There seems to be something more fundamental lacking in the engineer’s preparedness for their job. Despite finding a lack of key information in the published instructions on either the biocide or the maintenance manual, they were not deterred in their confidence that this should be a simple task. They were convinced the task was simple, and the circumstances did nothing to undermine that confidence. The missing element in this scenario was self-supervision.
Grading is important. Making high grades is important only for those who will end up standing on the shoulders of giants. For everyone else and for society as a whole, the optimal grade is a C.
A sabbatical is a legitimate option for career training. This is the only time a person can learn how to fill in unstructured time. Doing so develops skills in how to create jobs where none were defined before. The key element of extended absences is the completely unstructured time. Things that do need to be done can take much longer than normally would be allowed in a work setting.
The freeze dance game is an analogy of what lock down subjects to young people. In that game, someone plays music that everyone enjoys dancing to. When everyone starts getting well into their dancing, someone stops the music and everyone must freeze in their position. Anyone who continues to move is taken out of the game, even if that movement involves catching ones balance. When translated to real life, it is most hazardous for the younger generations.
Much attention is spent on the job-loss implications of introduction of automation to improve productivity. Meanwhile, automation is also used for job-preservation of older workers in outdated yet still essential practices, and this too has some unfortunate implications for the future. Eventually the simulation of an earlier age will fail catastrophically in the fact that that age no longer exists. Alternatively, eventually we will run out of older workers who can work in that simulation.
My discussion here is why I criticize my 17 year old self for not being more confident about my self-assessment. I don’t criticize my 13 year self who pretty much understood the same thing. It is reasonable to the 13 year old to treat the assessment as a hypothesis to be tested. The various tests attempted were all appropriate, if not not sufficient.
Behind this messy argument is a deeper concern I have that we are doing a disservice to young people by presuming that they really do need more than a decade to learn advanced skills. We can subject young people to more intense education than we are now, and that they could have college-graduate level skills before they become 18 years old. Yet, we think that such an expectation is unwise as if it risks losing something more valuable. Perhaps we fear the young person’s loss to easy access to the presumption of innocence.
Just like the fact that I can’t interest an advanced piano teacher doesn’t diminish the fact that such teachers exist, the fact that science can’t engage the immaterial teacher says nothing about the existence of such a teacher. The teacher is simply uninterested in engaging, and have every good reason to not engage.
The agile approach would subject an eligible worker to a couple weeks of intense training and testing to meet the requirements so that the worker can be available to work in a short period of time. The resulting contract will be between the client and the corporation that will take a cut of the hourly rate and then pass the remainder to the worker. The worker would be paid uniformly for the education and the assigned task.
Academic accreditation comes with a built in cost of inefficiency by demanding schools to arrange classes around semesters or quarters so that material is broken up into series of courses with later courses requiring prerequisites and achieving a year-level (minimum number of total credits). Education is dragged out with accompanying incidental living costs that add…
