"Even if that's so, you have to consider the probability that your typical, dumb and arrogant (or even your atypical, slightly-less-dumb and even more arrogant) high schooler is going to figure out what that set of alternatives is."
No I don't. Your schooled teenager has almost zero input into their curriculum. It is a false dichotomy that the only alternative is to entirely put it in their hands.
"You also have to consider the cost of failure. The best-case scenario if you teach yourself isn't much better than high school, while the worst-case scenario is much worse."
I dispute that very strongly. I look at the schools-that-are, not the schools-that-ideally-exist. Part of the school memetic program is that they are already almost as wonderful as can be but it doesn't take very much examination of that idea to knock it down. We graduate an awful lot of illiterates, and if that's too extreme for you, the vast bulk of our college freshman require remedial math instruction. I have seen this remedial math instruction. It is very remedial. And very necessary.
I would also claim that the reason that teenagers think those three things is schooling. Of course they have short-term thinking. They've been carefully sealed away from all external reality. Their only future is next week's test, after which they can safely forget everything again. School creates that short-term mentality. I shouldn't even have to defend the claim that school breeds the idea that every student is really sooper special since that has been a core part of the curriculum for the past 30 years. And schools are wonderful at completely negating the value of effort by their ever-increasing focus on the lower end at the sacrifice of anybody who isn't on the lower end.
School created those faults in the first place. You want them cured, get them out of that environment.
> No I don't. Your schooled teenager has almost zero input into their curriculum. It is a false dichotomy that the only alternative is to entirely put it in their hands.
Where would you classify magnet programs? Mine let me max out on Advanced Placement classes (around 7 over 2 years, I think) and introduced me to FIRST Robotics, which led to a programming job while I was still in high school. (It was not the greatest or the highest-paying, and my output was probably what one might expect from the situation, but having it at all was great.) The effect was to get me into college with 44 credits under my belt, which is equivalent to over a year's worth of classes. I then ignored the freshman advisors' advice to take it easy the first semester in order to "adjust" so that I could follow through and actually graduate in 3 years. Obviously, my experience was not typical, but atypical students are the subject under discussion.
Comments
"Even if that's so, you have to consider the probability that your typical, dumb and arrogant (or even your atypical, slightly-less-dumb and even more arrogant) high schooler is going to figure out what that set of alternatives is."
No I don't. Your schooled teenager has almost zero input into their curriculum. It is a false dichotomy that the only alternative is to entirely put it in their hands.
"You also have to consider the cost of failure. The best-case scenario if you teach yourself isn't much better than high school, while the worst-case scenario is much worse."
I dispute that very strongly. I look at the schools-that-are, not the schools-that-ideally-exist. Part of the school memetic program is that they are already almost as wonderful as can be but it doesn't take very much examination of that idea to knock it down. We graduate an awful lot of illiterates, and if that's too extreme for you, the vast bulk of our college freshman require remedial math instruction. I have seen this remedial math instruction. It is very remedial. And very necessary.
I would also claim that the reason that teenagers think those three things is schooling. Of course they have short-term thinking. They've been carefully sealed away from all external reality. Their only future is next week's test, after which they can safely forget everything again. School creates that short-term mentality. I shouldn't even have to defend the claim that school breeds the idea that every student is really sooper special since that has been a core part of the curriculum for the past 30 years. And schools are wonderful at completely negating the value of effort by their ever-increasing focus on the lower end at the sacrifice of anybody who isn't on the lower end.
School created those faults in the first place. You want them cured, get them out of that environment.
> No I don't. Your schooled teenager has almost zero input into their curriculum. It is a false dichotomy that the only alternative is to entirely put it in their hands.
Where would you classify magnet programs? Mine let me max out on Advanced Placement classes (around 7 over 2 years, I think) and introduced me to FIRST Robotics, which led to a programming job while I was still in high school. (It was not the greatest or the highest-paying, and my output was probably what one might expect from the situation, but having it at all was great.) The effect was to get me into college with 44 credits under my belt, which is equivalent to over a year's worth of classes. I then ignored the freshman advisors' advice to take it easy the first semester in order to "adjust" so that I could follow through and actually graduate in 3 years. Obviously, my experience was not typical, but atypical students are the subject under discussion.