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…
I agree that the current school system is not doing a good job preparing high school graduates who are well equipped to enter the job market. However, instead of extending high school for two more years through publicly funded community college, a better approach may be to end the compulsory education period at the 8th grade and then allow the educational benefits of voluntary continued studies to apply to high school years instead of waiting for the community college years. Our once more excellent high-school education was damaged by making high school universal (making it compulsory). We can restore that quality education by returning it to voluntary and provide alternative paths for those who decide they are not interested in the academic/college-prep track.
I observe a common theme in several topics of recent interest on Internet. The theme is a popular desire to avoid being confronted with uncomfortable or disagreeable content. Besides a personal choice of avoiding difficult topics, we are increasingly demanding institutional or policy changes to govern the information in such a way to…
