Teenagers and Careers: Is Apprenticeship an Answer?

There's another pg essay out there that talks about "premature optimization," which is what I generally think of apprenticeships. Giving teenagers a chance to see what really goes into a particular career is a great idea, but I wouldn't put much stock into it being more than a complement to traditional schooling, in which case it reduces to another form of internship or co-op, which, again, are great for giving students a taste of professional life, but are in no way a good replacement for the breadth of a good education.

Yes, but not as the author conceives it.

10 hours a week would not be an optimal way of organising it, especially if it'd be 2 hours here and there. You want large blocks of time in which you can pass on implicit as well as explicit knowledge.

Let’s say there’s a teenager out there who dreams of being a writer.

Very, very bad example. Solitary profession, very few people make a living out of it, mostly introverts.

The school puts out a notice in the community looking for a writer who would take on an apprentice ten hours a week. The apprenticeship would pay something around minimum wage, but would also involve the apprentice building something of value on their own with at least some of that time.

Who pays them? If this is educational why are they being paid? Why should the writer help the apprentice at all? I can see an amanuensis relationship, but this apprentice will not be a net gain to the writer for a very long time, but a cost. It certainly isn't worth the writer's while to pay them.

So, for example, I might have the apprentice spend five hours a week doing grunt work for me, then I would spend five hours each week with that person helping them to build a blog to share their writing, polish their writing skills, and so forth.

What grunt work? Why not pay someone who knows what they're doing instead?

If they want to learn to write I'd set up something like the Clarion Writer's Workshop, a short, intensed and focused group where you come together for daily meetings, readings and critique from someone who knows what they're doing, but most of all you write.

If they want to write for a living then a possible apprenticeship model would be journalism. One month study, three months internship, six cycles, you don't get paid. I cannot see how this would not be a better deal than a Masters in Journalism.

On the same lines Germany has a _proper_ apprenticeship system, 3 months professional school study, 3 months work experience, you stay with the same company the whole time (gotta find one to sponsor you first) and generally they hire you afterwards. We have something similar for some trades in Ireland, but not to the same extent.

I see no pressing reason this couldn't be open to 14 year olds. Three years of not getting paid to be in school or three years of not getting paid to earn a trade.

I could see this working well for a small number of teenagers, especially in programming. However, the vast majority of teenagers' help isn't worth anything near minimum wage.