> They can spend time learning how to critically analyze text or how to learn choreography for a musical.
But to what end? There is zero value to many of these kids in learning to do these things. Again, we're pulling from a playbook on how to live a successful life that is decades out of date. A kid who has a potentially successful side hustle should be encouraged to follow it. And besides, we're only talking about a small number of kids here. Those that have shown aptitude and initiative for some alternate path. In many cases opportunity is fleeting and must be grasped when it appears. On the other hand, school will always be there.
How many skilled high school aged programmers in the late 90s were encouraged by their parents to stay in school and missed out on a decade head start on their careers? How many potential founders missed out on the golden era for computer startups? (Imagine if Bill Gates had followed his parents advice!) How many kids wasted years in college only to be saddled with a crushing debt burden and no relevant jobs to show for it? Those who have suffered for following the standard advice never seem to get a mention in these discussions. Not everyone must or should follow the same path. We as a society need to be more tolerant to experimentation and outliers.
There is a lot of value, it's just that children are very bad at estimating value. That's why they'd rather spend all their time eating candy and going to the skate park - they're children. Apparently some adults see it that way, too, which is shocking to me.
Again, kids do not need to speedrun being cogs in the machines. Could SOME of them hypothetically become millionaires like 5 years earlier?
I mean... I guess? But that's frankly one of the stupidest justifications for anything ever that I have ever heard. The reality is 99.9999% of people are destined for the same thing: a normal career, with a normal salary. Most people are not going to be "entrepreneurs", and most "entrepreneurs" that I have met are not even entrepreneurs, they're scam artists. Which is a different thing, although you could say technically they're both self-made.
Look, it's a game of average. Are there SOME people out there who could benefit from less education? Sure. For the majority of people, education leads to higher lifetime income, and it's not even close. We have the statistics on this. We don't know ahead of time which one someone will be. So, we should optimize for the best odds.
> hose who have suffered for following the standard advice never seem to get a mention in these discussions.
No no, those people get WAY too much mention. What actually doesn't get enough mention are the people who are forced into lifetime poverty because they never graduated high school and are therefore essentially unemployable. Which is about 10,000x more common than the Bill Gates types. So, give me fucking break.
I know some people who didn't graduate high school, and I know a lot of people who opted to go straight into the workforce post highschool instead of getting a degree. None of those people are doing good.
>Again, kids do not need to speedrun being cogs in the machines. Could SOME of them hypothetically become millionaires like 5 years earlier?
It's not about speedrunning being cogs in the machine, its about finding their place in a world where nothing is guaranteed and there is no longer a "golden path" to a happy middle class life. Forcing everyone down the golden path that is guaranteed to not work for some sizeable percentage of kids is moral disaster. But it makes some of us adults feel good, so we encourage it regardless of the outcome.
>The reality is 99.9999% of people are destined for the same thing: a normal career, with a normal salary.
Of course. My argument is not that some small number of people will miss out on being millionaires. The argument is that parents don't know what the future looks like, yet they insist on forcing their children down paths that resemble their own success stories regardless of how much society has changed in the intervening decades. It's asinine.
>Sure. For the majority of people, education leads to higher lifetime income, and it's not even close. We have the statistics on this. We don't know ahead of time which one someone will be. So, we should optimize for the best odds.
It is exactly this thinking that has so utterly distorted the education market that it's now mostly worthless as a signal. Yes, high school education correlates with some amount of success. College education correlates with a lot more success. But it's not about having the piece of paper, it's about what the piece of paper signals about the person. But degrees now have little value as such signals because we've engineered society so that far more people go to college and get a degree, or graduate high school than are suited to it. To accomplish this we've had to dumb down both college and high school. We've created an education arms race where we need increasing years of education just to signal the same quality that many fewer years signaled in the past. We've done large scale damage to students and society with the kind of thinking you're exhibiting here.
>What actually doesn't get enough mention are the people who are forced into lifetime poverty because they never graduated high school and are therefore essentially unemployable.
Are they unemployable because they didn't graduate high school, or are they unemployable because they don't have the traits of someone who graduated high school? What's stopping them from getting a GED? The high school degree has little causal relevance here.
But to what end? There is zero value to many of these kids in learning to do these things. Again, we're pulling from a playbook on how to live a successful life that is decades out of date. A kid who has a potentially successful side hustle should be encouraged to follow it. And besides, we're only talking about a small number of kids here. Those that have shown aptitude and initiative for some alternate path. In many cases opportunity is fleeting and must be grasped when it appears. On the other hand, school will always be there.
How many skilled high school aged programmers in the late 90s were encouraged by their parents to stay in school and missed out on a decade head start on their careers? How many potential founders missed out on the golden era for computer startups? (Imagine if Bill Gates had followed his parents advice!) How many kids wasted years in college only to be saddled with a crushing debt burden and no relevant jobs to show for it? Those who have suffered for following the standard advice never seem to get a mention in these discussions. Not everyone must or should follow the same path. We as a society need to be more tolerant to experimentation and outliers.