i know that realisticly the country would collapse but this could be interesting
how would teenagers from 1920 run a country?
- Thread starter personthatisperson
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Might depend which teenagers we're talking about. Leopold and Loeb could be interesting.
Well, I'm not crazy about heterosexual thrill-killers either. But yeah, the Nietzschean Murderocracy would certainly be a handful.
@personthatisperson
PTIP:
Are you familiar with the King And Country Debate at Oxford University? That was in 1933, but most if not all of the participants would have been teenagers in the 1920s, and the themes of the discussion were typical of the post-World War I era.
PTIP:
Are you familiar with the King And Country Debate at Oxford University? That was in 1933, but most if not all of the participants would have been teenagers in the 1920s, and the themes of the discussion were typical of the post-World War I era.
Oxford students were not exactly a representative sample of British young people. . .
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Someone said that sounded very outside the box, to me it sounds like you are coming up with an idea for National Novel Writing Month. So, while I don't know much about Japan of this period as far as the culture, I will try to answer as best I can to help you develop some ideas.
Your teenagers will come in various personalities, but one thing they would have in common is growing up under an emperor. They know of democracy and parliaments and things, so it is likely they will have some discussion over who should be the ruler and that others can be the representatives of the people. How well they represent the people will probably depend on the individual personalities, because their minds, while immersed in Japanese culture, will still be developing. In fact, it might be interesting if your setting is somewhat different and they have to come to the realization that the people have different values. These will be young people who are generally used to a homogenized culture. I don't know how much access they will have had to Western ideas, though baseball was becoming very popular by this time I know.
Is this a country which is forming? They will probably implement laws that are similar to what they know in Japan.
I have heard it said that girls mature faster than boys. If this was true of 1920s Japanese girls the same way it is said to be true of Western girls who are teenagers, then you might find that eventually, once they realize they are the ones developing these rules, the girls and up asserting more power and authority because they seem to be the one making wiser, more mature choices. This in turn could make things very interesting as they consider the culture they came from, with some great opportunity for introspection.
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Like any inexperienced leaders they'd run a country very badly. Just a point in 1920 there's no such thing as a Teenager.
If we're looking at some sort of 'Mutant Spanish Flu different from the original timeline kills almost everyone over the age of twenty scenario'... well there will be some people over the age of twenty still around who had enough resistance or whatever to survive it and to help pick up the pieces.
If we're looking at anything else... well I think we're probably in Alien Space Bat territory, and this needs moving to the appropriate forum along with clarification of how whatever it is happens. (I think I remember seeing something like this only for a later time period posted in ASB or Chat, and there was argument about just how capable someone with no training whatsoever would be able to keep the machinery of modern society running - especially when people who knew computer passwords and security codes and the like had been 'vanished' or whatever that scenario was were taken into account. Obviously you're asking about 1920 though, where electronic security is not a consideration, and where children may have been 'apprenticed' to a business or trade from an early age, instead of being put through school.)
if american teenagers from the 20s ran a country it would most likely be really similer to the 1920s usa because thats when they were raised
Looks like (my previous post) I was thinking of a 'Mutant COVID' thread which didn't spare youths particularly, but simply killed 95% of the population. Current day issue, and posted in Chat here: https://www.alternatehistory.com/forum/threads/beginning-a-post-apocalyptic-realm.485465/
To second Peg Leg, the concept of teenager and indeed the word teenager did not exist in 1920. With only a tiny minority in colleges and a still small percentage completing even 12 years of schooling, most 'teens' of that era were functionally adult or on the cusp of being functionally adult. Inexperienced yes, but not a separate sub-culture as we know it and not coddled or protected save for the 'teens' of the 1%.
Studies from the 1960's showed that US high school students tended (with exceptions of course) to follow their parents' political views, at least so far as party affiliation was concerned. https://books.google.com/books?id=r_N9BgAAQBAJ&pg=PA41 I would imagine that if anything that would be still more true of 1920, where opportunities of students to get political opinions divergent from those of their family and community were less common than they would be a few decades later, let alone in today's world of the Internet.