Friday, February 04, 2005

Brilliant Ideas that will Never Work: Maturity Test

It was mentioned in passing in a newspaper article I read recently that adolescents typically don't have a fully developed sense of consequences because of physical differences between the adolescent brain and the adult brain.

I'm not sure whether I believe this, but suppose for a moment it's true:

Then shouldn't they be able to invent a kind of brain scan to measure how mentally mature a person is? Makes sense, doesn't it? Now let's extrapolate a bit:

Different people mature at different rates, so there are probably some 16-year-old who are ready to function as full-fledged adults, while there are others who shouldn't yet be trusted behind the wheel of a car. So instead of using arbitrary ages for adult privileges, you just go in for your quarterly brain scan starting at age 9 or 12 or whatever's appropriate, and you receive your adult privileges based on the results. So people who are ready can vote at 14, and people who aren't have to wait until they're 25. They could even use it for adult privileges that are traditionally administered by the parents as opposed to the state. For example, an adolescent would go in for a brain scan, and when they come out their parents would be informed that the teen is now old enough to set their own bedtime or date or stay home alone overnight or whatever.

The only problem is the potential consequences for sibiling rivalry...

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