As a sixteen year old, while I appreciate that this is being talked about and am a massive proponent of teens having more rights, I think your central point is fundamentally wrong—while we’re forced to go to school every day, we certainly don’t get death squads for minding our own business. To my knowledge, teens being sent to juvenile detention for habitual truancy is extremely rare, and it seems like a massive stretch to argue that teens are physically restrained and forced to go to school, especially by threat of death. With parental permission, for example, I can unenroll from school. Society giving parents ultimate authority over their kids is a different thing, and I agree that that is harmful; but I think you can combat that directly instead of railing loudly against the state’s potential for murder and destruction to teenagers.
While your other claims seem somewhat valid, the exceptional hyperbole on this is fundamentally driving people away from your argument, and I think you’d find potentially orders of magnitude more people willing to hear you out if you focused more on your argument that teen mental capacity is near-fully developed. (For example, it would be wonderful if you campaigned for no-fault emancipation without parental consent and the rights of teens to unenroll from school). Your book seems, at a glance, better for this than this post.
As a sixteen year old, while I appreciate that this is being talked about and am a massive proponent of teens having more rights, I think your central point is fundamentally wrong—while we’re forced to go to school every day, we certainly don’t get death squads for minding our own business. To my knowledge, teens being sent to juvenile detention for habitual truancy is extremely rare, and it seems like a massive stretch to argue that teens are physically restrained and forced to go to school, especially by threat of death. With parental permission, for example, I can unenroll from school. Society giving parents ultimate authority over their kids is a different thing, and I agree that that is harmful; but I think you can combat that directly instead of railing loudly against the state’s potential for murder and destruction to teenagers.
While your other claims seem somewhat valid, the exceptional hyperbole on this is fundamentally driving people away from your argument, and I think you’d find potentially orders of magnitude more people willing to hear you out if you focused more on your argument that teen mental capacity is near-fully developed. (For example, it would be wonderful if you campaigned for no-fault emancipation without parental consent and the rights of teens to unenroll from school). Your book seems, at a glance, better for this than this post.