> Maybe you go to a school in a poor area, or with a lot of violence, or far too many students for the teachers to pay any individual attention to; or, relatedly, maybe you’re required to spend a lot of time caring for siblings or parents, working a low-skill job, or holding your family together or preserving your safety in some way. The disadvantages of this case are obvious, but there are a few advantages too; the strategy, as with everything, is to mitigate the impact of your disadvantages while using your advantages to the maximum. I don’t know enough to say what the best tactics are for these cases, but I have a few theories.

I work in exactly the type of school this describes, with exactly these kids. I’m genuinely awed by the hubris it requires to just plow ahead with advice/theories about their advantages vs. disadvantages despite having no clue whatsoever what they’re talking about. It makes me genuinely angry. This person can take their theories and shove them up their ass, until they bother spending time in my shoes and really coming face-to-face with the profound systemic and otherwise deep long-term issues kids in this environment have to confront… just to make it to tomorrow. While navigating being a fucking teenager.

> And by the time you’re in your mid-teens, you’re probably as smart as you’re going to be – not as worldly or wise as you will be later, but the raw brainpower is mostly there.

I strongly disagree with this. I don't know if it is genuinely true in a biological sense, but in my life experience it is not even close to true. There are lots of things I do that are so far beyond my abilities as a teenager. It could be due to other factors, but my gut suggests those other factors are much more important than this comment about mere brain power leads us to believe.

This is an interesting article, but I think it is heavily skewed toward the author’s goals in life and who they innately are. A guide for a more introverted person, or sports-oriented person, or highly social person would be vastly different.

In particular, I think the author makes the mistake of believing everyone must be a creator. The reality is most people aren’t good at it, don’t like it and don’t pursue it. And that is OK.

It also underestimates how young 14 really is, and how much still needs to be learned in general, not just in school but in life.

The difference between 14 and 18 is a vast chasm.

Something that bugs me today is the way music education was handled at my school, and probably other schools.

I got to a pretty good technical competence with my trumpet but at the end of the day I could only play what was on the sheets. Maybe some of that is my bad, but I switched to keys after highschool and when I show up to jam, most wind players seem like musical cripples without a lead sheet, and my fakesheets of just chord sequences and important hits are not sufficient for them.

Part of it is just the nature of the Program (wind band is a highly synchronized large group activity and you cant have too much screwing around), but I also think the nature of a wind instrument where you have limited endurance and can only play one note at a time is stunting without proper instruction. Despite having great sense of rhythm and phrasing, I don't think I really understood music until I started getting chord shapes into my hands on the piano and could noodle without worrying about spending my limited endurance.

edited to add: And to be clear I do think the music programs are Good and Valuable. It's an excellent group activity and kids will work on something for months for the big concert. I did not have any other single school project with that kind of runtime and that's a valuable experience on its own.

tldr if your kid likes music dont let them settle for just wind band. Get them a guitar or a piano too. But it's fine to just like the band for what it is, too.

"Maybe you go to a school in a poor area, or with a lot of violence ... I don’t know enough to say what the best tactics are for these cases, but I have a few theories."

This pretty much says it all right here. The author comes from an incredibly privileged background and clearly believes they are smarter than people who have spent their lives studying education.

How we educate children isn't a perfect system, but educators really are trying to teach important information to all students, including figuring out ways to reach children with very different learning styles, and are stuck balancing what's important with the crap forced on them by legislatures, parents, and (hopefully) well-meaning people like the author.

Interestingly, the advice in this article pretty much aligns with what I did, although I can't claim I did what I did with any grand strategic vision. I mostly blew off high school doing the bare minimum necessary to graduate, while spending as much time as possible in-person and online with adults who worked in tech and would mentor me, working on side projects, and volunteering on open source. I went to college, but ultimately dropped out, with my most valuable time at community college where I was able to get tech certifications as part of my classwork.

It's been more than 20 years since I left high school and I've had a very good career and life despite having no degrees and a piss-poor high school GPA, because ultimately none of that actually matters in the real world. All that matters is who you know and whether you can do the job. If you know people who will give you a chance and you can actually succeed at the job, you'll do fine. Learning actual skills that other people care about and value is far more important than being able to regurgitate bullshit for a test to get a piece of paper that's meaningless. My only real regret is that I didn't just drop out of high school and get my GED so I could focus more time on my side-projects at the time.

Pretty decent collection of reasonable advices

Especially this: Make sure you aren’t just doing a glorified version of trying to earn good grades.

So many people failed on this, mostly because of parents. Dont put effort just for the sake of grades, they are worthless.

Just small nitpick to #1

Learning just in time =/= learning via practice

Learning just in case, the opposite of JIT makes sense too, but is "unpredictably effective" - the stuff you learned may be needed and put you ahead, but may not.

I'd add something about living your own life (career, relations, hobby) instead of being "locked" by your friends. Dont go to X school just because your friends go there.

Friendships decrease/end too. You may barely see them 5 years later due to... life

Personally, I’ve always felt that schooling is a waste of time, money, and resources. The default model of civilization is that children are absent from life. This means that kids are missing out on seeing adults interact, so they mature more slowly, and it also means that their life experiences are limited to what happens in a building. Importantly, after 18 years, people in the USA leave school in debt and are no better suited to professional life than when they entered school at 4 or 5. If I could wave a wand and changing things, I’d restructure civilization to expect children to be present everywhere with their parents or other family members, learning by being part of civilization as every young adult currently does.

Decades ago, an old friend of mine had a go-getter son, who started a lawn care business when he was ~15. Son was talented, and his business grew very fast. (This was in a well-to-do suburb, before there were so many lawn care businesses. Plenty of good HS students available to hire, and the trucks were leased.)

For getting into top-ranked colleges, "the summer business I started in HS is already paying me more than your median graduate's full-time job" is a slam-dunk argument.

From the opening:

> college isn’t doing a good job of setting you up to succeed in real life

Many colleges, especially the prestigious ones, would explicitly deny that as their goal as being too vocational is dismissed for reasons of class history

> As a bare minimum, high school is supposed to give kids somewhere to go while their parents are at work and keep them from ending up pregnant, in jail, or dead

Perhaps we should start with putting some trust in the people who are close to the age of majority.

High school is not daycare in any shape or form. Highschoolers can largely fend for themselves. Of course they get ideas, but you consistently see less of that when there's trust and mutual respect in place.

I really like the author's advice to do the "real" thing instead of the "kid" thing. This is what kids in more primitive societies do... if the family is subsistence farmers, the kids are helping do economically productive work from the moment they can. Even in farming communities in the US, kids are driving tractors, fixing cars, actually doing real adult work. Important for kids in the knowledge worker segment to do the same.

Don't get me wrong, I appreciate and agree with most of what this post says in isolation, but unfortunately I think it misses the point in a broader context. This advice works when children/students have plenty of support from above. It can be counterproductive when they don't. It's preaching to the comfortable upper-middle-class choir.

These days I live in silicon valley and my wife's family sponsors a bunch of projects at the montessori school they've attended for multiple generations, but I grew up in a small town in Texas where parents (and teachers) beat children for asking questions the adults don't know how to answer. This is advice to help people who are already in a good position get into an even better position. If you're born at the bottom, using existing institutions, which are consistent and safe, to escape to a better place might be the best you can hope for. "Getting your friends together and busking" sounds great if you have money to buy instruments and free time to learn how to play them and sane supportive parents who are supportive of that, and that might make you stand out on your ivy league application if you manage to record and self-publish something. But a school marching band gives you an instrument, and schedules time for you to practice during the school day, and is a verifiable piece of experience that a state university will probably recognize even if you don't win any form of competition. So I don't consider this post to be good advice generally for the masses. And as long as bad parents are allowed to give their children bad childhoods and bad communities are allowed to treat children like property en masse, this advice will be counterproductive for a pretty significant portion of society.

Incredibly narrow minded advice for the privileged.

> Maybe you go to a school in a poor area, or with a lot of violence, or far too many students for the teachers to pay any individual attention to; or, relatedly, maybe you’re required to spend a lot of time caring for siblings or parents, working a low-skill job, or holding your family together or preserving your safety in some way.

Oh if only not being extremely privileged was so easy to undo. When you work a lot of jobs to keep your family together you don't have time for alternative highschool guides. That's why people talk about companies being founded in garages and not on the street in Chicago.

I've had students who never got a good night of sleep in their lives. Or students with abusive family.

People who don't come from privileged backgrounds also cannot see themselves doing a lot of the careers related to this guide.

> It might be easier to talk teachers into letting you off the busywork for their classes

It's exactly the opposite. The idea that something is busywork and you tell a teacher you're going to do something else instead is privilege. Those teachers they're massively overworked and underpaid. They don't have time for this nonsense.

> Your charm advantage gets increased a little bit in this situation; if you reach out to an adult doing some sort of interesting work.

Seeing the author's reaction to being contacted by a student who doesn't talk they way they do, might have a tattoo, might dress very differently, would be interesting. No. Being poor and I'm bad conditions is not charming.

It is a decent list, but it probably should be qualified that for a good portion of the population, general education is likely not a bad thing. I love that the article emphasizes practical knowledge, but as I am trying to remember my younger years, I think I rarely thought about any of it in those terms.

This is for fearless kids. Most kids, I think, would be scared to death by these suggestions. It's an embarrassment minefield. It's better to start experimenting in a more private way in places where you are clearly welcome - student competitions, newbie-friendly websites, publishing stuff quietly without advertising it, reading and lurking, submitting tiny contributions that are clearly wanted, etc.

Kids these days do not suffer from scarcity of opportunities. They suffer from lack of confidence. They need to gain confidence through little successes. Sending them out into the world doing things way above their current skill level is going to result in confidence-crushing failures.

Sorry but there is no way to min/max life. We all do not get the same amount of time and opportunities. This reads as a verbose and pompous perspective on what one should do around high school age to "succeed" and has absolutely no reflection on the people who actually succeed. A-type people will continue to overachieve and write these types of posts, but their definition of "success" is just different.

We are trying to codify this: https://puthir.org.

My son (and our first learner) launched his portfolio (real work, not fake stuff) back in December and he added his new math toy last month. We expect his portfolio (+ his experience, skill and knowledge) to grow over the next couple of years. Here is his Show HN post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36603838.

> As a bare minimum, high school is supposed to give kids somewhere to go while their parents are at work and keep them from ending up pregnant, in jail, or dead.

I'm sure the tone of the article was meant to be light-hearted + silly + joke-y overall but this is actually interesting to me... Why is that the default? Why do some (most) parents need to actively invest time/resources to make sure their kids do not end up pregnant, in jail, or dead instead of the default being "those are non-issues".

This is wonderful, and I say that as someone who did REALLY WELL in high-school. Which is to say, I have no regrets about any of my schooling (I went on to complete law school) -- but if I'd thought about things more in this way, it would have better mentally prepared me for thinking about AFTER that.

> And by the time you’re in your mid-teens, you’re probably as smart as you’re going to be – not as worldly or wise as you will be later, but the raw brainpower is mostly there.

This doesn’t ring true to me. I don’t feel like I really got to peak “raw brainpower” until about 22-23 years old.

"wear a helmet until you are comfortable with whatever wheels you are riding" sounds like a formula for "die on a bike once you've hit the dunning kruger effect"

As a 16 year old, thank you.

tl;dr - only read the intro

> by the time you’re in your mid-teens, you’re probably as smart as you’re going to be – not as worldly or wise as you will be later, but the raw brainpower is mostly there. So you’ve got a four-year chunk during which you’re smart enough to learn anything a novice adult version of you could;

1. This presuppoess that "smart" is the essential ingredient for success. How about maturity/self-discipline? There is no way a 14 year old has the maturity of an 18 year old to deal with learning or doing difficult things.

2. IME a very significant problem that teens have learning is the "fixed mindset". When they are unable to do something right away, especially if they observe their peers can, most don't know how to put in the work to improve. In fact, they behave as if they cannot improve. Concealing one's inability to do something is very common.

The author does bring this up in "4F" but I don't feel like it addresses the problem very well. It postulates an ideal student who will connect with someone who is more motivated than them, but then not just ride their coattails. I don't even see that in the business world.

Fluid intelligence drops with age:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4906299/

You weren't an idiot as a teenager. You were just uneducated and inexperienced.

Personally, my decaying mental performance over the years is almost palpable. I feel like I am half-dead now compared to who I was 20 years ago. Sure I was nuts due to the powerful emotions, but that just means I was alive, not a talking corpse that I am now.

Yes, the scientific consensus right now is that the prefrontal cortex does not generally finish developing until the mid to late 20s, and this is the main locus of executive functioning. Perhaps according to some very narrow definition of “raw brain power” one could say, as TFA does, that this is all done in one’s teens - there seems to be consensus that IQ peaks around 19-20, though even short term memory (which I think would be unambiguously classed amongst “raw brain power”) is thought to peak in the mid 20s.

It seems to overly intellectualize a problem that has a whole spectrum of factors outside of being "smart". Long term thinking, risk/reward, motivations, emotions, hormones, all that stuff is either first forming or in total chaos and it's in no way as simple as smarting your way out of it.

AFAIK the human brain matures around mid to late twenties, so you'd probably be right about this from a biological sense too

There's no sense in rationalizing with folks who want to quantify intelligence in the first place. They're chasing statistical phantoms. Even if we take a generous view of what they said and interpret it to mean that brain development finalizes in the mid-teens, it's still a completely myopic view of what it means to be "smart."

Author is just another grifter peddling pop-psychology/bro-science nonsense like thousands and thousands of others, since it generates like, views and even conversation (like at HN).

None of it is worth paying attention to.

Yeah my teenage self was an idiot, there's no nice way to put it.

Your post reminded me of this article from almost a decade ago. Using James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem as a great example:

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/02/big-break...

I got a lot better at learning new material during my time in college. Did I get any smarter? Nope. Simply put, I learned how to learn.

It's analogous to athletics. Sure, you can have a talent for running. But you're not going to win races unless you train.

A mind is plastic, adaptable, and hence can be trained.

IQ studies show IQ caps at 25, so... yeah no remotely close.

commitment, leverage, delegation and compounding are hard to understand at that age or at least follow thru on

> I got to a pretty good technical competence with my trumpet but at the end of the day I could only play what was on the sheets.

This is pretty much how music is taught to all students learning 'classical' and was my experience as well. Most never really learn anything about music at a fundamental level, and can even have an entire career in the classical world not really knowing anything about what's going on in the music. Random story, but one night here in NYC I got asked by someone to bring out a visiting musician from Spain to hear some music, who had been playing in a major symphony there since the 80s (can't remember if it was Barcelona Symphony or Spanish National Orchestra). Brought him to Smalls in the West Village to catch whoever was playing that night. He was really impressed, kept on leaning over asking "how is that piano player doing that with no sheet music???". It's just not part of a regular classical musician's training, unless they're working to be a composer as well.

But back to your point, I felt the same way with music in my schools growing up. No one ever taught you how to actually play music, they just gave you sheet music and said "play this". It wasn't until much later that I started working with a jazz teacher privately that I got introduced to all the chords, scales/modes, and theories that'd you need to improvise or play music with others. Honestly, I probably would have been better off in high school if someone had told me to drop music classes altogether, handed me a bass or guitar or synth, and said go have fun with a few friends in a garage.

> I got to a pretty good technical competence with my trumpet but at the end of the day I could only play what was on the sheets.

Without commenting on the dire state of music (and arts) education in the schools, the same is true of all subjects. Mathematics is mostly taught as syntactic manipulation; physics as memorizing a bunch of "laws" and doing "experiments" that have a right or wrong answer (chemistry and biology are even worse in this regard) and so on. Even literature and history are not taught as an exploration and inquiry of possible themes but as structured topics (often one per book) that you learn as being "right" or "wrong".

The emphasis on testing, and in particular standardized testing, has made this worse, since teachers who don't "teach to the test" are often penalized.

The problem is time. Getting 140+ people to learn their instruments is hard enough, mixing in Music theory is just gonna add to the frustration, for which most of the band will never need to know.

That even holds true for everything but the smallest of jazz combos. Could you imagine listening to a group of 20 musicians all playing from Fake Books? It would be a mess of noise.

Music education got cut entirely in the East Bay public school district my kids attended. Had to move out of state.

Couldn't agree more. I think the issue is that school budgets are limited and music programs are perennially on the chopping block because they are among the most expensive and are seen as the least critical to education. The band directors fall into a cycle of needing to justify the investment by getting the kids to play the most impressive piece that they are capable of playing, even if the kids learn absolutely nothing along the way.

And have you ever tried to get 50 kids to do the same thing for five minutes? Even if that thing is sitting still, it's virtually impossible. If it's playing a song at the limit of their musical ability? You'd have a better time swallowing a shovel.

For what it's worth, contra to the other agreeing comments, this didn't happen to me. I'm sure this is all locally contingent upon an instructor with the ability and interest, but we had a jazz band I was a part of in middle school (in LA County early 90s) and we very much learned to compose and play music that was not written down on a sheet. I don't know that that kind of thing was feasible for the larger concert band, which had like 140 kids or something and one teacher.

I also played brass, for what it's worth, but never felt limited by breath endurance. I was a ~5:00 mile runner as a 12 year-old, though.

This reads to me like wanting to learn sports, and then disliking that your soccer instructor didn't teach you how to throw a ball. There's a lot you can learn about music in the classical framework, but the focus there is certainly not improvisation based on chord sheets. Generally learning about improvisation in a high school context would happen in jazz band, although in my experience lots of people in jazz band (including myself) are not too interested in improvisation either. A separate music theory class might also help although dedicated classes for that are probably even less common than having a jazz band, although if a student is particularly motivated and interested and the school is at all flexible, you can sometimes work out a deal with the band teacher to do a special run of such a class. Also music theory is just theory, it's totally insufficient without also actually practicing improv as doing it in real-time is a much harder challenge.

I wouldn't doubt if learning guitar or piano would help with this aspect, but I know plenty of people who learned it just fine on wind instrument if they want to. It's not too surprising especially for those learning wind instruments - taking a solo in high school is already scary for a lot of people, and even more so when they don't even have music to play or practice ahead of time. Also there is admittedly probably a higher barrier of entry to improv on wind instruments so a lot of the focus necessarily has to be on achieving a baseline technical proficiency before it even makes sense to think about improv (if they don't put in the prerequisite technical work, it would be hard to move to improv). For example, with guitar or piano, right off the bat I can play any note in tune and sound at least halfway okay. On a wind instrument, even playing the most basic note will sound quite bad at first, and generally the range of frequency is limited for beginners and learning to extend it can take many years. Playing in tune likewise takes years.

Anyway, all that said, I entirely agree, if someone really likes music, it's hard to go wrong with also learning guitar or piano. Piano in particular, as one of the most versatile instruments, used in so many genres, and can help with learning fundamental theory, composition, and even gives a very good sense of rhythm as the two hands have to act independent of each other in a way that other instruments normally don't have to. If I had to go back and learn a different instrument, piano would be a likely candidate.

Being in Band, one learns Music; being in a band, one learns music. The attrition rate of band students in extracurricular or post-high-school musical endeavors is a bit disappointing. It is similar to the kids forced through piano lessons who quit whenever they have a chance.

My experience playing the clarinet was the same as yours.

At least in public schools we've been teaching people how to read incorrectly for decades because of a trend out of New York that got pushed on everybody else

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/22/us/reading-teaching-curri...

https://archive.is/CxBcj

https://www.thecity.nyc/2023/2/14/23598696/nyc-teachers-coll...

Mississippi, Louisiana, and Alabama have went from laughing stocks to already middle of the pack nationally by dumping the new system and going back to phonics

https://apnews.com/article/reading-scores-phonics-mississipp...

If the "people who have spent their lives studying education" are using learning styles it isn't hard to be smarter than them, it has been roundly debunked.

https://www.educationnext.org/stubborn-myth-learning-styles-...

> educators really are trying to teach important information to all students, including figuring out ways to reach children with very different learning styles,

the rational adult in me want to to believe you and hoping the current crop of teachers really have started changing it up.

the part of me that still remembers what school was actually like would vehemently disagree. it took 8 years of deprogramming AFTER highschool before I really started to get my shit together and start to work on a path to success.

Don’t agree, I think it’s a very good list of well intentioned advice.

Eg try to become an apprentice to someone talented. This would indeed be extremely valuable to anyone trying to learn a skill. The author then goes to great lengths giving advice on how to land a position like that when young.

Yes, don't we all hate it when people come into our job and tell us how to do it?

Parents love to think that because they have had one child (or maybe a couple), they know how to educate children writ large. Compounding that, most people went through the education system as students, so they believe they have insider knowledge as to how the system works. Usually their advice on how to fix the system is geared toward fixing the frustrations they personally felt as a student.

In reality, most people are only exposed to the education system as consumers, and therefore know next to nothing about how it actually works. Doesn't stop them from spouting off what they think they know on internet forums and blogs though. They enjoy pointing out what they see as problems, and are happy to offer quick fixes born in ignorance that have either already been tried and don't work, or don't solve the problem for reasons obvious to people currently working on it. Or better yet, the supposed problem isn't one at all, but a boogeyman that politicians are currently pushing to scare voters.

If you want to fix education, get into the mix and actually help. Sitting on the sidelines complaining isn't helping anyone. If your perspective about the education system is along the lines of "people who can't, teach", as seems to be in vogue these days, then you're really part of the problem.

Education majors in college have some of the lowest IQs.

See https://thetab.com/us/2017/04/10/which-major-has-highest-iq-...

or they're just being honest, it was a nicely written piece and no one knows everything

educators are garbage because they don't work empirically, they experiment on kids and the experiments have been failing since the 60s, causing mass amounts of fatherlessness but none of them are even willing to see themselves as the issue because no snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible

Life long educators are suddenly teaching boys can be girls in kindergarten. They are a joke.

>Dont put effort just for the sake of grades, they are worthless.

They aren't worthless.

Grades make it easier and cheaper for you to go to college. Good grades in college make it far, far easier to get jobs and can get you in the door to significantly better and higher paying jobs or grad school.

So not worthless, just not the be all and end all.

> Dont put effort just for the sake of grades, they are worthless.

I have this archetype which I constructed over the years, that I named "34-year-old Patrice".

By just looking at him, you wouldn't be able to tell that 34yo Patrice dropped out of high school, took some odd jobs in his youth which eventually got him into trouble, so he did time. At age 26 he got out and started turning his life around and despite all this hardship is currently a functional member of society and in some regards even more successful than his peers.

Point being, life is more complex than just taking and passing tests. I feel like more teenagers should be told this as early as possible.

"Never let schooling interfere with your education"? That's how I always approached it.

One of my middle school teachers observed with chagrin that I would rush my classwork, accepting a high B or low A when they were sure I could have gotten a 100% if I had "tried", so that I could go back to reading my book. Unfortunately, there was no reward for a 90 vs a 100 (beyond buffer to your overall grade being an A), so I just did as little as possible to get the maximum reward out of the system, and then went back to doing what I liked to do - learning.

It's also a bit funny to me that the program that was ostensibly supposed to support kids like me - "Future Problem Solvers" if I recall the name right - rejected me because they test they administered to determine if I should be invited was extremely weird to me - I mostly remember it asking me to, given a set of random lines, draw a picture using them. I think I mostly turned them into smiley faces because I was bored and confused by what they wanted. I'm sure, in retrospect, that they wanted me to show creativity in making interesting art out of the "constraints" of the lines. But alas, I just wanted to get back to reading what (given my age) was probably a book about space or a CS Lewis book or something. My best friend got in, and he ended up dropping out of college after 2 semesters of drinking, so I guess maybe it wasn't a very good program anyway.

> Learning just in case, the opposite of JIT makes sense too, but is "unpredictably effective" - the stuff you learned may be needed and put you ahead, but may not.

This is also a place to tailor things. If you are particularly good at learning ahead of time, then you can learn a lot of things "just in case" at a low cost, increasing the chances that something you learned is useful.

If you aren't especially good at it, then you're going to have much lower chances and JIT learning makes sense for all the reasons in TFA

> Dont put effort just for the sake of grades, they are worthless.

I'd like everyone who makes this claim to try submitting resumes of a fresh college graduate with a low C average to a dozen companies and see if even a single one of them calls back.

Grades are a means to an end, which is different than being worthless.

My parents do not speak fluent English, they have zero grasp of the sciences or even basic math (they still have trouble grasping percentages and fractions), and are very susceptible to scams by cult leaders from their country of origin. Same for almost all of my aunts and uncles, who lives hundreds or thousands of miles away.

I would have been doomed without an external setting where I got to interact with much more qualified people.

Would that not utterly stratify social classes? Upward social mobility would be near impossible if not for general education? Children would have no approaches other than what their family already has access to. The son of a smith becomes a smith, the son of a carpenter becomes a carpenter, the son of a lawyer becomes a lawyer and so on.

And schools also function in part as day care. Parents can devote hours of the day to work, focused and without worry for their child. If all parents had to bring their children to work, would that not diminish their ability to work?

Can an electrician focus on his work when a young child is with him? How can he teach the child the theory of electrophysics that is necessary to understand if one is to become an electrician? Do others at the site watch the children and explain the theory? Would you then not end up with teachers again?

Edit: This is also a rather amerocentric take. What of other countries educational systems where you can choose more directional high schools. Where the final year of highschool IS an apprenticeship in some vocation? Where you leave school, with no debt and with experience on the job. And all the countries where education is free. Countries where relevant experience is a part of the degree? Where courses in teamwork, leadership and other skills are a part of higher education? To discard educational systems because of the defects of a single country's defects seems poorly thought out.

Isn't this how we end up with a lineage of uneducated blacksmiths? I am from a rural town focused on oil and gas and some agriculture. There were no software developers were I was from and the internet was only dial-up before I left. A lack of schooling would see me in a O&G work camp right now because I would have been exposed to nothing else.

> The default model of civilization is that children are absent from life.

There's nothing "default" about Civilization, which entailed intentional centralization and creation of bureaucracy.

We don't live in a society where 80% of people farm shitty land to survive, and no one of sound mind wants to turn back that dial. We're not bringing our kids to roam sheepishly around oil rigs, mines, labs, sales floors, whatever.

I think everyone has an opinion on how education could improve, but there's no superior (or viable) substitute for it at scale.

Notwithstanding, this isn't zero sum in the first place: parents can teach their kid at leisure, and they do. They expose them to their interests and their work, to some extent.

And lastly, there's no such thing as "absent from life". Even if this is only meant to convey the idea that schooling shelters kids away from any and all interesting things in society, this is untrue (and by extension, it would suggest that you're "absent from life" if your shit job doesn't meet some arbitrary criteria, or otherwise that your shit job is "full of life" but school isn't).

> Importantly, after 18 years, people in the USA leave school in debt and are no better suited to professional life than when they entered school at 4 or 5.

I'm not aware of anyone in the US going into to debt for school before the age of 18.

Are you confusing the free public education that's offered throughout the US with the optional college education that some, though definitely not most, take out loans to attend?

Thats crazy imo

You are limited to your sorroundings with less ways to move up due to lack of awarness

I bet it would increase inequality hard

I love this idea. It's done a teeny tiny bit in the form of work experience, but actually we should make a scheme where workplaces get some kind of incentive to let the kids come and hang around, maybe even do some work depending on what it is.

I would sprinkle this around the school calendar so that you had a few weeks a year where you could sit at various places of work and see what was going on, instead of little weeklong academic breaks plus a mega long summer holiday. Not everyone loves the academic side of things and this could be a good break, plus it might provide some motivation for the question of "why am I learning this" that everyone has at various points in their education.

I’m confused. Are you suggesting children should be working?

> For getting into top-ranked colleges, "the summer business I started in HS is already paying me more than your median graduate's full-time job" is a slam-dunk argument.

No. It's really not. As someone who has been involved in the system that admits you to top ranked universities and whose summer hustle also paid well in highschool. This is not a slam dunk. It's one small piece. And it could easily backfire and be a negative depending on how you write it. For example by writing it as if it's a slam dunk.

These sort of overt economic arguments tend to go over very poorly.

Right after getting his master's degree my friend's father stood before a choice: accept a desk job paying X a month, or make X per job installing and repairing A/C units.

That MSc at least helped tremendously with branding - people could lay their trust in that when he was still starting out.

I disagree. I think that what college offers is more than an increase in salary. For hyperbole’s sake, you could use the argument of ‘my trust fund is already paying me more than your median graduate’s full-time job’ and most would roll their eyes at such a statement.

This seems to be another strong argument for social class being a huge player in determining your success - as you say it was a well-to-do suburb. Good on them for taking advantage of the opportunity, but just as vitally the opportunity was there to take.

Hi, author of the post here - thanks for chiming in! Was hoping to hear from someone who had worked in or gone to a school like this. This part of the essay was admittedly the most guesswork-heavy; I included it because that seemed better than the alternative of not mentioning economic disparities at all, or of telling kids at poor schools they're resigned to doom.

I'm guessing you're a teacher? If so, I'd be curious to hear more about your experience and thoughts on what strategies work best for teenagers in economically/socially/geographically disadvantaged situations. Do you follow the post-school life trajectories of any former students? Do any manage to achieve upward mobility (this could look like the "homeless to Harvard" human interest story you hear every year, but it could also look like someone who goes from a childhood of abuse or abject poverty to a relatively stable blue-collar job and is safer and happier as an adult than as a child)? What advice would you give to a fourteen-year-old student?

This isn't to say that there aren't massive obstacles in their way (especially for the ones who have to devote all their time to securing basic needs like food/shelter/sleep), or that their circumstances are their fault, or that systemic change wouldn't be a more powerful lever. What I'm wondering is, assuming you're a kid in this situation and you don't have a hand on the lever of institutional power, is there anything you can do beyond the standard "stay in school" advice to improve your circumstances, even if the improvement is just from "very bad" to "kind of bad"?

> People who don't come from privileged backgrounds also cannot see themselves doing a lot of the careers related to this guide.

What careers do the students you know typically aspire to? Or are they usually resigned to the prospect of an unfulfilling job?

My kids aren’t top students at all. They both have learning disabilities. My son is highly sports oriented, my daughter is very musical. They both have trouble with traditional subjects.

They both got “B”s in public school, despite their standardized tests showing them in the 15-20th percentile.

They both struggled with their knowledge deficit transitioning into the private school.

They are doing very well now. Not straight A’s, but they are learning what they need to learn and flourishing as people.

I have seen this repeated for many other families. A lot of public schools are simply awful.

It's also kind of dangerous though, there's a reason these people need to be certified. Dealing with a 5V breadboard? Yeah I'm game. Disassembling the housing of something to figure out which part needs to be greased or came loose? Yeah sure. My computer science training has prepared me to think outside the box and solve novel problems.

But if it's got 240V mains going through it, I'm not going to touch it. I like how my EKG currently looks and want it to stay that way. Why are humans made out of such a conductive material again? My CS degree didn't do anything to help me here beyond my biology class giving me an appreciation for how much meat-circuitry my body has that relies on fractions of a single volt to operate my vital organs.

A central AC compressor capacitor is plug and play.

https://www.ferguson.com/product/mars-usa-455-mfd-440370v-du...

Turn off circuit breaker, unscrew ~4 screws on the cover of the compressor unit, take a picture of how old one is connected, unplug it, connect new one matching up the symbols or letters, confirm with the picture you took, screw the cover back on, and switch the circuit breaker back on.

Watch any of the available 5,000 YouTube videos if unsure.

Well, the hard part is finding that capacitor. I try to repair almost everything and very rarely it is possible to find the damaged component without extremely specialized skills. The best you can hope for is that someone else has done the work for you and posted it in a forum. Even then it is often the power supply that goes first and those parts are dangerous to work with.