> Teenagers are inherently highly capable young adults
I'm currently a teenager. This is mostly false.
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On a serious note, interesting idea. It won't happen, since the US education system (and the public sector in general) is not open to, well, any kind of change.
But as the founder of 9 startups, high school wasn't a huge help for me in any ways other than somewhere to socialize. However, this is the special case. High school works decently enough for the rest of the 95%.
Dropping out is not an option. You 100% will have a much harder time with acceptance with most colleges (and asian parents.)
I was a teenager -- I dropped out of school, moved out of my parents home, and took a full time technology job at 16, and began working my way up. This meant that by the time my peers graduated from college, I had 6 years of experience under my belt.
I wasn't special, I was simply motivated. If my home and school life had been satisfactory, I probably would have been content to sit out my future high school and college years with very little responsibility, and I imagine this is the situation that most teenagers find themselves in.
High school works decently enough for the rest of the 95%.
95% of teenagers don't accept real responsibility and behave like capable adults because there is no external motivation or encouragement to do so.
Is this beneficial to their well-being?
Dropping out is not an option. You 100% will have a much harder time with acceptance with most colleges (and asian parents.)
That depends on what you would like to do with your life. Returning to college later in life is surprisingly easy.
If you did something that 99.9999% of the population did not do then you are special by definition.
Teenager's have significantly different levels of cognitive ability compared to adults. There is a reason most people look back on their teenage years and say "why was I so stupid" and honestly it's because your brain was less developed on a biological level.
If you did something that 99.9999% of the population did not do then you are special by definition.
My circumstances were special, not me.
Teenager's have significantly different levels of cognitive ability compared to adults. There is a reason most people look back on their teenage years and say "why was I so stupid" and honestly it's because your brain was less developed on a biological level.
Cognitive differences do not preclude all responsibility. As it currently stands, most teenagers are provided with none at all, despite their historically demonstrated ability to shoulder considerably more than our institutions provide.
I was not special -- I did quite a few phenomenally stupid things as a teenager -- but I also learned how to be an adult sooner.
[Edit] One of the dangers of expressing this opinion is that it triggers cognitive dissonance amongst those who did follow the standard protocol.
So, allow me to reiterate -- given the proper circumstances, I believe all teenagers are well capable of accepting quite a bit more responsibility than they are currently allowed, but most never have the external encouragement or motivation to do so.
You are 100% right. It really works like that. If you grow up with little or no opportunity to meet your responsibilities head on and to shoulder your weight you'll lose a decade. Sometimes more.
I started working at 17, mailroom boy at first, worked my way up to systems programmer then started my own business. By the time my friends graduated I had a nice little business going. But I doubt if that would have been possible in the period after I got started and before the whole www thing happened.
The barrier to entry was pretty high for a long time.
I attribute most of what happened to luck and the little bit that's left to plain old fashioned hard work. But then again, I like my work. That really helps.
Did not or could not? Many people can do a lot more than they actually do do. Just because they choose not to - or are never aware that they have the choice - doesn't make it impossible.
Consider spending less than you make (i.e. not going into massive credit card debt). I highly suspect most people can do this - they certainly did just fine up until the 1970s. But many people don't - at least, enough that the savings rate was negative until the current financial crisis.
I've heard a few people argue that this proves people are constitutionally incapable of managing money. I think this is bullshit. They're incapable of managing money because the environment and incentives around them provides them no reason to manage their money. If you stopped handing out credit like candy, you'd find that people could very easily manage their finances.
So it is with school. Just because 99.99999% of the population doesn't drop out and support themselves while building their career doesn't mean they can't. It just means they find it easier and more imaginable to stay in school.
I feel like it's the wrong question. I don't think anyone would really advocate postponing responsibilities until the brain had reached maximum maturity. The responsibility question's function signature is wrong: it's returning a boolean when it should be returning a float.
This discussion highlights why these questions are so difficult and frightening: ethics prevents good science.
Randomly sample a bunch of kids, hook them all up to monitoring devices, put them in different schools and societies that involve transitions into adulthood at different rates and onsets, set up a control group (Lord of the Flies setup), do the longitudinal study, and write it up. An associate professor and his 5 grad students would get a bunch of solid papers out of it. Theorists would have fun defining "optimality" in this context (to be fair, the philosophers have been gnawing at it for a while..)
This is unethical .. right? Then, you have to ask yourself: wouldn't it be more ethical to do the study, figure out how best to raise kids, and let all human young for posterity (or at least 'til the results are invalidated) benefit from the wisdom?
It would only be more ethical if your ethical system was based on a utilitarian viewpoint.
In contrast, most capitalist democracies (all that I can think of anyway) are centered on individualism... the only ethically allowable sacrifice is the voluntary sacrifice... and children (anyone under 18) are not considered sentient enough to make decisions about their own lives and futures.
You prove him right: by assuming underage people aren't sentient enough, ethics prevent us to check. Not necessarily bad, but definitely restrictive, and not good science™.
But is it because young adults these days don't have to grow up as much as teenagers had to say a century ago? You can effictively stay a child emotionally for a very long time.
[This meant that by the time my peers graduated from college, I had 6 years of experience under my belt.]
Invalid assumption, since during my undergrad and graduate years I was exposed/worked on large systems (Vax), administered the math dept systems, tutored statistics/calculus, etc. If I add in the wonderful people I met, studied with or learned from during those college years (something that is hard to find in the common workplace btw), those years are far more valuable that 6 years in the workplace.
Experience isn't just putting down years at task X, it is what you gained and the effort you put forth.
That depends very much on where you work. There are plenty of opportunities to grow in some of the larger institutions. I ended up working for a bank and I learned lots of stuff that came in very handy in my later career. Contrast that to my buddies who took the university path and all got stuck in middle level management or very boring code maintenance.
A CS degree is not a free pass to a well paying and interesting job.
College can also be a valuable experience, but you're incredibly presumptuous about working experience as "years at task X" and the value of my experience relative to your education.
A degree program provides the opportunity to learn, but no guarantee that you have. Real-world experience provides a measurable demonstration of your abilities. Both are valuable, but for different reasons.
However, some people have to live with the systems (err nightmares) that were built by people gaining "real-world experience". Just a little bit of focused education can do wonders (esp if you mix in a little passion).
Bad code comes from bad and/or inexperienced programmers, which in my experience seems to have very little correlation with level of education, and quite a bit more to do with a lack of "real-world experience".
The data doesn't support high school working out for 95% of students.
Fewer than 70% of US high school students graduate with their class. Few districts do better than 80%. About 3% or so homeschool, so that leaves you with about 67% who graduate in the system.
The 2005 data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress shows that 34% of 12th graders rated "proficient" reading abilities.
Not exactly a glowing success.
There are good options if you're looking for alternatives. I know a bit about the situation in Seattle because I opted out of high school there. The school district there has a "school" set up where home schoolers can register, do some non-home friendly classes (science & theater mostly IIRC), and benefit from government education funding. Many cities have programs that let high schoolers get credit for taking college classes and some universities are set up to do early admission (I did the UW program). Before all that I did an apprenticeship at a small electronics company (age 13). Pretty much you need to do the legwork though, you may find that the school district isn't interested in helping students leave the system (taking their funding with them).
Couldn't a fail be an indicator that schools still are serving kids? "Oh, Johnny didn't really get it the first time around, let's get him to try again"? I'm not necessarily advocating this point of view, but stating the statistic isn't enough to get your point across. You need to propose a proper way of interpreting those results as well.
High school works decently enough for the rest of the 95%.
Funny. If you listen to the political-sphere, the argument is that high school sucks for most people, but works brilliantly for the well-off.
But if you actually ask the well-off and the people at the top of the class, they almost unanimously decry it as an awful waste of time.
High school does not really work for anyone. The vast majority of people end up learning their trade on the job. Why delay that process 4 (or 8) years?
I think to encourage young people to drop out and take up a trade as soon as they think they know what they want to do with their life would be incredibly harmful. Many people think they have an idea of what they want to do at 14, but end up discovering an entirely new field in their course of learning. It would be hard to happen upon a career in physics if you were never introduced to it in high school, and weren't in an environment where you could learn easily at a high level about it.
I think kids should be encouraged do productive things they enjoy. That might mean school, that might mean work.
Nor would getting a job at 14 preclude a career in physics.
Most people who discover an interest do so in their own free time. I know very few creative works (programmers, architects, scientists) who picked up their careers because of a high school class. Do you?
Perhaps a kid might work at carpentry from 14 to 16. Then get interested in physics books he read in the library, and apply for university. Who knows. The real harm is that society has cut off a productive path (work) and forced students into a path that is neither productive nor enjoyable for 99% of the kids (school).
"Nor would getting a job at 14 preclude a career in physics."
It does, provided there is an age limit to go to physics. Like, you need a PhD, which can't be attended to if you are past 30 or something. These limits are artificial, but they are, anyway.
There must be ways around the PhD, but I bet they are a lot harder.
Why do you assume that people know what they want to do when they're 13-14 years old? If you were to ask me what I wanted to do back then, I'd look at you funny and say "computers".
Come to think of it, If you were to ask me what I want to do now (I'm 19, a junior in college), I'd probably give you the exact same answer. Even though one of my majors has nothing to do with computers at all (other one does), nor did my internship this summer.
I don't. But the best way to figure out what you want to do is to actually do it. School does not help in this process.
I'm three years out of college. Most of my friends had no idea what they wanted to do in graduation. They picked a job, didn't like it, and now are switching. Except now the biological clocks are ticking, and it's becoming more important to pick the right path, because there is a major costs in switching careers.
If people started working at 14, or even 18, people would have a lot more time to discover the career they loved, before they had to assume the burden of earning enough to support a family.
But the best way to figure out what you want to do is to actually do it. School does not help in this process.
I would say that school does help. It exposes people to different ideas and topics (Wait, I can get paid to do something with math besides run a business? You mean I can spend my entire life researching something?).
Personally, my opinion is that its absolutely great to know a lot about your specific field that you (want to) work in. But I would never want to limit myself to only knowing about one particular topic of knowledge.
//edit (to reply to this bit):
If people started working at 14, or even 18, people would have a lot more time to discover the career they loved, before they had to assume the burden of earning enough to support a family
There's a lot of careers that require years of training to go through before you can begin working. Lawyers, Doctors, etc. We on HN might like to think that anyone can pick up a profession and just hack away and be able to make a living at it on whim. But it doesn't work like that. Its not as simple as deciding "I don't like being a lawyer, but I think I'd like being a farmer. I'm going to buy some land, plant seeds and call it a day".
Re:Law and Medicine. The US system for both of these is EVIL in its regressivness and waste of time and talent. Most other Common Law countries have undergraduate law degrees, in the UK they're mostly three years. There is also bugger all reason for Medicine to be a graduate degree, it's all taught. Bond University in Australia does an undergrad medicine programme in 4y 5m, with three trimesters per year, and the UK system has undergrad Med degrees of 5 or 6 years.
...I don't really see what high school did for you, then. That sounds more like an argument for change than against it. If you're not gonna know as a junior in college, having been through high school, any better than you did as a 8th grader - why bother with it at all?
I'm currently frustrated by high school. I've known I wanted to do "computers," like you, since middle school. High school hasn't changed that.
Maybe some people aren't exposed to enough options in middle school. So why don't we fix middle school instead of sticking adolescents in 4 more years of useless education? Assuming a high schooler can take 8, and assuming only two will be in his or her subject of interest, fully 75% of the student's time is wasted learning facts and skills that are unimportant. Even accounting for an additional class in a subject of moderate interest that may be useful later in life, that leaves 5/8 periods wasted. Assuming an additional 2 classes (I'm feeling generous) are useful for the skills they provide, such as communication and... (You pick. I can't even think of another useful skill that a high school class might teach.), that leaves 3/8ths of a student's time wasted.
Consider a business where 37.5% of _every_ employee's paid hours was spent playing video games. (For all the good the other 3 classes do our student, I don't think that's an unfair comparison. Except the games would be more fun.) How do you think that company would fare? That's shockingly wasteful under any other circumstances. Why do we expect it of our schools?
Unfortunately the problem is that "unimportant" facts and skills are all over the place, and are not limited to subjects outside your interest. I'd bet you might even learn useless things in classes on subjects you are interested in. Combine that with the apathy for teaching and increased focus on testing well for federal funding (in the US), and it's all useless.
(On a less cynical day, I'd say that eventually taking all these "useless" classes in HS might come in handy some day, you never know. I realized what I had gotten out of it the moment I left. I had an art history and ceramics class that's prompted me to look for a pottery studio near my home to continue on because I love making cups. The scant amount of chemistry I've learned bored me in HS (and I thought it was useless...) but it gave me a foundation in college to take so many chem classes I'm considering a double major in chem and CS. My last HS phys ed teacher over the course of a year never let me give up no matter how badly I was doing - something I've never had happen at the gyms I've been to with all the trainers I've seen. His voice is the voice I hear internally encouraging me to keep on running/swimming/working out or to even get my ass out of my chair after sitting in it all day. All these little things I thought were stupid ended up making a fairly large impact on my life. I wonder if I'm the exception to the rule.
I might also note I actually ended up dropping out of HS after my sophomore year because I thought going to college early would help me more with my interest in "computers" since I still had to take some number of "irrelevant" classes but I could focus more on my interests. I don't regret that, and occasionally I wish I had left earlier on, but I can't deny that what little I did do in HS has impacted me.)
If you're not gonna know as a junior in college, having been through high school, any better than you did as a 8th grader - why bother with it at all?
Because, as an 8th grader, I wanted "computers". Now, I although I still want "computers", I don't know if I want to focus on web/scripting languages, on embedded systems (or something in between), on computer graphics or on UI/UX, etc. Now, I know what fields I have available to pick from, and have (some) experience in most of them. I can make more of an informed choice now then I could have a decade ago. I can tell you that as an 8th grader, I wouldn't have been able to understand most of the things that I do today.
Maybe some people aren't exposed to enough options in middle school.
I think its because when you're 9-13 years old, theres limits to what you're capable of doing and what you know. Its completely and utterly impractical to even pretend that it is possible to expose someone to every field and topic by the time they're 13.
..fully 75% of the student's time is wasted learning facts and skills that are unimportant.
See, I don't (and didn't) think think that any of my classes were unimportant or useless. I might not have cared about them. But I could see the value in the fact that the knowledge is there and in knowing the basics of the topic.
I might not be an English major, but I can read a book and then be able to understand it and write about it in a coherent manner. The ability to write (and therefore express yourself) is very important to have. I might not do anything with Chemistry or Biology, but at least now I can look at a food label, read the list of ingredients and (somewhat) break down whats in the food, to figure out how unhealthy it is for me. I might never need to know about the causes of the Industrial Revolution or what the big deal about the Enlightenment was, but, in its own way, thats exploring human thoughts and behaviors - that still influence the world today.
I had to fill a "Modern History" requirement here at college. I took International Relations. I found it interesting enough so that I took on a second major to study it some more.
The knowledge might not be directly useful to you. But its knowledge. And you can take it, and with some thought, apply to the rest of your life. The concept of learning the basics about a number of fields wasn't randomly chosen by people hundreds of years ago for no reason. They were onto something. That something might not work well for everyone. I'm not going to pretend it does. But, a majority of the time, it does work.
Schooling and learning — all of it - is what you make of it. At the end of the day, if you choose to make nothing of it, thats your choice. If you think that you can learn more on your own, then I hope that you're right. Because learning is something good, you should enjoy it, not hope to get out of the way so you can make money.
Oh, just for laughs, I went back to my elementary (primary) school yearbook. In the "When I grow up, I want to be.." field, I had down: "Baseball Player, Stock Broker, Lawyer, Scientist". This completely changed after Middle School. If that yearbook asked a similar question, the answer would read "Computers, Musician, Author, Politician". By the time I graduated High School, it would have read "Computers, Journalist, Graphic Artist". In college, if I had to fill out that field, it would likely read "Computers, Something to do with international politics, Author"
I can change that to 8 if Avecora (which did previous web stuff, but now is developing a mobile dev) doesn't count as one, since it's in development. In fact. I'll list them and try to qualify them, chronologically sorted.
DebateWare - sold enterprise event mgmt software. sponsoring debate event in bos in oct
Avecora - doing a mobile device in dev
Avecora OnDemand - CRM/Project Management app. only connected to Avecora by name. market sucked.
Cadmium - social advertising network. used facebook data to target ads. decent revenue, closed down later b/c market was :/.
Student Concourse - was at WebInno 22. Lots of users but bad retention rate. Closed down.
FB Idol: >15,000 Facebook users and very active. monetized via ads, with good money. said screw it and sold it.
Ramamia: with hnuser:jasonlbaptiste. few thousand users, in public beta. tons of gigs of photos. launching next month.
TickrTalk: in dev. funded by UPenn Weiss Tech Fund.
Classleaf: sales force started making calls last week. software. it's selling.
Adaptance: in dev: advanced ad network built on a complex algorithm combining behavioral + contextual + 3 other targeting metrics.
Actually, that's 10, but remove Avecora OnDemand and there's the nine.
I don't really know what the definition of a startup is, but I know it's certainly different than a website. HN in general tends to have a very liberal definition of the word. Side projects that never made a dime or had more than a few hundreds visitors are rightly or wrongly considered startups rather frequently. The word "startup" is so overused that like the terms "breaking news" and "celebrity" it doesn't really mean much anymore.
The way I see it, high school doesn't really teach content, it teaches learning, which we've been learning (cout << recursive_meta_joke) for about eight years now. The second thing that high school gives is a one-year introduction to the various careers that can be taken on.
For example, I notice one thing with many of the people I talk to, to this regard: high school is where the transition from "YEAH MAN, I'm going to be a pro athlete when I grow up dude" to "I thought physiology was pretty cool in bio class, so I'm going to go and do premed."
But of course, this doesn't work for a lot of people. It doesn't work with me, because I've personally already have found my passion (and it has been for three years.) It also didn't work for Richard Branson.
Everyone complains about high school. And there's definitely a lot of rote memorization. But for some people, they might not gain this important "oh, this is actually pretty cool" moment.
If I believed that most high schools taught people how to learn I'd be very satisfied.
There are many options that we could explore if our political system allowed it. The one that makes the most sense to me is to provide two paths for students: one which leads to a university and one which is vocational. The university path could begin at 16 with the curriculum that would typically be taught to a college freshman.
I think this is a pretty good idea! A lot of students at the colleges I went to spent their first year taking core classes or classes in a major they ended up switching out of. Might as well let students take care of that first year somewhere more affordable/accessible to everyone, and then move on to college.
Realities of life are not taught in high school. Regular High School is a joke, however, specialized optional programs like International Baccaularate or AP, I found more challenging than most college classes. Unfortunately, these are optional, IB/AP should be the norm.
"We teach you how to learn" was repeated over and over again in my engineering department at my university. I always thought it was an excuse and justification that allowed them to save face and make it ok that what was being taught was going to be useless in the "real world"
So sure, content-wise it was useless, but now I see that I can pick up any project or subject learn it and apply it really quickly. But I am still not ok that they were not capable of providing valuable content and practical knowledge in class.
Neither in college nor in high school did I learn anything from class or teachers (except for a handful), my education was mostly Google, Wikipedia, and blogs, not textbooks or teachers. (I stopped buying books my last semesters in College after I realized I never opened them when I did)
"We teach you how to learn" was repeated over and over again in my engineering department at my university. I always thought it was an excuse and justification that allowed them to save face and make it ok that what was being taught was going to be useless in the "real world"
That's a horrible argument that defines your disdain for learning.
It is an argument that defines my methods for learning, which is that I learn on my own. Not a disdain for learning. I strongly believe in learning by doing.
Dropping out is not an option. You 100% will have a much harder time with acceptance with most colleges (and asian parents.)
I enjoyed turning on, tuning in and dropping out, fwiw. It's not for everyone, but life experience has fine-tuned my BS filter, given me infallible icebreakers and generally purged that poisonous Life-As-A-Race mindset.
By my experience getting into university after doing the dot-com years and a few years of domesticated life, colleges only care about their straight-out-of-secondary rates (given, I went to a state school, not an Ivy League, but I feel that the end effect would be similar.) Asian/1st generation immigrant parents, on the other hand, are a terrible burden to bear!
I would encourage the younger HN demographic to manage their expectations. Spending 3 decades in school doesn't give you a whole lot of common ground with a VC panel, other people in your chosen field or (really) anyone outside of a similarly-academic background. While that may be who you're working with or hiring, 8/10 times that's not who you're ultimately selling to. Freight-train academia can, however, set up a crushingly intense fear of failure that can break a young hacker's willpower in half.
Short story: never be afraid to walk away from a raw deal, especially if there's an implication that it's "mandatory." Life doesn't have to be a Dostoyevsky novel.
Exactly. It's not that there are 39 Awesome Icebreakers For Hackers, but rather that I have stories and experiences that (more or less) relate to almost anyone I'm likely to meet.
And yes, the stories are often more fun in the telling than in the living.
I'm currently a teenager. This is mostly false.
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On a serious note, interesting idea. It won't happen, since the US education system (and the public sector in general) is not open to, well, any kind of change.
But as the founder of 9 startups, high school wasn't a huge help for me in any ways other than somewhere to socialize. However, this is the special case. High school works decently enough for the rest of the 95%.
Dropping out is not an option. You 100% will have a much harder time with acceptance with most colleges (and asian parents.)