I'd said that I wasn't going to blog on my views of the drinking age until after you folks had put in your two cents. Well, most of you have weighed in, so here it is.
In my opinion, the biggest issue surrounding alcohol abuse is drunk driving. Yes, if a young adult drinks too much alcohol they can kill themselves, but they're probably not going to seriously hurt anyone else until they get behind the wheel of a car. (Sidenote: If a forty-year-old drinks too much alcohol, yes, they can do all sorts of things to hurt those around them--child abuse, domestic violence, etc.--but we're not even going to consider raising the drinking age, are we?)
To me, the legal drinking age and the legal driving age are intrinsically linked. Thus, my proposition: Yes, lower the drinking age. In fact, lower it to the age of sixteen. But, at the same time, raise the driving age to at least seventeen. And by "driving age" I mean "the age at which you're allowed to drive without a parent at any time of the day." This way, perhaps folks could get over those initial stages of alcohol experimentation before they obtained the license to drive a potential bullet. Lowering the drinking age would perhaps de-stigmatize drinking a bit, allowing us as a society to treat it as something that isn't necessarily evil, but something that can be pursued in moderation. Raising the driving age would reinforce the idea that driving a car really is a potentially deadly act. And keeping both in the high school years would mean that most experimentation would happen while the learners still lived at home, putting responsibility for the teaching into the hands of their parents, not college administrators.
I know, it's not a perfect solution, and the chances of such a system happening in the US within my lifetime is virtually nil. Far too many parents would rather keep their heads in the sand and just tell their children "Alcohol bad" than have actual discussions on the subject, and keeping the drinking age at 21 pretty much means that parents seldom have to come to terms with the amount of illegal drinking that their children do. Too, raising the driving age would mean an extra year of taxi-ing their kids around--unless, of course, we as a society grew up and started to invest in quality mass transit. That's another rant, though, I suppose.
Finally, I suppose I should indulge in some academic honesty (see previous blog topic) and let you in on my sources. My husband and I lived in Belgium for a year right after we finished our doctoral course work. (It's that small country between France, Germany, and the Netherlands. Three official languages, and it's about the size of South Carolina. Great cheese, chocolate, waffles, and, yes, beer.) They have a system very much like the one I've described, and it seems to work. Of course, Belgium is a country in which, for many centuries, the best beer has been brewed by monks. :-)
In my opinion, the biggest issue surrounding alcohol abuse is drunk driving. Yes, if a young adult drinks too much alcohol they can kill themselves, but they're probably not going to seriously hurt anyone else until they get behind the wheel of a car. (Sidenote: If a forty-year-old drinks too much alcohol, yes, they can do all sorts of things to hurt those around them--child abuse, domestic violence, etc.--but we're not even going to consider raising the drinking age, are we?)
To me, the legal drinking age and the legal driving age are intrinsically linked. Thus, my proposition: Yes, lower the drinking age. In fact, lower it to the age of sixteen. But, at the same time, raise the driving age to at least seventeen. And by "driving age" I mean "the age at which you're allowed to drive without a parent at any time of the day." This way, perhaps folks could get over those initial stages of alcohol experimentation before they obtained the license to drive a potential bullet. Lowering the drinking age would perhaps de-stigmatize drinking a bit, allowing us as a society to treat it as something that isn't necessarily evil, but something that can be pursued in moderation. Raising the driving age would reinforce the idea that driving a car really is a potentially deadly act. And keeping both in the high school years would mean that most experimentation would happen while the learners still lived at home, putting responsibility for the teaching into the hands of their parents, not college administrators.
I know, it's not a perfect solution, and the chances of such a system happening in the US within my lifetime is virtually nil. Far too many parents would rather keep their heads in the sand and just tell their children "Alcohol bad" than have actual discussions on the subject, and keeping the drinking age at 21 pretty much means that parents seldom have to come to terms with the amount of illegal drinking that their children do. Too, raising the driving age would mean an extra year of taxi-ing their kids around--unless, of course, we as a society grew up and started to invest in quality mass transit. That's another rant, though, I suppose.
Finally, I suppose I should indulge in some academic honesty (see previous blog topic) and let you in on my sources. My husband and I lived in Belgium for a year right after we finished our doctoral course work. (It's that small country between France, Germany, and the Netherlands. Three official languages, and it's about the size of South Carolina. Great cheese, chocolate, waffles, and, yes, beer.) They have a system very much like the one I've described, and it seems to work. Of course, Belgium is a country in which, for many centuries, the best beer has been brewed by monks. :-)
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