Earlier quoted context omitted.
> They can spend time learning how to critically analyze text or how to learn choreography for a musical. But to what end? There is zero value to many of these kids in learning to do these things. Again, we're pulling from a playbook on how to live a successful life that is decades out of date. A kid who has a potentially successful side hustle should be encouraged to follow it. And besides, we're only talking about…
There is a lot of value, it's just that children are very bad at estimating value. That's why they'd rather spend all their time eating candy and going to the skate park - they're children. Apparently some adults see it that way, too, which is shocking to me. Again, kids do not need to speedrun being cogs in the machines. Could SOME of them hypothetically become millionaires like 5 years earlier? I mean... I guess? B…
It's not about speedrunning being cogs in the machine, its about finding their place in a world where nothing is guaranteed and there is no longer a "golden path" to a happy middle class life. Forcing everyone down the golden path that is guaranteed to not work for some sizeable percentage of kids is moral disaster. But it makes some of us adults feel good, so we encourage it regardless of the outcome.
>The reality is 99.9999% of people are destined for the same thing: a normal career, with a normal salary.
Of course. My argument is not that some small number of people will miss out on being millionaires. The argument is that parents don't know what the future looks like, yet they insist on forcing their children down paths that resemble their own success stories regardless of how much society has changed in the intervening decades. It's asinine.
>Sure. For the majority of people, education leads to higher lifetime income, and it's not even close. We have the statistics on this. We don't know ahead of time which one someone will be. So, we should optimize for the best odds.
It is exactly this thinking that has so utterly distorted the education market that it's now mostly worthless as a signal. Yes, high school education correlates with some amount of success. College education correlates with a lot more success. But it's not about having the piece of paper, it's about what the piece of paper signals about the person. But degrees now have little value as such signals because we've engineered society so that far more people go to college and get a degree, or graduate high school than are suited to it. To accomplish this we've had to dumb down both college and high school. We've created an education arms race where we need increasing years of education just to signal the same quality that many fewer years signaled in the past. We've done large scale damage to students and society with the kind of thinking you're exhibiting here.
>What actually doesn't get enough mention are the people who are forced into lifetime poverty because they never graduated high school and are therefore essentially unemployable.
Are they unemployable because they didn't graduate high school, or are they unemployable because they don't have the traits of someone who graduated high school? What's stopping them from getting a GED? The high school degree has little causal relevance here.