed I think you’d find most other adult rights and responsibilities would soon follow.

The education acts (1918) plan was very workable. It was even intended to extended it into university with some form of compulsory part time university education for adults over 18. And that is how university used to work. No loans as such, you have 110 days of free education (+ exams), about half of the years working days, then you work the rest of the time to support yourself. 49 days of study for teenagers may have been unrealistic but 110 seems quite feasible especially given the amount of material that is repeated between school years.

We would live in a very different world now if something like the 1918 act had gone ahead and teenagers were allowed to support themselves through a shorter school year with employment.

You know when I was a teenager I felt I ought to be treated like an adult and frankly My views haven’t changed. Allow me to explain why. The mental health capacity act says the government can come along and take away an adults legal autonomy if they don’t have the capacity to make their own decisions. It defines the capacity as the ability:

• to understand the information relevant to the decision,
• to retain that information,
• to use or weigh that information as part of the process of making the decision, or
• to communicate his decision (whether by talking, using sign language or any other means).

Now how many 16 or even 14 year olds do you think could pass this test for most every day decisions? Ah but you may say some decisions are harder than others and you’d be right. How many adults understand pandemic modelling? Or vaccine production? How many adults even know what mRNA is? How many can weigh up all the pros and cons medically in a rational balanced way? Not many. But you wouldn’t say that they lack mental capacity to decide whether or not to take a vaccine would you? When the act talks about the ability to understand, retain, use and communicate information it means to the standard of the average adult. I suspect most teenagers could meet this standard. So if there is a mechanism where by the government can take someones adult independence away why shouldn’t a teenager be able to go to the court and say “I believe I have mental capacity and want the rights and responsibilities of an adult.” Other countries have emancipation laws that effectively allow for something like this.

There are plenty of reasons to think that in terms of intelligence teenagers are functionally close to adults. IQs are supposed to be normalised for age so that a persons IQ will, on average, not change much as they age. An 8 year old with an IQ of 100 should grow into an 18 year old with an IQ of roughly 100 (on average). But the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale, arguably the most widely used IQ test, doesn’t even make an adjustment after 16. Prior to 16, 14-15 the adjustments aren’t very big.

There is of course the vulnerability argument. That teenagers are more easily manipulated or intimidated. However this point is also applicable to many adults. Our system is quite poorly designed in that if you want to add additional protections to a vulnerable adult often the only tool the system has is to take away their legal autonomy and as autistic people, a class that is more commonly considered vulnerable than others, this should concern all of us. On the one hand it means vulnerable autistic people who are deemed to have capacity do not get the protection they need and other vulnerable but otherwise rational autistic people, people who are perfectly able to understand things, are having their legal autonomy taken away because doctors see it as the only way to protect them. There needs to be a 3rd legal class of person. A legal class of vulnerable adult with mental capacity, For whom a series of laws provide additional duties and safeguards for those interacting with them without taking away autonomy. I humbly suggest that many teenagers belong in this category. It should also be pointed out that in many ways giving teenagers the rights of adults, such as the right to earn and control their own money, would make them substantially less vulnerable.

The reason under 18s are treated as children rather than adults has much more to do with the pragmatic concerns of compulsory education rather than their capacity, intelligence or vulnerability. Prior to the education act of 1918 any child under 13 needed an exemption to be in work saying they had been educated to sufficient standard. The purposes of compulsory education was not the protection of children from work but the protection of the poor from ignorance. Poor parents who could not easily turn down the money their children could earn in the mills. By making education a requirement the idea was to ensure poor children got the benefit of an education that could lift them out of poverty in later life. Although working conditions were dangerous for many the purpose was to protect children from a lack of education not to protect them from work.

The education act of 1918 recognised that education to be more than just the 3 Rs, that a post industrial revolution world needed engineers, clerks, accountants, skilled men and more of them. So the the age for compulsory full time schooling was raised to 14 and a new age for compulsory part time schooling was created an set at 18 to be phased in. Everyone under 18 but 14 or over would be required to do 49 days worth of schooling throughout the year and would be free to work the rest of the year. Now in the end that phasing in never happened for a variety of reasons (in the end they raised the age to 16 instead) but suppose it had? Suppose in 1969 when they reduced the voting age to 18 there had been 16 and even 14 year olds working to support themselves while attending school part time? Would the voting age have gone down further, to 16 or even 14? And with the voting age lowed I think you’d find most other adult rights and responsibilities would soon follow.

The education acts (1918) plan was very workable. It was even intended to extended it into university with some form of compulsory part time university education for adults over 18. And that is how university used to work. No loans as such, you have 110 days of free education (+ exams), about half of the years working days, then you work the rest of the time to support yourself. 49 days of study for teenagers may have been unrealistic but 110 seems quite feasible especially given the amount of material that is repeated between school years.

We would live in a very different world now if something like the 1918 act had gone ahead and teenagers were allowed to support themselves through a shorter school year with employment.