Why Teenagers Are Growing Up So Slowly Today | Hacker News Reader

Why Teenagers Are Growing Up So Slowly Today

blog.newsweek.com

162 pointsanuleczka100 comments

Not only are kids expected to stay in school until their early/mid 20's, depriving them of necessary real-world developmental experience as discussed in the article, they are expected to accept decades' worth of debt to pay for it. The American education model is poison.

I think the worst part is that they're piling more and more school on top of the higher performers, depriving them of the chance to explore outside of school.

For example, 6 AP courses or start your own business after school? Which one are kids choosing?

You can choose both. The AP courses were nice, and 11 years later I'm making my living running the business.

You can have both, but chances are it's still going to eat into the other activity.

Business is just one thing you could do in the time not spent on advanced courses. It's nice to have the option but it also pressures students towards more curricular learning as opposed to self-motivated learning. For example you could spend 3 hours a day making iPhone apps, or spend that 3 hours studying. Chances are unless you become famous for your iPhone apps, those 3 hours acing your courses will seem more advantageous if you're college-oriented.

You'd be lucky if you're so well as off academically as to have free time and still ace courses.

In my case:

6 AP courses, start your own business after school, or drop out and start your own business.

I like option C.

Or take 3 APs and start your own business at the same time.

It's doable if you're motivated enough.

It's 100% doable.

I'm taking 3 APs and a few past-AP classes (classes for which APs don't exist), and in my free time working at making iPhone apps/mobile contractor work with a few of my similarly motivated friends. It's not exactly what people around here consider a "business" (i.e. startup), but it does show that it's possible.

It maybe doable, but your business isn't as likely to be successful.

That's true even if you have a great background and plenty of funding. Few businesses make more than the founders would have made working for someone else for the same number of hours. This is not to say dropping out of high school is a bad idea, just far more risky than successful people might think.

Most things are doable if you're motivated enough. That's not the problem at hand though. The problem is how can we make it easier for students to do what they do best.

I think it's a good idea to focus less on standardized curriculum. For those laissez-faire lovers, standardized curriculum are the equivalent of tight-controlling governments. Some students may need the control, but to those who are self-motivated, a strong regiment just hurts learning.

I believe it's the worlds greatest deception. At 16 I was working as a reviewer, I worked as an assistant (note: not apprentice) electrician for a couple of years doing identical work to my father who was certified (on several jobs he did solely the testing to pass the work as legal) and right now I'm working in windows and siding. I presently earn more than any of my friends, and job prospects still land me at the head of my group of friends in 10/20 years, only my wife is likely to be earning more than me. I've done virtually everything involved in building a house save for foundation work, and was taught this all by my father. Nothing I did in school prepared me for any of this. Outside of manual labour, I'm a writer, I repair and upgrade friends and acquaintances for cash on the side . . . all of which I did not learn from school.

Nothing in my life has really come from school. I'm only indebted to three teachers, my English teacher who encouraged me into writing, my science teacher who taught me to watch and question everything and my woodwork teacher who encouraged me to hit nails into things all class. For 11 years of education, little in retrospective appears to have been useful. My greatest lessons were of casual knowledge, not of information or education by any institutional standard. Persistence and intrigue.

If you want to an Ivy League college you probably would not probably be able to say you are earning more than all your friends. I'm certainly not.

If you did insert X here you probably would not be able to say you are earning more than all your friends.

> I repair and upgrade friends and acquaintances for cash on the side

You're an unlicensed doctor too!

Well there's a lot of cuts and scrapes in my work and First Aid training was required, unlicensed doctor was just a natural progression . . . lol no, there was supposed to be a 'computers for' in there, but a lack of proofreading bit me in the ass.

Ironically, my mother was a nurse and I just picked up on how to patch minor injuries up. Nothing sutures better than sterilized royal blue thread in a hurry.

The debt burden for most students in higher education is a major problem. We're almost at the point that getting a college degree is not an economically viable option. This has very bad long term consequences.

Average tuition costs for 2009-2010: http://www.collegeboard.com/student/pay/add-it-up/4494.html

I think at $35k/degree the public university route is probably the most bang for your buck. I wonder how these schools compare to similar state run schools in Europe/Asia.

One thing to keep in mind is that around 50% of all students fail to complete their degree in 6 years. We're talking about 4 year degrees here. I believe around 30% never complete a degree. The opportunity cost of getting a degree for many majors makes it, from a monetary point of view, not worthwhile.

If I could do it all over again I would have gotten a two year degree in nursing and been in the workforce at 20. I ended up going to graduate school in mathematics and was in school until 29. I lost 9 years of earnings and my pay as a community college instructor is less than what my nursing friends make. There are other factors to take into consideration but here I'm only considering things from a money point of view.

These numbers are all lies, because they don't take financial aid into account. See, eg. Harvard's financial aid program here: http://www.fao.fas.harvard.edu/icb/icb.do?keyword=k51861&...

Early/mid twenties nothing; I'm 28 and have never been out of school! Why? Because I'm interested in research, and the career path for research is school->school->moreschool, until you get your PhD. It's possible to do others, of course, but that's the default one. And PhDs take longer now than they did a generation ago, too (in science/engineering, they averaged 5 years in 1965; 6 in 1975, and 7 in 1985; been holding steady at 7 since). On the plus side, it's a lot easier to do side projects in grad school, and they sometimes spin off into startups; whereas undergrad is much more by-the-book.

Do Phd's really take that long? I've never know anyone to take more than three years of pure research if they are full time, but this is in the biological sciences or computer science.

That's the average from a National Science Foundation report, counting only active semesters (wall-clock time is more like 9 years on average): http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/nsf06319/ [Figs 4-14 and 4-15]. It does include the years of classes, not just the research years, but classes are usually only two full-time years or so (less if you got a master's first).

It's quite possible to do it in less, if things go right, though in the areas of CS I'm familiar with doing it in under 5 is a stretch (maybe if you're doing a pure theory thesis). But often things don't go right. Lots of people end up writing their PhD on their 2nd or 3rd project, not their first, either because it turned out not to interest them or turned out to be fatally flawed. Or they end up having to switch advisors for reasons ranging from personality clashes to the advisor leaving their university.

Things can also go faster or slower depending on how funding goes. The ideal is to be funded on a grant or fellowship to do your own research full-time. Less ideal is being funded on a grant to do something other than your research, often code-monkey implementation for some big DARPA project or something, which means you basically have a separate part-time job; or if you're supported by TAing, that's a different kind of part-time job.

Yeah I understand how it works (I have done postgraduate research) - I didn't know you were including undergraduate/postgraduate studies, I thought you were meaning thesis only!

Err, I wasn't including undergraduate, just graduate. At least at the schools I know about, there isn't really much of a distinction between "thesis" time and PhD time generally. There's quals, but they aren't that important at a lot of places. Mostly if people say "I'm a 4th-year PhD student", it means they entered the program 4 years previously. They probably spent most of the first two years taking classes, though that varies too (I spread my classes over three years to have more time to start research earlier). I'm not even really sure how much time to allocate to my thesis, because there wasn't some official point at which I stopped doing classes and started doing thesis.

Edit: Actually, it just occurred to me you might be in Europe, where the norm is a three-year PhD thesis, in a pretty time-defined program. The PhD program norms are pretty different between Europe and the U.S. overall (I'm in the U.S.). Is that an accurate guess? If so, that'd explain the confusion. =] The U.S. program is fairly ad-hoc: you enter grad school and then there's various things that you can do in various orders, for various durations, depending on the school. Often you don't have to get a masters first either, so you sort of get that along the way, and you might be doing PhD research at the same time as that too.

Good guess. Where I'm from you can start on your phd work in your fifth year of study normally (for some earlier), and it takes 2-3 years after that to complete your project + thesis.

Louis Menand's The Marketplace of Ideas (http://jseliger.com/2010/01/21/problems-in-the-academy-louis...) discusses time to degree extensively, and the short answer is "yes." The longer answer: I think the average (or median?) time-to-degree for Ph.Ds in the humanities is 9.7 years, while in the sciences it's now hovering around 6 years and trending upwards.

Note that this merely measures the time from start to finish, including breaks.

Added to my wishlist. Thanks.

Very true, reader5000. And this would not have happened without compulsory education.

We're spending huge amounts and losing big time. As usual, the nanny state is a fail.

Instinctively, we knew this was true when we got that first job. We felt a sense of real work getting done and hopefully a lot less bored out our skull than in the classroom.

The real world is always more of a challenge than the documented world. You can read music all you want, but won't know a damn thing about making it til you strum a guitar. And you can sit in a classroom 5 days a week for 4 years and not know German as well as would fully immersed in it for 2 months.

Rather quickly, all meaning would vanish from our work. Even if we enjoyed the activity of our job, intrinsically, it would rapidly lose depth and relevance. It’d lose purpose. We’d become bored, lethargic, and disengaged.

In other words, we’d turn into teenagers.

I am reminded of growing up in suburbia.

With more context and eloquence, John Taylor Gatto has been saying this for years: adolescence is artificial, and dangerously so. See his sketch of the future Admiral Farragut, who took his first command at age 12:

http://johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/1q.htm

...and of course, Ben Franklin:

http://johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/1r.htm

Hooray! Somebody who has someone with more experience and authority to cite than "my kid" or "PG says."

JTG and related changed my life.

I quit school at 14 and never looked back. And never once regretted it.

I quit school at 14 and never looked back.

I'm not normally one to advocate my own career path -- I didn't leave school until I was twice as old as you were, and that was probably too long -- but just because you don't look back doesn't mean that others won't.

School can be a lot of fun, if it's your thing and you approach it properly. For example, I don't regret having taken the time to learn physics. It's nice to understand physics, quite apart from its economic value.

School can be a lot of fun, if it's your thing and you approach it properly. For example, I don't regret having taken the time to learn physics.

Those are big ifs, and are equally applicable to learning outside of a formal setting.

Yes, I agree. Indeed, yours is my usual default advice. ;)

One thing I'd note is that I decided to go to grad school just before the web was invented. School is far less tempting today, now that you can listen to many of MIT's best lecturers from your basement via the web.

I didn't say "Hey kids, you should go drop out!"

Just because you feel awkward about your career path, doesn't mean you should conflate my personal statement about mine with advocacy.

Another big point JTG makes is that the current crop of wealthy producers have no need for 80% of the smart people out there who might get an education. So why not keep them in school and hence not in competition with the established producers, for as long as possible?

I've heard that unions were big proponents of universal compulsory education when it was being introduced. Some say it was for the very same reason.

I feel this article is worth pointing out as a reminder: Almost all concepts of school reform still takes as a given that you will have basically the same foundation of a school.

Sometimes it's worth stepping back and asking, "Does it actually make sense to put all children below a certain age in a big building for the majority of the day, where they spend all their time with other children of the same age, taking classes from teachers who serve as their only consistent contact with the adult world outside their own home?" Very few concepts of "education reform" are radical enough to ask that question.

Maybe it would be better if children spent more of their time in the company of adults in the real world, rather than in the company of each other in a kind of greenhouse-for-children artificially designed to raise them in a certain way.

Or maybe not; maybe after taking a step back and thinking big thoughts, we take a step right forward again and decide that schools as currently understood are what we're sticking with and any problems just mean we need better schools. But it's best to make that decision on the basis of a rational plan, rather than saying that Kids Belong In Schools because that's what the conventional wisdom was last year and we can't think of anything else.

Does it actually make sense to put all children below a certain age in a big building for the majority of the day, where they spend all their time with other children of the same age, taking classes from teachers who serve as their only consistent contact with the adult world outside their own home?"

Yes, because like it or not, our current set up sees a large secondary function for school: babysitter.

The larger problem when dealing with what to do about school is addressing this issue.

The other problem problem is that the current system has a lot of people and organizations invested in keeping the system running as is or adding more days to the system to add to income. Children aren't the issue, paychecks are the issue.

The other problem is that dumping millions of teenagers into the workforce would decrease wages for older people.

This is only a problem if one assumes labor and wages are a zero-sum game, which I think most people on HN would disagree with.

exactly. any new worker will add to both demand and supply or save his money for someone else to borrow and add to demand.

The schools seem to removing days, not adding them, in order to meet their budget.

I remember a thread on this very board where there was a article on year-round-schooling.

I say no where you say yes because school is not a good babysitter. It is perhaps one of the worst babysitters, in fact.

Very few, true.

I almost feel as if we need a return to a semi-apprentice model - for high schoolers, at least:

For some of the day, you take classes teaching you theories, history, and so forth. For the rest of the day, you work an apprenticeship at a company. You don't get paid for it; the employer doesn't get that much work out of you; but you apply concepts that you're learning in your classes to what you're doing at your apprenticeship.

Don't like your apprenticeship (the line of work, the subjects, et cetera), change it. But your classes stay largely the same. If you stay at the same apprenticeship throughout school, you likely have a paid position (or, part-way through, a part-time paid position) as soon as you graduate. The employer could decide to subsidize your higher education, if you need it. But this model should work well enough that most of what you need to be entry level at that position is taught to you by the time you graduate. The rest just rounds you out.

It worked well enough for the "makers" of the 17th century: why would it not work well for the "makers" of the 21st? Not only computer programming, but numerical analysis, musicianship, and so on and so forth would work fine for this. Some professions that absolutely require a higher degree (nuclear engineer; architect - though that's arguable, and already uses an apprenticeship system; structural engineer (doubt you could learn all that math in high school); etc). Even such a thing as research assistant would work well as an apprenticeship.

Note, of course, that there's no geographical limit on what a student could take an apprenticeship on, with todays communications advances.

A lot of people do this already. It's called tech school (and optionally, if offered, there are co-op programs).

I did both, but was constantly bothered by the perception that tech school is for people who are, basically, to stupid to go to college. You go there to learn a trade. That's fine, since the "trade" I learned was configuring wide-area networks via the CCNA Academy.

I think it was really valuable for a lot of reasons outside of the good, practical training I got: it got me around kids from other schools since it was a tech school for the whole county; I had access to the co-op program to get some real work experience (which I took advantage of); I was being taught by someone who was actually doing what I was learning.

All in all I'd recommend the experience for many of the reasons you cite here.

Oh, true. It's very similar to a trade school.

I'm just saying that it should start much sooner. For a lot of people, a part-time job in high school is just for extra cash to see movies. For a lot of the same people, if the school had been a little more involved and had relationships with a lot of local small businesses, they could have apprenticed at accounting, lab/research assistant (at a very basic level, mainly observing) at a local university, etc.

It's a serious shame that tech/trade schools have the stigma they do.

It's also a serious shame that said tech/trade schools typically treat their students as older high school students instead of valuable members of the current/future workforce.

One of PGs essays discusses similar ideas (http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html). I agree that segregating teenagers may actually be harming their development instead of aiding it.

The problem is specialisation and aptitude. First part of the problem: Underlying most modern education is the idea that each individual is suited to a different profession, and that both the individual and society benefit when people are allowed to pursue that specific profession.

Second part of the problem: there are more specialisations, professions, then ever before. How many basic professions can you think of? Farmer, sailor, doctor, ... There are hundreds or thousands. And every one has hundreds or thousands of specialisations. In some professions these change on a yearly basis.

Thus education becomes a search problem, and like all search problems the key is scaling: how do you find the ideal speciality for each of the millions of students? Modern education takes an iterative approach, where students learn the absolute basics of everything, then learn a little more of a slightly narrower subset. The early iterations (i.e. school) are long and concentrate on building up foundations for later choices. The later iterations (i.e. early jobs) are shorter and concentrate on quickly narrowing down huge numbers of possible specialisations.

Reality (young brain needs real world) vs. Idealism (direct each person to an ideal profession). The trick is how to compress the spectrum - incorporate reality into a system built on an ideal.

"The trick is how to compress the spectrum - incorporate reality into a system built on an ideal."

It's actually much, much simpler than that. Schools simply don't give a damn about teaching students about anything- their primary purpose is just to keep the kids in one place all day long. So give the sufficiently motivated/intelligent kids, who have proven that they don't need to be kept in one place all day long, an opt-out option.

I've seen that opinion here a lot, that school is a glorified babysitting service. Maybe that's true in your experience, but that is a shortcoming of those schools in particular, not of schools in general.

I loathe special cases. As a programmer I see them as a sign that program design is flawed. A good program, and a good education system, has mechanisms in place to handle extreme cases.

Opt-out is fine for students who have a specific alternative (e.g. trade apprenticeship). But it is not a "solution". It does not help the 99% of brillient students for whom there is no alternative. Simply cutting them loose is a cop out.

I am a programmer by training, but my first job out of school was an administrator-type under a government grant in one of the ugly parts of government (Health and Human Services). Sadly, there is a huge difference between established bureaucracy and code. People aren't widgets, we are all special cases, we all learn differently, and we all have different things that inspire us. If you think schools actually serve the "smart" student well, then you are not looking at real funding priorities or went to a special case school yourself.

ND has full driver's licenses at 14. An old teacher of mine says it will probably go to 16 since students aren't as mature as they used to be. WTF? That shouldn't be. Teens are running half-million dollar combines at that age. What changed?

"No alternative?" What about all the stuff that adults do with their lives? Doesn't that count?

This argument bothers me, since it degrades everything teachers do. My girlfriend student taught this semester, and worked her ass off, in coordination with her supervising teacher to build interesting lessons (history in particular).

The sheer amount of teacher hate I run across here is amazing.

I suggest you're reading too much into it. The OC said "schools" not "teachers."

My own hate is certainly for the system and for teachers only to the extent that they perpetuate it. (Member of a public employee union and not fighting to have it abolished? Consider yourself hated.)

worked her ass off

The real world has no "A for effort."

interesting lessons (history in particular).

Interesting lessons may or may not be effective at teaching. It is, however, a reasonable conclusion that they would be effectivein keeping the students in one place.

I'd be interested to see a study of people, like my folks, who were in their teens in the 60's and 70's. Up north where my family is from, you generally left school at 16, got an apprenticeship with a company like Caterpillar, or hit the coal mines or shipyards. There was no coddling, no indeterminate hiatus from responsibility, and it seems to have produced a generally successful group of people who rank amongst the top contributors to a variety of industries the world over, some of the largest and most successful companies ever brought to light having come from people within this generation. Something else I find interesting, and something I see in my own age group (30-40), is that a lot of the South Africans who were forced to undergo conscription into the armed forces seem to have a deeper level of self-discipline, which you'd expect from a military experience of the kind that they were subjected to. I'm not saying that you require a drill instructor to develop self-discipline, but it did have the advantage of forcing you to take responsibility for your assigned tasks, even if only to avoid a run and indeterminate PT to sooth the ruffled feathers of your shouty DI.

What my son has wanted for as long as he has been a teenager is a chance to have grown-up responsibility. That's why he loves working on his start-up project. An actual profit-making business proposal gets evaluated by investors with no "grading on the curve" or concern for "self-esteem." He can deal with that. He found school environments that attempted to coddle teenagers (he wasn't in many such environments, but encountered them in passing) very off-putting.

I realize this is a site dedicated to startups, but business proposals and investors for children? As long as he likes it I suppose and doesn't rationalize happiness = money.

I felt like the whole purpose of this discussion was essentially to point out: teenagers aren't exactly children. Teenagers can be fully functioning adults, they just aren't given the chance to get the necessary experience. (I'm assuming here that the teenager in question is at least 15, I feel like younger than that blurs the line between child and teenager...)

Disclaimer: I'm 17, and this is just how I feel about people equating teenagers to children. Also, sorry if this post came off a bit... over-vehement. ;)

He has been quite motivated in his learning as considers the problem of how to use his teen years to get ready for running a business in his (soon) adulthood. That's been good for my younger children to see his thought process in making the teen years count for adult independent life. The essay pg wrote about this

http://paulgraham.com/hs.html

has been helpful in our family's thinking about this issue. Perhaps endure school-like experiences, but look for the most adult-like learning experiences possible.

I understand your rationale and sounds like everything is going swimmingly. In my eyes some things aren't meant to be 'optimized' or taken so seriously, like when you are teenager. Or maybe I'm just playing Devil's advocate.

Why not take something seriously if it is meaningful to you? I don't take (for example) the high school prom at all seriously, rather when I was in high school I look learning foreign languages seriously. Isn't freedom all about letting people decide for themselves what to value?

It's an uphill battle even if you want to do something productive instead of drinking and doing drugs. I started my own company when I was 16... and my higher education (which was supposedly training me for the job I was already doing) did nothing but try and keep me from actually getting real world experience by using real work for my education, or god forbid, intern at my own company.

Not to speak of the artificial group assignments. That model just doesn't work. Period. It's the lowest common denominator that controls the quality, or it's the lone nerd that spends his entire weekend redoing his teammates sub-par work. Ugh.

Unfortunately, nothing learned at that university will be of use to me in the real world, save how to handle bureaucrats.

Come on dude, handling bureaucrats is one of the most important principles one can learn anywhere in the world. (I think this remains true for only this generation).

Absolutely! But I'm not sure if it was worth the 4 years of tuition ;)

Why limit it to one generation? Seems pretty universal to me.

In the Napoleonic wars, 20 year old Generals commanded armies. Today, Napoleon's military tactics are taught at West Point and other noted military academies. Life expectancy was mid-thirties to forty-ish if my memory serves me correctly. Necessity drives people to do whatever is required to achieve a goal if the need is pressing enough.

The notion that young adults aren't able to cope with "real life" (what an oxymoron that is) is utter rubbish. Try giving them real responsibility (within reason) is the cure.

Ah, the good old times.

I do think that some more real-world and unstructured experience added into standard schooling would do some good, but I sometimes think there's an odd anti-schooling bias on HN, maybe because we all hated high school.

Another common theme on HN is how the lack of basic science knowledge amongst the voting population negatively impacts funding of and perception of science policy. Is advocating that we abolish general schooling and have everyone just learn what they need for their jobs a good idea? How does that fix that problem? Doesn't it just make it worse?

Tweak the schooling model, yes, but I've not been convinced yet that any of the radically different alternatives I see proposed here would still accomplish some of the important things that general schooling DOES do. Everyone hates certain subjects, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't be forced to learn them at least once in your life.

One thing I noticed when I went on the employment market for the first time was that I had never had a relationship with an adult other than family or teachers close enough to discuss jobs/money. American middle class children are hermetically sealed in a child's world, with the adult world a bit outside the bubble filled with sexual predators who you can't talk to. That's another flavor of crazy.

(disclaimer: this is just my theory...)

Coming from an Asian perspective, I can see why the concept of schooling has become so heavily mainstream.

Surely enough, people in the old days didn't get as much "schooling" and entered the adult world with real responsibilities and work earlier in life. For this reason, the jobs they held would typically have been labour-based jobs.

In such societies, though labourers received a decent life, it was the doctors/lawyers/professors that held the highest respect socially. The reason for this is that when things got tough outside the norms of what the common people could control (health, injury, legal issues, politics, etc), people from such educated professions were the ones that were looked up to.

It's due to the commanded respect of such learned professions that more and more parents wanted their children to receive further education. Even to this day, I hear a lot of my aunties and uncles talk in awe of children who grow up to become doctors. They really were the celebreties in my parent's culture.

Times have changed. Rather than being a place to go to learn, highschool has turned into a mindless competition to get "ranked" on how well you can retain (mostly) useless information that would have little to do with what your target professsion will actually require.

I picked up a bunch of stuff from school that would perhaps have never fully developed if I hadn't gone there, or if I'd had my own choice of exactly what to do. I would never have chosen to take a history class, and yet in that class I learned critical thinking skills in a way that I would have had no direct cause to do outside of that environment. I gained a basic grounding in science. I learned enough about a variety of different subjects that I was able to make an informed choice on a career path.

I certainly believe that the school system needs changing, particularly as self-learning becomes easier, and I agree that kids need more responsibility (I recall aching for it in my teenage years), but the number of comments here suggesting that school is of no use whatsoever surprises me.

"Never let school interfere with your education"

Agreed. See

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1281341

on efforts to trace the quotation.

"I never let public schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain

-----

At 12 years old my sister and I were "off the dole" as my parents put it. No more allowance, which had topped out at $2.75/wk. If we wanted money, we were expected to use our heads. We ended up mowing lawns, gardening and shoveling after having my mom introduce us to the neighborhood.

At 14 I wanted a computer to mess around with. That's fine, but the family computer wasn't for that. I went with some juniors and seniors in the computer club to dumpster dive behind businesses, or sometimes to the dump itself. Ended up with a working stack of 386s to put FreeBSD and Linux on.

I had a part-time job at 15 to save for a car, because at 16 we were told we were going to be on foot. At 16 I used to take on contract work that one of my teachers had to pass up, doing web-development. Mostly PHP, ColdFusion and some Classic ASP. Two of those sites, 12 years later, are still running just fine on the custom CMS built for their needs.

I had partial scholarships to top tech schools, but the debt load of going to CMU or WPI was still approaching that of a home mortgage where I grew up. I had saved enough money to go to state school and pay cash. Yet when I got there, I was completely underwhelmed. Bored out of my mind. There was very little I would learn until my 3rd or 4th years, they didn't end up applying AP course credit to get me out of 10x courses, and the social environment was akin to drunken day care (and I didn't need to be on campus to make new friends or go on dates). After 3 semesters I ended up in the Vice Chancellor's office with my parents having a very long, very candid discussion about the pros and cons of me sticking it out. They're weren't paying for it, but they were livid at the idea of me dropping out. Long story short, no one could punch a hole in my argument and I even managed to get a partial refund for the 3rd semester. I had until the end of the week to pack up and move out.

I'll go back eventually for a proper engineering degree when I'm bored building trading systems for investment firms.

Point is, nothing like being stuck with a dilemma (no more allowance, so unless you want a video game, we expect you to find a way to make money) and being forced to work out a solution at the ripe old age of 12. I learned more about how to further myself in my free time than I ever did through some state-mandated curriculum.

Would I recommend this exact approach to everyone? Absolutely not. Yet there's always a playing field everyone can succeed on, and there's an immense amount of value in kids finding that out for themselves with a bit of guidance.

"I never let public schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain

Of all persons to whom pithy lines are attributed, Mark Twain is by far the most likely to NOT be the genuine attribution.

http://www.amazon.com/Quote-Sleuth-Manual-Tracer-Quotations/...

I have never been able to verify that Twain wrote the usually quoted form of that line, "I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." (There are a lot of scholars who study such things.) I have seen one attribution of that line to Canadian humorist Stephen Leacock,

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Leacock

which to me is a much more believable attribution, but one I am also unable to verify.

Mark Twain did have some great lines about schools, of which my favorite is

"In the first place God made idiots. This was for practice. Then He made School Boards."

-- Mark Twain, Following the Equator (1903) 2:295

/pedantry

I'd like to do something like this when I have kids. However I'm afraid that it's just a reflex against the way I was brought up, way too sheltered and forced to go through school and ignore my real interests. I would just be projecting on my kids what I would've wanted for myself, and that's not good.

Additionally, this seems to explain why some people are getting married and having children later. It's a combination of a lack of life experiences and financial unreadiness from school.

Don't forget there are some positions that require a fair amount of training. I guess if those in school because they're forced go away, it would leave a better environment for those picking up the background for advanced studies.

And I see criticisms of the American model of college. Yeah, it pushes a lot of debt on the students but I thought the European model resulted in more years spent in college. There's ways to secure funding for school (such as taking the King's Shilling), and there's no real reason to try for Harvard vs. less-expensive schools, etc.

training, not learning. did you read the first paragraph? care to give examples of positions that require learning that isn't actual hands-on training?

Folks with advanced degrees in things like math, physics, physical chemistry, ... Many types of doctors (ie non surgeons), possibly lawyers as people have said that their schooling trains the mind rather than provides "courtroom practice". One can argue that advanced degrees in organic chemistry or biology is "hands on training", but those doing research in reaction mechanisms would probably beg to differ.

A few months ago I read Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman's excellent book Nurtureshock:

http://www.nurtureshock.com/

If you have or are responsible for children, I highly recommend it as an excellent overview of current research into cognitive development.

I tend to see this type of article and the associated discontent with a protracted adolescence quite a bit on ycombinator, and I can't understand it as of yet. Is their really that much research suggesting that an extended education and a delayed maturation really is detrimental? Or is it more of a shared experiential resentment? Or is it just a resentment at the lack of flexibility and accommodation in our current system, a system that assumes that one size fits all?

In some ways, I wouldn't have minded earlier exposure to questions that forced me to discover my innate passions as opposed to continuing to be fed prerequisite course after prerequisite course. However, I can't say that this is equivalent to wishing that I had started my adulthood at age 15 (or earlier). Modern society is more complex, as are the roles that adults assume in modern society, and I presume that a protracted adolescence serves to give maturing adults longer to find their place in this increasingly complex society.

Is the resentment founded in the fact that we force everyone to extend their adolescence for so long? Or that such a period provides no usefulness whatsoever?

so you argue that it's okay to FORCE kids through school?

i wouldn't have been ready for the world at age 15, but maybe at age 19-20. now i'm 23 and i'm getting sick and tired of university. they don't even try to relate the stuff they teach to any real-world applications.

i realize that i've been depressed for a while now. it's affecting me physically now. i can't handle expectations these days. i avoid even thinking of studying for exams, which might be the third response of the fight-or-flight response. i can't manage my time. i'm always 20 minutes late to anything, even dates i set myself and that affect nobody else, even if i "account for" that usual delay, unless it's a one-time event and i'm making a real mental effort.

kids want choice, because they're not given any. expectations are the opposite of choice. i can't blame kids for turning out fucked up like they are.

I actually have experienced the same depression and listlessness you described, and I imagine a lot of it could be tied to the constant lack of choice and excessive amount of expectations that our current, mill-like educational system forces students through. I definitely agree with you that our system, one that burns so many kids out about caring about anything, needs an antidote. But, along the lines that you said, I don't think that the antidote is necessarily forcing kids to take on full adult responsibilities at age 15. I guess I can see a real-life-buffered educational system that allows for more responsibility and choices without going so far as asking kids to start working full time and living on their own at age 15.

Oddly enough, Newt Gingrich agrees:

http://www.businessweek.com/print/magazine/content/08_45/b41...

Why is that odd?

You're right that it's not that odd. I was pandering a little to readers who might otherwise be open to Po Bronson and alternative child-rearing theories, but have biases against Gingrich based on a partisan caricature of him.

But, Gingrich is a former college professor and sometimes-member of a political establishment which usually emphasizes more high-school-graduations, and more people going to college. So it is a little odd (and brave) for Gingrich to advocate a change in thinking that, practically, could mean fewer traditional K-12 high school diplomas granted, and lower traditional college enrollment.

He's breaking a political taboo, the simpleminded idea that more years-of-schooling is always better. That's a little odd for someone who might have presidential ambitions.

One thing I've noted is that a rare number of politicians, like Gingrich and Al Gore, have the ability to see above and beyond the short term political context and the courage to act on what they see. Both of them have an uncommon amount of wisdom and intellect and an inclination to break from conventional thinking.

Because I'm not used to agreeing with Newt Gingrich. :)

That is the furthest thing from "odd"

Interesting... however I would really like to know how could anyone convince the teenage me that moving to yet another step of school doesn't really matter - that I should think about actually starting to do some serious freelance work in microcontrollers / electronics instead, which is what I liked to do. In the end, it didn't matter that much what I did during the studies - being good enough to pass, or even putting uni off for a couple of years could be probably more beneficial to me long-term.

But would I believe anyone saying that? Now I wish I tried... But at the same time I'm thinking about what I could tell my future kids, so that they join studies only if they really, really like learning in the academic way - not because "everyone does that".

Good points, but remember it isn't an either or. I had several friends in high school who worked in addition to class. And yes, most of those were "McJobs" but for at least one young lady I know that "McJob" brought in a nontrivial portion of the income for her entire household. And another ran his own business. Granted it was just a lawn maintenance business, but it was his and helped him start saving.

In college it is even easier to do both because there is more freedom. I worked full time in tech support while I was getting my undergrad. Now I am going for my masters part time while working full time.

Yeah - I'm still finishing my masters while working on a normal position. But it's really tiring and at this point I feel like I'm doing it just because I started, to be honest. You really have to enjoy this environment if you want to go all the way to MSc or higher. I would not do it again. But it's hard to know what's waiting for you before you sign up... I'm not sure how to pass that knowledge to someone else - simply saying "if you don't actually enjoy spending the evening on reading those 5 papers (or can be motivated enough to do it during the best years of your life so far), it's not for you" is not going to convince anyone, even if it's true on some level. There's just much more to it than that.

It's actually much easier to show someone what does a normal job feel like while s/he is in high school, than explaining what happens during the undergraduate studies (which can be completely different than you've ever experienced at school).

Despite the derisive use of the term in this piece, there's nothing wrong with experiencing a "McJob". Two good things that could come from it are: you learn that this is NOT where you want to work for the rest of your life (or even another month) or you follow the path to franchise ownership that is available in most such jobs.

Even if you don't go all the way with it, a hard working entry-level employee at a "McJob" can quickly advance in to management and learn quite a bit about how business really works. And get paid for it, rather than forking over tuition to learn about "stars", "cash cows", "question marks", and "dogs"