In backward nations, youths work, Bryan Caplan notes (in The Case Against Education), while in advanced nations, youths study:
As civilization advances, the young spend ever more years sequestered from paid employment. The modern fear is that work might interfere with school, never that school might interfere with work. These rules are so ingrained they seem like laws of nature.
The logic is elusive. As society evolves, teaching the young different occupations is common sense. Teaching them no occupations and hoping they adapt to the job market after graduation is not. It doesn’t matter how futuristic our society becomes. Making kids study irrelevant material for a decade-plus is timelessly dysfunctional.
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Sticking with the classic curriculum instead of trying to forecast the job market is looking for your keys under the streetlight because it’s brighter there. Sure, teach the genuinely general skills: reading, writing, math. But otherwise, schools should make educated guesses about future career opportunities, measure students’ aptitudes, then expose them to plausible occupations.
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Visualize a world where 16-year-olds have real job skills and earn enough to provide for themselves. Visualize a world where academically uninclined preteens look up to apprentices instead of delinquents. Visualize a world where students find their lessons either practical or interesting.
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Instead of fearing a dystopian future, we should gawk at our dystopian present. In modern societies, achievement-oriented kids spend almost two decades in school. Most find the curriculum dreadfully dull. During this drawn-out ordeal, students are either poor or financially dependent on their parents. When they finally join the “real world,” graduates apply only a sliver of what they studied.