Why Teenagers Are Growing Up So Slowly Today
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Why Teenagers Are Growing Up So Slowly Today
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Re: Why Teenagers Are Growing Up So Slowly Today
#2Not 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.
Re: Why Teenagers Are Growing Up So Slowly Today
#3Not 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.
I think the worst part is that they're piling more and more school on top of the higher performers, depriving them of the chance to explore outside of school.
For example, 6 AP courses or start your own business after school? Which one are kids choosing?
Re: Why Teenagers Are Growing Up So Slowly Today
#4What 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 encountered them in passing) very off-putting.
Re: Why Teenagers Are Growing Up So Slowly Today
#5It's an uphill battle even if you want to do something productive instead of drinking and doing drugs. I started my own company when I was 16... and my higher education (which was supposedly training me for the job I was already doing) did nothing but try and keep me from actually getting real world experience by using real work for my education, or god forbid, intern at my own company.
Not to speak of the artificial group assignments. That model just doesn't work. Period. It's the lowest common denominator that controls the quality, or it's the lone nerd that spends his entire weekend redoing his teammates sub-par work. Ugh.
Unfortunately, nothing learned at that university will be of use to me in the real world, save how to handle bureaucrats.
Re: Why Teenagers Are Growing Up So Slowly Today
#6Not 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.
I think the worst part is that they're piling more and more school on top of the higher performers, depriving them of the chance to explore outside of school. For example, 6 AP courses or start your own business after school? Which one are kids choosing?
You can choose both. The AP courses were nice, and 11 years later I'm making my living running the business.
Re: Why Teenagers Are Growing Up So Slowly Today
#7I 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 classes from teachers who serve as their only consistent contact with the adult world outside their own home?" Very few concepts of "education reform" are radical enough to ask that question.
Maybe it would be better if children spent more of their time in the company of adults in the real world, rather than in the company of each other in a kind of greenhouse-for-children artificially designed to raise them in a certain way.
Or maybe not; maybe after taking a step back and thinking big thoughts, we take a step right forward again and decide that schools as currently understood are what we're sticking with and any problems just mean we need better schools. But it's best to make that decision on the basis of a rational plan, rather than saying that Kids Belong In Schools because that's what the conventional wisdom was last year and we can't think of anything else.
Re: Why Teenagers Are Growing Up So Slowly Today
#8With more context and eloquence, John Taylor Gatto has been saying this for years: adolescence is artificial, and dangerously so. See his sketch of the future Admiral Farragut, who took his first command at age 12:
http://johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/1q.htm
...and of course, Ben Franklin:
Re: Why Teenagers Are Growing Up So Slowly Today
#9Interesting... however I would really like to know how could anyone convince the teenage me that moving to yet another step of school doesn't really matter - that I should think about actually starting to do some serious freelance work in microcontrollers / electronics instead, which is what I liked to do. In the end, it didn't matter that much what I did during the studies - being good enough to pass, or even putting uni off for a couple of years could be probably more beneficial to me long-term.
But would I believe anyone saying that? Now I wish I tried... But at the same time I'm thinking about what I could tell my future kids, so that they join studies only if they really, really like learning in the academic way - not because "everyone does that".
Re: Why Teenagers Are Growing Up So Slowly Today
#10It's an uphill battle even if you want to do something productive instead of drinking and doing drugs. I started my own company when I was 16... and my higher education (which was supposedly training me for the job I was already doing ) did nothing but try and keep me from actually getting real world experience by using real work for my education, or god forbid, intern at my own company. Not to speak of the artificia…
Come on dude, handling bureaucrats is one of the most important principles one can learn anywhere in the world. (I think this remains true for only this generation).