I was interested in voting before reaching legal age, and accepted the lowered age when it happened. The odd thing is that, even at the time, I thought that lowering the age to 18 is close to the minimum sensible value.
I'm going to rely on my memory now, always a risky exercise.
Most if not all cultures have some sort of system for assigning responsibilities based on age. At least one that I encountered while reading used a three-tier system similar to ours.
Tier one was childhood, and lasted until the mid-teens. At that point, the people were physically mature enough to assume adult tasks, but lack the experience and completely-rewired adult brains it takes to make reasoned, workable, decisions.
Tier two is roughly equivalent to this cultures young-adulthood, and includes tasks such as gathering, growing, and hunting food, starting the process of raising children, and military service. At this stage, boys (in the example I ran into) were allowed to sit in on the elders' councils, but not to speak there (this raises a whole different topic,which I'm not going to touch).
Tier three is adulthood. The chief difference is that the council-sitters were not allowed to speak. As I recall, this stage started somewhere around the mid-twenties. Our culture's equivalent is the lower limits for some elected officials.
I think that this sort of multi-tier system makes a great deal of sense, acknowledging the way that our bodies grow up long before our minds do.
A feature of late-sixties culture that was particularly annoying to me was the interviewing of teenagers to get their opinion on global economics, socio-political issues, and other relevant issues. Teen-on-the-street interviews as such didn't bother me: As a teenager myself, I was interested in what they said.
What flabbergasted me was that what they said was being regarded seriously, on an equal footing with what people who had spent years studying these issues said. As a teen, I was acutely aware of how little I knew, how passionately I felt about what I knew, and how unreliable what I thought could be: and in quite a few cases, the doodlebug interviewees were clearly less well-informed than I was.
That's enough of a rant for now.
And notice: I barely answered part of one of your questions.
Answering without answering: an example :D
I'm going to rely on my memory now, always a risky exercise.
Most if not all cultures have some sort of system for assigning responsibilities based on age. At least one that I encountered while reading used a three-tier system similar to ours.
Tier one was childhood, and lasted until the mid-teens. At that point, the people were physically mature enough to assume adult tasks, but lack the experience and completely-rewired adult brains it takes to make reasoned, workable, decisions.
Tier two is roughly equivalent to this cultures young-adulthood, and includes tasks such as gathering, growing, and hunting food, starting the process of raising children, and military service. At this stage, boys (in the example I ran into) were allowed to sit in on the elders' councils, but not to speak there (this raises a whole different topic,which I'm not going to touch).
Tier three is adulthood. The chief difference is that the council-sitters were not allowed to speak. As I recall, this stage started somewhere around the mid-twenties. Our culture's equivalent is the lower limits for some elected officials.
I think that this sort of multi-tier system makes a great deal of sense, acknowledging the way that our bodies grow up long before our minds do.
A feature of late-sixties culture that was particularly annoying to me was the interviewing of teenagers to get their opinion on global economics, socio-political issues, and other relevant issues. Teen-on-the-street interviews as such didn't bother me: As a teenager myself, I was interested in what they said.
What flabbergasted me was that what they said was being regarded seriously, on an equal footing with what people who had spent years studying these issues said. As a teen, I was acutely aware of how little I knew, how passionately I felt about what I knew, and how unreliable what I thought could be: and in quite a few cases, the doodlebug interviewees were clearly less well-informed than I was.
That's enough of a rant for now.
And notice: I barely answered part of one of your questions.
;D