by Bennett Haselton

Created on: February 14, 2007   Last Updated: June 21, 2007

What should be the minimum age to get a library card without a parent's signature? How old should you have to be to get medical care without your parents' consent? At what age should your parents no longer be allowed to pull you out of sex education classes at school, or even pull you out of the whole school? I think that most people have never thought seriously about the answers to these questions.

Some people's answer to all of these is, "18, because lots of other people think so." This is usually phrased in fancier language - "We as a society have determined", "Our civilization has decided", etc. - but those are really just different ways of saying "Lots of other people think so." The problem with this is that if you defend your beliefs by merely agreeing with people around you, that leads down some bizarre paths. Suppose you live in a state where it's illegal for minors to get an abortion without parental permission, and you support that law. Then you move to a state where abortion for minors is legal. Do you now change your beliefs because you moved? If you're an American woman and you move to Saudi Arabia, do you forget that you ever had any "beliefs", and start trying to forget how to read? It's one thing to say that you should follow the laws of the country or state that you live in, but hopefully you wouldn't change your own personal views depending on where you lived, if your views mean anything to you at all. Or to put it another way, if your answer to some question is "lots of other people think so", the obvious question is, "Why do you agree with them?"

Why, for example, don't minors have the right - from, say, age 13 onward - to read whatever books and watch whatever movies they want? Not because they can't handle it - in practice, most teenagers are allowed to read and watch whatever they want, and they turn out fine. In that case, is there any reason why it shouldn't be a right for all of them, instead of just the ones whose parents are cool?

Yes, it's true that teenagers don't pay a lot of taxes and are usually freeloading off their parents. But that's not because teenagers are lazy or dumb, it's because they're forced to work all day in school for free. If you took a bus driver's license away and made him study Biology and American History for 10 hours a day, he'd have to move back in with his parents too. This is not to say that school is a waste of time; on the contrary, the whole point of school is that you're investing in yourself, just like

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