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Why Teenagers Are Growing Up So Slowly Today

blog.newsweek.com

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Re: Why Teenagers Are Growing Up So Slowly Today

#41

Post by _delirium »

reader5000 wrote: post #2

Not only are kids expected to stay in school until their early/mid 20's, depriving them of necessary real-world developmental experience as discussed in the article, they are expected to accept decades' worth of debt to pay for it. The American education model is poison.

Early/mid twenties nothing; I'm 28 and have never been out of school! Why? Because I'm interested in research, and the career path for research is school->school->moreschool, until you get your PhD. It's possible to do others, of course, but that's the default one. And PhDs take longer now than they did a generation ago, too (in science/engineering, they averaged 5 years in 1965; 6 in 1975, and 7 in 1985; been holding steady at 7 since). On the plus side, it's a lot easier to do side projects in grad school, and they sometimes spin off into startups; whereas undergrad is much more by-the-book.

Re: Why Teenagers Are Growing Up So Slowly Today

#42

Post by mmt »

mechanical_fish wrote: post #19
ahoyhere wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hooray! Somebody who has someone with more experience and authority to cite than "my kid" or "PG says." JTG and related changed my life. I quit school at 14 and never looked back. And never once regretted it.

I quit school at 14 and never looked back. I'm not normally one to advocate my own career path -- I didn't leave school until I was twice as old as you were, and that was probably too long -- but just because you don't look back doesn't mean that others won't. School can be a lot of fun, if it's your thing and you approach it properly. For example, I don't regret having taken the time to learn physics. It's nice to u…

School can be a lot of fun, if it's your thing and you approach it properly. For example, I don't regret having taken the time to learn physics.

Those are big ifs, and are equally applicable to learning outside of a formal setting.

Re: Why Teenagers Are Growing Up So Slowly Today

#43

Post by protomyth »

shib71 wrote: post #28
apsec112 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The trick is how to compress the spectrum - incorporate reality into a system built on an ideal." It's actually much, much simpler than that. Schools simply don't give a damn about teaching students about anything- their primary purpose is just to keep the kids in one place all day long. So give the sufficiently motivated/intelligent kids, who have proven that they don't need to be kept in one place all day long, an…

I've seen that opinion here a lot, that school is a glorified babysitting service. Maybe that's true in your experience, but that is a shortcoming of those schools in particular, not of schools in general. I loathe special cases. As a programmer I see them as a sign that program design is flawed. A good program, and a good education system, has mechanisms in place to handle extreme cases. Opt-out is fine for students…

I am a programmer by training, but my first job out of school was an administrator-type under a government grant in one of the ugly parts of government (Health and Human Services). Sadly, there is a huge difference between established bureaucracy and code. People aren't widgets, we are all special cases, we all learn differently, and we all have different things that inspire us. If you think schools actually serve the "smart" student well, then you are not looking at real funding priorities or went to a special case school yourself.

ND has full driver's licenses at 14. An old teacher of mine says it will probably go to 16 since students aren't as mature as they used to be. WTF? That shouldn't be. Teens are running half-million dollar combines at that age. What changed?

Re: Why Teenagers Are Growing Up So Slowly Today

#44

Post by InclinedPlane »

run4yourlives wrote: post #13
ejames wrote: post #7

I feel this article is worth pointing out as a reminder: Almost all concepts of school reform still takes as a given that you will have basically the same foundation of a school. Sometimes it's worth stepping back and asking, "Does it actually make sense to put all children below a certain age in a big building for the majority of the day, where they spend all their time with other children of the same age, taking cl…

Does it actually make sense to put all children below a certain age in a big building for the majority of the day, where they spend all their time with other children of the same age, taking classes from teachers who serve as their only consistent contact with the adult world outside their own home?" Yes, because like it or not, our current set up sees a large secondary function for school: babysitter. The larger pro…

I say no where you say yes because school is not a good babysitter. It is perhaps one of the worst babysitters, in fact.

Re: Why Teenagers Are Growing Up So Slowly Today

#45

Post by mmt »

wtn wrote: post #23
protomyth wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The other problem problem is that the current system has a lot of people and organizations invested in keeping the system running as is or adding more days to the system to add to income. Children aren't the issue, paychecks are the issue.

The other problem is that dumping millions of teenagers into the workforce would decrease wages for older people.

This is only a problem if one assumes labor and wages are a zero-sum game, which I think most people on HN would disagree with.

Re: Why Teenagers Are Growing Up So Slowly Today

#46

Post by mechanical_fish »

mmt wrote: post #42
mechanical_fish wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I quit school at 14 and never looked back. I'm not normally one to advocate my own career path -- I didn't leave school until I was twice as old as you were, and that was probably too long -- but just because you don't look back doesn't mean that others won't. School can be a lot of fun, if it's your thing and you approach it properly. For example, I don't regret having taken the time to learn physics. It's nice to u…

School can be a lot of fun, if it's your thing and you approach it properly. For example, I don't regret having taken the time to learn physics. Those are big ifs, and are equally applicable to learning outside of a formal setting.

Yes, I agree. Indeed, yours is my usual default advice. ;)

One thing I'd note is that I decided to go to grad school just before the web was invented. School is far less tempting today, now that you can listen to many of MIT's best lecturers from your basement via the web.

Re: Why Teenagers Are Growing Up So Slowly Today

#47

Post by mmt »

cschneid wrote: post #36
apsec112 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The trick is how to compress the spectrum - incorporate reality into a system built on an ideal." It's actually much, much simpler than that. Schools simply don't give a damn about teaching students about anything- their primary purpose is just to keep the kids in one place all day long. So give the sufficiently motivated/intelligent kids, who have proven that they don't need to be kept in one place all day long, an…

This argument bothers me, since it degrades everything teachers do. My girlfriend student taught this semester, and worked her ass off, in coordination with her supervising teacher to build interesting lessons (history in particular). The sheer amount of teacher hate I run across here is amazing.

I suggest you're reading too much into it. The OC said "schools" not "teachers."

My own hate is certainly for the system and for teachers only to the extent that they perpetuate it. (Member of a public employee union and not fighting to have it abolished? Consider yourself hated.)

worked her ass off

The real world has no "A for effort."

interesting lessons (history in particular).

Interesting lessons may or may not be effective at teaching. It is, however, a reasonable conclusion that they would be effectivein keeping the students in one place.

Re: Why Teenagers Are Growing Up So Slowly Today

#48

Post by PieSquared »

dsspence wrote: post #30
tokenadult wrote: post #4

What my son has wanted for as long as he has been a teenager is a chance to have grown-up responsibility. That's why he loves working on his start-up project. An actual profit-making business proposal gets evaluated by investors with no "grading on the curve" or concern for "self-esteem." He can deal with that. He found school environments that attempted to coddle teenagers (he wasn't in many such environments, but e…

I realize this is a site dedicated to startups, but business proposals and investors for children? As long as he likes it I suppose and doesn't rationalize happiness = money.

I felt like the whole purpose of this discussion was essentially to point out: teenagers aren't exactly children. Teenagers can be fully functioning adults, they just aren't given the chance to get the necessary experience. (I'm assuming here that the teenager in question is at least 15, I feel like younger than that blurs the line between child and teenager...)

Disclaimer: I'm 17, and this is just how I feel about people equating teenagers to children. Also, sorry if this post came off a bit... over-vehement. ;)

Re: Why Teenagers Are Growing Up So Slowly Today

#50

Post by kentosi »

(disclaimer: this is just my theory...)

Coming from an Asian perspective, I can see why the concept of schooling has become so heavily mainstream.

Surely enough, people in the old days didn't get as much "schooling" and entered the adult world with real responsibilities and work earlier in life. For this reason, the jobs they held would typically have been labour-based jobs.

In such societies, though labourers received a decent life, it was the doctors/lawyers/professors that held the highest respect socially. The reason for this is that when things got tough outside the norms of what the common people could control (health, injury, legal issues, politics, etc), people from such educated professions were the ones that were looked up to.

It's due to the commanded respect of such learned professions that more and more parents wanted their children to receive further education. Even to this day, I hear a lot of my aunties and uncles talk in awe of children who grow up to become doctors. They really were the celebreties in my parent's culture.

Times have changed. Rather than being a place to go to learn, highschool has turned into a mindless competition to get "ranked" on how well you can retain (mostly) useless information that would have little to do with what your target professsion will actually require.

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