If you want to enrich teenagers' lives, offering them something other than a prison sentence where kids ruthlessly torment each other seems a decent way. It worked for most of history.
Coming from a poor, working class family, an apprenticeship-driven society like those of centuries ago would've resulted in me being trapped doing back-breaking labor and having no chance to escape.
But I got a chance to study tech and other languages, got interested in things my family could never understand, and moved to another country to pursue what made me happy.
I think offering a choice of apprenticeships would be good, but discouraging schooling in any way in favor of them would lead back to cycles of poverty and and end to the upward movement we've seen in the past century with the introduction of widespread public education.
I still took advantage of what I was offered.
I believe Germany has this kind of system.
Edit: Never mind Electrical Engineering https://www.ausbildung.de/berufe/elektrotechniker/ Electrician https://www.ausbildung.de/berufe/elektroniker/
We have this kind of system, and it works extremely well for most professions that don’t require a master’s degree, and where the field doesn’t change too quickly. It is a mix of school and apprenticeship. Great, for example, for becoming a nurse, less great for programming since the field moves so fast.
For higher education, we still have the old school university system. Students usually leave university with little industry experience beyond a few internships, but especially the technical universities put a lot of focus on preparing their students as well as possible for the real world.
All in all it works quite well.
Learn the basics at school and the day-to-day activities through the apprenticeship? Not sure what else would be better than the dual-system
A random web search gave me this relatively recent article [1] presenting it. It says that 2/3 of students goes through apprenticeship:
«In Switzerland, two-thirds of students in the final stage of secondary education opt for vocational training, mostly in three or four year “dual” programmes combining classroom study with workplace training.»
[1] https://www.ft.com/content/98e06036-d99b-11e7-a039-c64b1c09b...
Do you have any evidence for that or is it an assertion? I feel very confident that the top decile of those who complete an apprenticeship as a Chenistry lab tech or as a Computer Programmer could go straight into a UK doctoral programme. If the proportion of academically inclined entrants increased so would the proportion capable. I’m sure they’d have massive gaps in their knowledge compared to those who went through a theory focused Bachelor’s but you learn plenty of theory with one to two days a week of class and you can apply it immediately so you’re going to remember it.
On a more Anglophone note lambda school seem to be doing great at training web programmers and data scientists in six months of full time project based work. It’s not an apprenticeship but it looks a lot more like it than any university.
At the university, we actually had a very successful internship program for high school students (in particle physics). It turns out there is a lot you can learn by "learning by doing".
Also the actual day-to-day work of a master or PhD student is not too different from an apprentice in crafts - but very different from a school or univerity student. You learn by being embedded in a working group and performing actual work, instead of only sitting in class and learning from books.
We had an apprentice at work (in Germany) who was going to a Waldorf school I think. They do a half-year apprenticeship as opposed to three weeks as the others do.