Ivy League schools for example are really good at producing the kind of people who can pass McKinseys first year deathmarch, but most of us don’t work there and don’t want deathmarches in general.
You write that like everyone automatically has any idea what it is.
And infer they treat the new hires harshly?
There's a few blogs around about it; this one seems less hyperbolic than your average news headline but does mention the hours: https://managementconsulted.com/interview-first-year-mckinse...
Isn't that a decision that the children should be allowed to make for themselves once they are adults? School should give them sufficient resources for them to attack any profession, from soldier to priest, pilot to surgeon. Asking a child to make such choices, allowing them to forgo certain subjects, harms them in the long term. It limits their potential options.
A few years ago I read that "social media influencer" was a more desired trade amongst highschool kids than doctor/lawyer/fighter pilot. Such kids should not be allowed to make educational decisions.
To be a doctor, you need a 4 year college degree, then acceptance into a medical school, then pass the medical school courses and do N years of residency. The average medical school graduate has $200K of debt at that point.
To be a lawyer, you need blah blah blah law school, and then it turns out the USA has too many lawyers already... so the average entry-level lawyer makes $48K. Yes, really.
To be a social media influencer, you need about $2000 in startup costs and a lot of luck, as well as some degree of actual work. There are roughly a million people with 100,000+ followers on Instagram or YouTube or TikTok.
Interestingly, there are about a million lawyers and about a million doctors in the USA.
Finally, there are about 15,000 pilots in the US armed forces, but only about 2200 attack or fighter role aircraft.
In total: a kid with no particular educational affinity is making a reasonable immediate choice to pursue "social media influencer" over doctor/lawyer/fighter pilot. It's probably a terrible long-term career choice, but so is fighter pilot.
It's not even that simple anymore. There's also the PGY1 year. There aren't nearly enough residencies to satisfy demand anymore. You might have to change specialties a few times before you land a residency. We're at the point where if you didn't go to medical school in the US, you're SOL. Even if you did, it's a struggle -- hope you went to a great medical school.
This at a time when we have higher demand for doctors than ever. Nobody wants to change the residency situation because the economics of it don't work out.
There are more kids wanting to be social media influencers than there are doctors, lawyers, or fighter pilots. The chances aren't purely based on how much demand there is for a given job, but also on how much supply. For that one million spots competition is fiercer.
If you're willing to accept the failure modes of non-fighter military pilot, non-pilot military officer, person with a college degree or person with some college (depending on when things go wrong) it's not a bad track. Lots of hedging. Then you can transition to a career in civilian aviation or management.
Compare that to something like enlisted Special Operations. Wash out of SEAL selection and you could be scraping barnacles off the side of a ship. Maybe you wash out of Special Forces selection and you end up in infantry. But then you decide you want to stop blowing stuff up, and the highlight of your resume is 4 years experience blowing stuff, with a minor in sweeping barracks. Failure modes aren't as nice.
I'll mention that to one. It is a perfectly valid career choice even if you don't make it to an F-16 cockpit. Unlike failed civilian pilots a failed military pilot has their choice of other officer trades, from lawyer/doctor to tank commander. And no company will fault someone for failing out as a military pilot. The fact you were accepted into pilot training in the first place puts you ahead of most.
Realistically, I don’t think all kids schooled in Montessori style “learn what you want when you want to learn” will fail at becoming doctors or lawyers if that’s their passion. It may detract from the number of people who make it through law school just because they heard lawyers make a lot of money.
But that’s realism, I was responding to the hypothetical of if this method of learning somehow destroys a human beings capacity to ever become a doctor or lawyer. That’s not very practical to say a schooling method will destroy all sense of delayed gratification. Personally, I think developing those life skills is orthogonal to intellectual education in the first place and are more akin to personal character which parents can build in their children without conjoining it with schoolwork.