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Comment by fosk | Hacker News Reader

There should be two categorizations for students: highly creative students should be placed on a different path to adulthood, everybody else could use the current system. Highly creative people are more likely to be successful dropouts.

To force highly creative people into this routine, is dictatorship of the mind. That's how it was for me.

Edit: I upset the academics :)

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I would love to see your system/tool for predicting future creativity. Or some evidence that creative people are more likely to be successful dropouts. The evidence I've seen at least suggests the biggest predictor of success is grit: the ability to grind through and stick with something longer than others. Now, you might argue the measure of success also needs to be updated to accommodate your "creative people" hypothesis, but then you're basically designing the question to meet your predefined outcome.

How would you identify highly creative people? Genuinely asking. If you advantage them, parents will do everything they can to make their kid look like one even if they aren’t one. And some kids will not look like one due to a bad home life or food insecurity or untreated developmental disorder.

You don’t advantage them. A creative track is probably as infuriating to a non-creative person as the current system is to creative ones. Creative tracks should still have outcomes.

It’s like trying to cheat your way into professional sports: if you are not a good fit, it won’t be pretty. And indeed we do have a track for athletes.

To think that all students are identical and they all deserve the same track is myopic. Turns out, we are all different people.

People do cheat their way to professional sports, though. We had a whole collegiate scandal explicitly to get non athletes into the athlete track.

Why not three? One stream for creative types, one for practical types, then the rest. For the practical stream, unless it's changed, we already do this - from year 10 (about 15yo), Australian students can begin an apprenticeship/trade. From that age group, students are choosing electives and focusing on their strengths or interest, whether STEM or arts or physical electives.

And otherwise or for highly creative people, a grounding in most other things is useful. If you're an artist of some sort, you're going to be writing supporting documentation for exhibitions, or running business admin selling your work. To some degree, I think it's healthy for people to be pushed out of their comfort zone here and there.

Do you suppose there should be a test to get into the creatives path? Because every kid will want to be there

Isn't this how we somehow (per|con)verted "likes computers" into STEAM? Everybody deserves to participate!

Nice caste system you've got there

That's like, the opposite of a caste system

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