I know pretty solidly that society should not reinstate child labour. So it totally depends how they are supposed to spend their days then. The trivial option of just keeping child labour forbidden and keeping them loose is a surprisingly strong candidate compared to keeping them in school. But I would expect a real option to have some structures present.
Adults would be a lot more simpler as the time that childhood has time to make its magic would be shorter. More labour supply, lower job complexity and blander humans. I am not super confident with the specifics but quite certain that childhood is doing important effects.
How is this any different from school, except that you could get paid rather than your parents losing money to pay the teachers? There are many valid arguments against child labor (though also many valid arguments that the child should be allowed to decide for themselves), but nearly all of them apply to schooling as well. School eliminates the time of childhood magic, actively makes it harder to be curious (many jobs would not have this effect) and you don’t even get paid.
If “being paid” means not only that children get money, but also that the people paying them are motivated by profit, that creates bad incentives on the part of those people. If children are paid but parents still have control over the children and the money, that creates bad incentives for the parents.
To be clear, there are plenty of good reasons why one might not want children to work. You might want them to be able to enjoy childhood without the burden of a job, you might want them to focus on learning to be more productive later. But “the people paying them are motivated by profit” is equally true of adult jobs.
Oh right, the whole world doesn’t have education as a right.
It does apply also to start of school. It is about developmentally appropriate environments. Schools are supposed to be where that can be a high objective. Keeping up skill development in work is rather hit and miss and can be quite narrow for profitability increasement.
That both destroy magic doesn’t mean the destruction is it to the same degree. And school has its own magic. Jobs tend to have way less magic of their own.
“Oh right, the whole world doesn’t have education as a right.”
Are you trying to argue from existing law to moral or practical value? That would be easier if the whole world hadn’t had slavery and monarchy until fairly recently.
“That both destroy magic doesn’t mean the destruction is it to the same degree.”
That’s a good point. But jobs ideally produce value. School often doesn’t, and “learning” in a toxic setting specifically makes it harder to learn later. That’s a harm specific to school; most jobs do not have it.
“And school has its own magic. Jobs tend to have way less magic of their own.”
I’m glad it was magical for you. That’s far from universal. The largest problem with schooling is the compulsion. If you enjoyed it or benefited from it, well and good. But those who didn’t should not have been forced into it. The alternative to compulsory schooling doesn’t have to be no option to go, it can be letting people choose.
Oh right, the whole world doesn’t have education as a right.
Are you trying to argue from existing law to moral or practical value? That would be easier if the whole world hadn’t had slavery and monarchy until fairly recently.
My tone is bad and inappropriate especially in this contex. What I actually mean or should have meant is that “parents lose money” is not really descriptive of my local reality and I have trouble taking on that perspective. Trying to imagine a counterfactual what would have needed to be different to not have universal education starts to baffle me a little. My brains come up with questions like “Do people in this world have to pay the police if they call them to protect from gunmen?” which are more obviously out of touch what I know to be the case. The money loss is a facet of some corners of reality. I am familiar with the organization where teachers are first accountable to society or state rather than accountable through parents. So “What are we paying you for?” has two sides to it that I am extremely unfamiliar with.
What I am used to is that the public option is mostly appropriate, so children and parents are not constantly trying to escape it. Keeping “study duty” firm has for me the most important role that a parent while having large custodial rights may not fail to educate their kid. Alternative venues are fine but they can’t be shambles, they must be worthy of the dignity of the progeny of civilization (so need to pass goverment checks). So if private schools are a large part of the equation why are not parents using the customisability if they are going the hard route anyway? If students are suffering why are the parents not advocating for their kids needs? Is it because the solutions exist but are paywalled and some that need them can not get them? How come the public options gets a pass for maleducating a significant stream of citizens? Is this some kind of thing where the most prestigious places are prestigious because they are harsh (and failures are because of students and not schools) and thus misery is a sign of status?
But jobs ideally produce value. School often doesn’t,
The word “value” has so different meaning in job context and school context that I am not confident on which idea this expresses and can’t really follow.
In general I am very interested in finding out and rooting out bad schooling whereever it might be. But I think it might be appropriate to talk about specific schoolings rather than the abstract idea of schooling in general.
On the “exploration—exploitation” scale, schools at least try to teach you, even if not very efficiently. Jobs typically do not try at all… and when they try, it is usually very narrow, the thing you will immediately need for your work.
(“But you learn by doing”, yes, but only a very narrow selection of things. If you need to learn too much, it is typically more effective for the company to hire someone else for that job.)
In school there is more slack; you can spend a lot of time daydreaming, you finish earlier, you have summer holidays. At work you get responsibilities, unrealistic deadlines, for many people it is difficult to stop thinking about their job when the shift ends.
So, in some sense, both school and work suck in similar ways, but school sucks relatively less. Doesn’t pay you, though. But if you consider the market value of what a small child would produce, it is peanuts.
For more precise discussion, we would need to be more specific. Are we talking about jobs for 6 years olds, 10 years olds, 14 years olds? Full time or part time? What is the consequence of quitting the job or getting fired?
The “childhood magic” from my perspective means, importantly, not being responsible for paying the mortgage or making enough money to buy food. As long as that is your parents’ responsibility, and you are allowed to completely ignore this, you are mentally a child. When the metaphorical gun is put to your temple, adulthood begins.
I am curious where you went to school. That was not my experience, and I was in an unusually good school district by American standards. Some of my friends had noticeably worse experiences than I did. Are you conflating the nominal purpose of a school with its real-world actions? Alternatively, did you go through a good enough school system that it might be worth replacing a great many existing “educational” systems with yours as a stopgap along the way to school abolition?
“Jobs typically do not try at all… and when they try, it is usually very narrow, the thing you will immediately need for your work.”
Exactly! Surely that is precisely how it ought to be? Forced learning is a difficult thing to justify, and when a job teaches you something, it is incentivized to help you learn it in short order. Note that I am not calling for removing the option to learn and/or take classes, just removing the requirement. Likewise I am not calling for the forced imposition of child labor, just wondering if children who want to work should have the right, and questioning the idea that it’s so much worse than forced schooling when by many metrics it’s better.
“In school there is more slack; you can spend a lot of time daydreaming, you finish earlier, you have summer holidays. At work you get responsibilities, unrealistic deadlines, for many people it is difficult to stop thinking about their job when the shift ends.” This is true, and a fair point. But a situation that creates little to no to negative value is bad, even if there’s enough slack to make it less bad than it could conceivably be. And a situation that creates meaningful economic value is at least potentially worthwhile (again, I suspect a minority of children would choose to work, and none of them should be forced to. But the option should potentially exist, and morally it’s plausibly better than an “education” that tends not to be actually educational.)
“The “childhood magic” from my perspective means, importantly, not being responsible for paying the mortgage or making enough money to buy food. As long as that is your parents’ responsibility, and you are allowed to completely ignore this, you are mentally a child. When the metaphorical gun is put to your temple, adulthood begins.”
Alright. But A: That can coexist with working (maybe you keep all your money and let your parents worry about the mortgage and grocery budget) and B: there are people placed under incredible stress to perform in school, sometimes much greater than the stress that most adults face. You can argue that it shouldn’t be as stressful, given that even total failure is unlikely to starve you, but in practice it often is.
Back then it was called Czechoslovakia. I am puzzled about the disagreement votes, given that I have hedged my statement as “try to teach you, even if not very efficiently”. Not sure how people do things on the other side of the planet, but I imagine that there are these things called textbooks, which are full of information, and they at least make you read them. I am not saying that the information is especially useful, or especially well explained; just that it is there, and the school exposes you to it.
There were subjects that I hated, mostly history. That one was taught literally as a list of facts that I considered utterly irrelevant—I couldn’t care less about what year exactly which king was born, or what year exactly was a battle that happened centuries ago. There were subjects that I would have learned on my own anyway, especially math and computer science. A subject where the school provided the most added value for me, was probably chemistry. Explained sufficiently well that some information stuck in my brain, and yet not something I would have studied on my own.
I suspect a minority of children would choose to work, and none of them should be forced to
Okay then.
there are people placed under incredible stress to perform in school, sometimes much greater than the stress that most adults face. You can argue that it shouldn’t be as stressful, given that even total failure is unlikely to starve you, but in practice it often is.
Correct.
Perhaps this is another case of what I call “America succeeds to go to all extremes simultaneously”. Excellent universities, dystopian elementary and high schools. In Eastern Europe things are more… mediocre, at both extremes. The universities are meh, but the elementary schools are kinda okay, mostly. Or maybe one of us generalizes too much from personal experience. It would be interesting to make a survey (not limited to the rationalist community).
I was seriously considering the possibility of homeschooling my children, but it turned out that my daughter enjoys school (she is currently in 2nd grade), so I am like: “well, if there is no problem, I do not need to solve it”. Of course, enjoying and learning new things are not the same; she probably likes the fact that she is one of the best in the classroom. Then she does Khan Academy and Duolingo at home. That doesn’t really seem like an argument in favor of the system… unless the point is that she has enough time and energy left to pursue her own goals. (I am quite tired when I get home from work.)
Dunno, maybe it’s like the mass transit. Some places give up on the idea completely, and then it becomes really bad. Other places make it a priority, and then it is not necessarily great, but it is okay. There might literally be two attractors; either the idea of school is high-status or low-status, and that determines whether the teachers love or hate their jobs, etc.
Strongly upvoted for clarification and much greater plausibility given that clarification.
“Back then it was called Czechoslovakia. I am puzzled about the disagreement votes, given that I have hedged my statement as “try to teach you, even if not very efficiently”. Not sure how people do things on the other side of the planet, but I imagine that there are these things called textbooks, which are full of information, and they at least make you read them. I am not saying that the information is especially useful, or especially well explained; just that it is there, and the school exposes you to it.”
Typically the material covered in a given day was a repeat, nearly word for word, of the previous day’s lecture, or the previous month’s. Seventh grade mathematics spent over a month on adding negative numbers, despite the fact that pretty much everyone already knew how to, and that if someone had somehow managed to avoid understanding how despite the same lecture being given every day, presumably they would need some other method of instruction than repeating it again. While this could, perhaps, be considered trying to teach a few days’ worth of material over months and years, that is so far from what any sane person would do if they actually wanted students to learn that I think it’s fair to disagree with saying that American schools aim to teach. If the Czechoslovakian system was better, well and good. I can actually believe that; for all the faults of the Eastern Bloc, it was reportedly quite good at education, and I learned a decent amount studying on my own from an excellent Russian textbook called алгебра и начало анализа.
There were textbooks, but they never made us read them. We typically did not have time to do so, with study time instead going to the aforementioned mostly-useless lectures and equally repetitive and useless homework.
“There were subjects that I hated, mostly history. That one was taught literally as a list of facts that I considered utterly irrelevant—I couldn’t care less about what year exactly which king was born, or what year exactly was a battle that happened centuries ago. There were subjects that I would have learned on my own anyway, especially math and computer science. A subject where the school provided the most added value for me, was probably chemistry. Explained sufficiently well that some information stuck in my brain, and yet not something I would have studied on my own.”
Most of this seems like a good case against schooling. Your experience with chemistry is a fair point, but how much value have you gotten out of your chemistry knowledge, and if the answer is a lot, due to a job or the like, wouldn’t you have studied it when you needed it? If the answer is that you never needed it for work, yet are much happier for the sheer beauty of the knowledge (admittedly plausible; there are many things in life that may not be immediately necessary to know, but are still incredibly fun to understand), and would never have studied it unless forced, that is a valid point in favor of compulsory schooling. I submit that it is outweighed by all the downsides, but that is a valid point. At a minimum we can agree that the American schooling system ought to be more like the Czechoslovakian one.
“Perhaps this is another case of what I call “America succeeds to go to all extremes simultaneously”. Excellent universities, dystopian elementary and high schools. In Eastern Europe things are more… mediocre, at both extremes. The universities are meh, but the elementary schools are kinda okay, mostly. Or maybe one of us generalizes too much from personal experience. It would be interesting to make a survey (not limited to the rationalist community).”
That is a good point, and quite plausible. To be perfectly honest, I have a hard time imagining a non-dystopian elementary or high school; the concept sounds like a non-dystopian prison sentence. It is very interesting to talk to someone who apparently went through a plausibly non-evil school system.
“I was seriously considering the possibility of homeschooling my children, but it turned out that my daughter enjoys school (she is currently in 2nd grade), so I am like: “well, if there is no problem, I do not need to solve it”. Of course, enjoying and learning new things are not the same; she probably likes the fact that she is one of the best in the classroom. Then she does Khan Academy and Duolingo at home. That doesn’t really seem like an argument in favor of the system… unless the point is that she has enough time and energy left to pursue her own goals. (I am quite tired when I get home from work.)”
If she enjoys it, fair enough, though I would strongly recommend keeping an eye out for the possibility that it’s a poor use of her time or may become so, even if she’s happy so far. But if she’s learning (and Khan Academy and Duolingo will see to it that she is) and happy, it sounds like things are going well.
“Dunno, maybe it’s like the mass transit. Some places give up on the idea completely, and then it becomes really bad. Other places make it a priority, and then it is not necessarily great, but it is okay. There might literally be two attractors; either the idea of school is high-status or low-status, and that determines whether the teachers love or hate their jobs, etc.”
That is an interesting idea. It seems implausible that public school could have reasonable incentives, given the inherent isolation of government programs from market forces and meaningful feedback. However the existence of a high status equilibrium for teachers resulting in at least a strikingly less horrific system is possible, and might explain why the Czechoslovakian educational system was apparently much better.
I would also like to thank you for the very polite tone of your reply. I am also trying to be polite and respectful, but this is enough of a touchy subject for me due to how horrific my schooling was that my previous comment held more than a little anger. Despite this you responded extremely well.
There were textbooks, but they never made us read them.
Well, what you describe is much worse than I imagined… and I still have a problem imagining that this is a typical American school experience. No offense, but I would need more people to confirm this, before I update on American education in general.
I have often heard that American schools are “teaching to the test”. Would you agree with that statement? If yes, how does that square with… not even reading the textbooks, and adding negative numbers in seventh grade? Were the seventh grade tests about adding negative numbers?
On the other hand, I have also heard that as a consequence of “No Child Left Behind”, teachers are focusing on the students that perform worst. So, maybe the least performing student in your seventh grade had a problem with adding negative numbers? That would kinda explain.
Or do the both things combined together mean that American teachers are “teaching the worst performing student to the test”? Sad, but possible, given the incentives. (“No Child Left Behind” was replaced in 2015 by a new law, hopefully better.)
If the answer is that you never needed it for work, yet are much happier for the sheer beauty of the knowledge
I admit that if I never attended school, and spent maybe 1⁄3 of the extra free time reading books (sounds likely, I have read tons of books as a child), I probably would have grabbed a few chemistry books, too, just out of curiosity. So maybe the benefit of the school was smaller than I imagine.
I still give the school credit for curating the information: filtering out knowledge from bullshit, and ordering the knowledge from simple to more complex. In the alternative reality where I learned chemistry from library books, who knows, maybe a book written by a convincing homeopath would get to my hands first, and I would waste lots of time studying bullshit.
The benefits of chemistry for my life would be: (1) It increases the general protection against bullshit. Like, when I heard about homeopathy, I remembered what I learned at school, and I noticed that this is not how atoms and molecules actually work. Water is a liquid, the molecules are randomly bouncing around all the time, million times per second, so they are not going to “remember” the shape of a larger molecule that floated around them a few days ago. (2) My wife is a biochemist; the fact that I have some general background in chemistry and biology makes it easier for me to understand her work. Similarly, people spent a lot of time debating covid recently, having some general background in chemistry and biology made the vaccines less mysterious. Both of these things have happened at random, but I was generally prepared.
My relation to knowledge… uhm, let me put it this way: It is the fucking 21st century, people are flying in space, engineering genes, the satellites allow you to make a phone call to the other side of the planet, insane amounts of knowledge are freely available online, we are on the verge of developing an artificial intelligence… so the idea that someone doesn’t know that the planet is round or that the matter is made of atoms, just feels horribly wrong, like a form of child abuse, like living in 21st century using a medieval brain.
Of course, the question is where to draw the line. If someone cannot solve a quadratic equation, that’s not a big deal, assuming that they know something else. But they definitely should have seen the graph of an exponential equation, because that’s just everywhere around us (economy, covid). Everyone should know about atoms and molecules (not the names of all of them, just the general idea of tiny balls bouncing around), the speed of light, planets orbiting stars, the difference between fire and nuclear reaction. That living organisms are composed of cells, what is photosynthesis, what is DNA, that all living things descend from a common ancestor. Etc. Not knowing these things, it’s like being locked in a dark basement, while everyone else participates in the 21st century civilization.
The school is the institution that was supposed to provide this. And maybe it should be abolished and replaced with a series of books, or a website… I just don’t know how to make everyone actually read those books. Because the fact is that most people do not read books. (This is what the rationalist community does not represent.) I know many people who told me that they haven’t read a book since finishing school. I am afraid that without the general background from school, these people would be ripe for all kinds of bullshit and conspiracy theories (that is, even more than they are now). Consider the impact on democracy, if people had even less of an idea about how things actually work (plus active misinformation from bad actors such as Russia today).
...oops, this became a long rant, and I guess I sound like a zealot.
the concept sounds like a non-dystopian prison sentence
(If such thing exists, I would expect to find it somewhere in Scandinavia. Joking aside, American prisons seem to be especially dystopian.)
Elementary school is mass babysitting. Where would most of the kids go otherwise, if both parents have a job? Then again, perhaps government should provide optional free babysitting for the masses. In perfect case, free babysitting where the kids can either play all day long, or can choose to go to a quiet room and read a book or use a computer.
this is enough of a touchy subject for me due to how horrific my schooling was that my previous comment held more than a little anger.
I get it. I hated a few subjects in school, and I was bullied shortly. So I can imagine that some people maybe got 10x of the same. Would make me quite angry, too. Also, my experience was probably above average, living in the capital city, attending selective schools. I am happy that homeschooling exists as an alternative for the unlucky ones.
The thing about communist Czechoslovakia was that communism is a blank-slate ideology, which—if you think about the logical consequences—makes teaching one of the most important jobs, in theory. Also, in communism smart people did not have many opportunities to use their talents, so many of them chose education; it provided them relative autonomy, contact with other smart people, and if they taught mathematics or natural sciences they were relatively free from the influences of ideology. This caused the relatively higher quality of education. (There was still a lot of emphasis on memorization and obedience.) When communism was over, maybe 1⁄4 of teachers at my high school quit and started their own companies, most of them profitable. Good for them, but the quality of education plummeted. Sadly, resources are limited, and in a free society, education competes with everything else and often loses. Then again, we do not have toilet paper shortages anymore...
I was enthusiastic about online education; things like Khan Academy, Coursera, Udacity, etc. Turns out, the greatest weakness of online education is lack of self-discipline. The universities that tried asynchronous online education found out that most students did not even click on the lessons during the semester, and when they finally started learning two days before the exam, it was too late. Which is the reason why now many online courses switched to synchronous education. (Even if it’s just you and the computer, you must do the specified lesson on a specified day. A complete nonsense if you are not a student. But a necessity for the universities that use this.)
Many of my friends are teachers, and I am procrastinating at writing a blog about the ongoing Czech reform of math education (called “Hejný method”, here is a video that is not the best explanation, but has English subtitles. Examples of problems: Snakes, Cobwebs, Sum Triangles, Exhibitions). If I hopefully write that blog in 2023, it will be reposted on LW.
However, Valentine says that something similar was already tried in USA long ago, and failed horribly.
In 1839 Prussia was the first country to pass laws restricting child labor in factories and setting the number of hours a child could work.[3] Though the reasons behind why these laws were passed were to expand working conditions for adults, it did lead to laws being passed across Europe.
The “International Labor Organization” also seems responsible for a bunch of subsequent anti-child-labor activism. Although I’m not sure how much one would expect them to represent the economic interests of adult workers—it’s a U.N. agency apparently with an interesting tripartite governing structure, only one part of which nominally represents workers.
Of course, the meme of “protect children against horrible factory conditions” probably has enough staying power (it’s literally “think of the children”) that it doesn’t particularly need special interests to promote it. But it would be interesting to know how much it is in fact being promoted by adult laborers who are very conscious of the downward pressure child labor would impose on their wages.
Anyway, at least for intellectual/office labor (such as programming), as long as the hours aren’t crazy, if a company can find a use for kids’ labor I see no serious argument for preventing it. And, really, it would likely be highly educational.
Looking it up… In the U.S., federally at least, it seems that 16-year-olds “can be employed for unlimited hours in any occupation other than those declared hazardous by the Secretary of Labor”, which seems reasonable; but for 15 and under, it outlaws work during school hours, which pretty much coincide with office hours and therefore cripples most options. And under-14s have a somewhat bizarre list of carve-outs:
If you are under the age of 14, you are only allowed to do the following jobs:
Deliver newspapers to customers
Babysit on a casual basis
Work as an actor or performer in movies, TV, radio, or theater
Work as a homeworker gathering evergreens and making evergreen wreaths; and
Work for a business owned entirely by your parents as long as you are not employed in mining, manufacturing, or any of the 17 hazardous occupations.
Whenever someone says “We have laws for X because of [principles]”, my response is generally, “No, we have laws for X because a ruling body of politicians passed them at some point, and no ruling body of politicians has repealed them yet. If you think [principles] are the dominating factor in what laws get passed, you will go wrong quite often.” This is a decent example.
Societies evolve. Regardless of why the law was originally created, laws that follow principles are easier to keep going than laws that violate them. In a functional society most of the surviving laws will follow principles even if they were created for other reasons. While this won’t be true of every single law, it’s a huge influence.
Also, I think you’re not granting enough charity to whether that set of carveouts could be described by principles. Jobs that are inherently part time, high status, small scale, or involve parents, and are not dangerous, are much more likely to be good for, or at least not harmful to, the children. You could describe that a “bizarre list”, but I’d call that a “list of jobs where the incentives are relatively good”.
This is true, but (a) I think many people think they’re a lot closer to being absolutely determined by principles than is accurate, and (b) this is very especially so for school stuff. Today’s school is the result of a many-generational tug-of-war between many disparate parties, some with more power than others; and the thing they’re pulling is a bureaucracy that is plenty old enough to be expected to follow Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy.
Some people think that “the point” of schools is to teach kids. Others think… well, I’ll list the hypotheses that have come up in this thread alone:
educating the kids in math, history, etc.
putting the kids in a place where they’ll learn social skills
sorting the kids (“signaling”) by conformity+intelligence+conscientiousness
sorting the kids by social class
babysitting the kids
Others I’ve heard elsewhere:
promoting cross-generational upward mobility (the opposite of a prior claim)
making kids into obedient little factory workers
religious indoctrination (not recently, but centuries ago)
ideological indoctrination
I could go on. But even with all of the above, from what I’ve seen of school, in many cases the dominating concern seems to be:
the convenience of those who run the school
To the extent that the external tug-of-war cancels out, school administrators are free to optimize for their own interests at the expense of any of school’s nominal goals (whatever you think they might be). And they often do. Some administrators, and especially teachers, are idealistic, but the system has a reputation for burning that away.
Also, I think you’re not granting enough charity to whether that set of carveouts could be described by principles.
Does being a child star in Hollywood strike you as a safe, healthy environment? More so than other jobs not on that list, such as doing paperwork in an office?
Or do you think that the upsides of being a child star outweigh the dangers? Then can you think of other jobs where the upsides outweigh the dangers, but aren’t on that list?
I think what happened had a lot more to do with “people liking the existence of child actors” and/or “the lobbying power of Hollywood directors (who don’t have good substitutes for child actors)” than with “people faithfully implementing an explicit set of principles with coherent tradeoffs”. (Come to think of it, with AI deepfakes and stuff, maybe adults will be good substitutes for child actors; I wouldn’t be entirely surprised if people then tried to ban real child actors.)
“Incentives are relatively good” doesn’t mean “bad things can’t happen”. Of course it’s still possible for bad things to happen.
I would, however, point out that it’s hard to have a factory full of 10000 child actors, and hard to make significantly more money by ensuring the child actors have bad working conditions. And while there are jokes about out of work actors, an actor who does have a job is likely to be paid more than a factory worker. And there are laws about child actors which discourage some kinds of exploitation.
Yes, some of this is true of other jobs. But a system which evolves piecemeal without being directly designed will mostly involve jobs that are likely to turn up in real life. It won’t include all categories of safe jobs. I suspect that the number of children who are able and willing to do office paperwork for normal office wages just isn’t very big.
I am all for stimulating stuff to do. That sounds like a case where personal lack of money is not a significant factor. To me it would seem that doing that stuff as a hobbyist would be largely similar (ie money is a nice bonus but tinkering would happen anyway because of intrinsic interest / general development).
Not being able to mess with computers because your parents needed hands to pull potatoes from fields would probably also made it hard to be a relevant blip when that employer was searching for talent. I am also more worried about when it systematically affects a lot of people, when “so where do you work?” you would get an eyebrow raising answer “I in fact do not work, but my mother insisted that I should go to school” from a 10 year old. It would actually probably be working a fast food joint to pay on the family car loan interest.
If we could make work so enriching that it would bring people up all their life then maybe it would be developmentally desirable environment. But as long as you will have adult unemployed people, I consider the job of children to be playing and any employed minor to be a person that is inappropriately not playing. Then offcourse if a framework where education is preparation to be a cog in a factory leads to schools being even more stiffling than actual factories, having a artifically stably bad environment is worse than unstably bad environment.
In certain sense this “prepatory phase” lasts until the end of tetriary education. I am of the impression that “mid stage” people do not push off their work to pick up new skill. By doing the aquisitions early in life we have it “installed” and pay dividends during most of the lenght of life. But the environment where you develop the capabilities and where you can use out of them are different. And the transition costs between them are not always trivial.
I know pretty solidly that society should not reinstate child labour. So it totally depends how they are supposed to spend their days then. The trivial option of just keeping child labour forbidden and keeping them loose is a surprisingly strong candidate compared to keeping them in school. But I would expect a real option to have some structures present.
What would happen if society reinstated child labour?
Adults would be a lot more simpler as the time that childhood has time to make its magic would be shorter. More labour supply, lower job complexity and blander humans. I am not super confident with the specifics but quite certain that childhood is doing important effects.
How is this any different from school, except that you could get paid rather than your parents losing money to pay the teachers? There are many valid arguments against child labor (though also many valid arguments that the child should be allowed to decide for themselves), but nearly all of them apply to schooling as well. School eliminates the time of childhood magic, actively makes it harder to be curious (many jobs would not have this effect) and you don’t even get paid.
If “being paid” means not only that children get money, but also that the people paying them are motivated by profit, that creates bad incentives on the part of those people. If children are paid but parents still have control over the children and the money, that creates bad incentives for the parents.
How is this different from adults having jobs?
To be clear, there are plenty of good reasons why one might not want children to work. You might want them to be able to enjoy childhood without the burden of a job, you might want them to focus on learning to be more productive later. But “the people paying them are motivated by profit” is equally true of adult jobs.
The question was how this is different from school. Adults having jobs is also different from school.
In addition, the part about parents having control over children and children’s money doesn’t apply to parents of adults with jobs.
Oh right, the whole world doesn’t have education as a right.
It does apply also to start of school. It is about developmentally appropriate environments. Schools are supposed to be where that can be a high objective. Keeping up skill development in work is rather hit and miss and can be quite narrow for profitability increasement.
That both destroy magic doesn’t mean the destruction is it to the same degree. And school has its own magic. Jobs tend to have way less magic of their own.
“Oh right, the whole world doesn’t have education as a right.”
Are you trying to argue from existing law to moral or practical value? That would be easier if the whole world hadn’t had slavery and monarchy until fairly recently.
“That both destroy magic doesn’t mean the destruction is it to the same degree.”
That’s a good point. But jobs ideally produce value. School often doesn’t, and “learning” in a toxic setting specifically makes it harder to learn later. That’s a harm specific to school; most jobs do not have it.
“And school has its own magic. Jobs tend to have way less magic of their own.”
I’m glad it was magical for you. That’s far from universal. The largest problem with schooling is the compulsion. If you enjoyed it or benefited from it, well and good. But those who didn’t should not have been forced into it. The alternative to compulsory schooling doesn’t have to be no option to go, it can be letting people choose.
My tone is bad and inappropriate especially in this contex. What I actually mean or should have meant is that “parents lose money” is not really descriptive of my local reality and I have trouble taking on that perspective. Trying to imagine a counterfactual what would have needed to be different to not have universal education starts to baffle me a little. My brains come up with questions like “Do people in this world have to pay the police if they call them to protect from gunmen?” which are more obviously out of touch what I know to be the case. The money loss is a facet of some corners of reality. I am familiar with the organization where teachers are first accountable to society or state rather than accountable through parents. So “What are we paying you for?” has two sides to it that I am extremely unfamiliar with.
What I am used to is that the public option is mostly appropriate, so children and parents are not constantly trying to escape it. Keeping “study duty” firm has for me the most important role that a parent while having large custodial rights may not fail to educate their kid. Alternative venues are fine but they can’t be shambles, they must be worthy of the dignity of the progeny of civilization (so need to pass goverment checks). So if private schools are a large part of the equation why are not parents using the customisability if they are going the hard route anyway? If students are suffering why are the parents not advocating for their kids needs? Is it because the solutions exist but are paywalled and some that need them can not get them? How come the public options gets a pass for maleducating a significant stream of citizens? Is this some kind of thing where the most prestigious places are prestigious because they are harsh (and failures are because of students and not schools) and thus misery is a sign of status?
The word “value” has so different meaning in job context and school context that I am not confident on which idea this expresses and can’t really follow.
In general I am very interested in finding out and rooting out bad schooling whereever it might be. But I think it might be appropriate to talk about specific schoolings rather than the abstract idea of schooling in general.
On the “exploration—exploitation” scale, schools at least try to teach you, even if not very efficiently. Jobs typically do not try at all… and when they try, it is usually very narrow, the thing you will immediately need for your work.
(“But you learn by doing”, yes, but only a very narrow selection of things. If you need to learn too much, it is typically more effective for the company to hire someone else for that job.)
In school there is more slack; you can spend a lot of time daydreaming, you finish earlier, you have summer holidays. At work you get responsibilities, unrealistic deadlines, for many people it is difficult to stop thinking about their job when the shift ends.
So, in some sense, both school and work suck in similar ways, but school sucks relatively less. Doesn’t pay you, though. But if you consider the market value of what a small child would produce, it is peanuts.
For more precise discussion, we would need to be more specific. Are we talking about jobs for 6 years olds, 10 years olds, 14 years olds? Full time or part time? What is the consequence of quitting the job or getting fired?
The “childhood magic” from my perspective means, importantly, not being responsible for paying the mortgage or making enough money to buy food. As long as that is your parents’ responsibility, and you are allowed to completely ignore this, you are mentally a child. When the metaphorical gun is put to your temple, adulthood begins.
“Schools at least try to teach you.”
I am curious where you went to school. That was not my experience, and I was in an unusually good school district by American standards. Some of my friends had noticeably worse experiences than I did. Are you conflating the nominal purpose of a school with its real-world actions? Alternatively, did you go through a good enough school system that it might be worth replacing a great many existing “educational” systems with yours as a stopgap along the way to school abolition?
“Jobs typically do not try at all… and when they try, it is usually very narrow, the thing you will immediately need for your work.”
Exactly! Surely that is precisely how it ought to be? Forced learning is a difficult thing to justify, and when a job teaches you something, it is incentivized to help you learn it in short order. Note that I am not calling for removing the option to learn and/or take classes, just removing the requirement. Likewise I am not calling for the forced imposition of child labor, just wondering if children who want to work should have the right, and questioning the idea that it’s so much worse than forced schooling when by many metrics it’s better.
“In school there is more slack; you can spend a lot of time daydreaming, you finish earlier, you have summer holidays. At work you get responsibilities, unrealistic deadlines, for many people it is difficult to stop thinking about their job when the shift ends.” This is true, and a fair point. But a situation that creates little to no to negative value is bad, even if there’s enough slack to make it less bad than it could conceivably be. And a situation that creates meaningful economic value is at least potentially worthwhile (again, I suspect a minority of children would choose to work, and none of them should be forced to. But the option should potentially exist, and morally it’s plausibly better than an “education” that tends not to be actually educational.)
“The “childhood magic” from my perspective means, importantly, not being responsible for paying the mortgage or making enough money to buy food. As long as that is your parents’ responsibility, and you are allowed to completely ignore this, you are mentally a child. When the metaphorical gun is put to your temple, adulthood begins.”
Alright. But A: That can coexist with working (maybe you keep all your money and let your parents worry about the mortgage and grocery budget) and B: there are people placed under incredible stress to perform in school, sometimes much greater than the stress that most adults face. You can argue that it shouldn’t be as stressful, given that even total failure is unlikely to starve you, but in practice it often is.
Back then it was called Czechoslovakia. I am puzzled about the disagreement votes, given that I have hedged my statement as “try to teach you, even if not very efficiently”. Not sure how people do things on the other side of the planet, but I imagine that there are these things called textbooks, which are full of information, and they at least make you read them. I am not saying that the information is especially useful, or especially well explained; just that it is there, and the school exposes you to it.
There were subjects that I hated, mostly history. That one was taught literally as a list of facts that I considered utterly irrelevant—I couldn’t care less about what year exactly which king was born, or what year exactly was a battle that happened centuries ago. There were subjects that I would have learned on my own anyway, especially math and computer science. A subject where the school provided the most added value for me, was probably chemistry. Explained sufficiently well that some information stuck in my brain, and yet not something I would have studied on my own.
Okay then.
Correct.
Perhaps this is another case of what I call “America succeeds to go to all extremes simultaneously”. Excellent universities, dystopian elementary and high schools. In Eastern Europe things are more… mediocre, at both extremes. The universities are meh, but the elementary schools are kinda okay, mostly. Or maybe one of us generalizes too much from personal experience. It would be interesting to make a survey (not limited to the rationalist community).
I was seriously considering the possibility of homeschooling my children, but it turned out that my daughter enjoys school (she is currently in 2nd grade), so I am like: “well, if there is no problem, I do not need to solve it”. Of course, enjoying and learning new things are not the same; she probably likes the fact that she is one of the best in the classroom. Then she does Khan Academy and Duolingo at home. That doesn’t really seem like an argument in favor of the system… unless the point is that she has enough time and energy left to pursue her own goals. (I am quite tired when I get home from work.)
Dunno, maybe it’s like the mass transit. Some places give up on the idea completely, and then it becomes really bad. Other places make it a priority, and then it is not necessarily great, but it is okay. There might literally be two attractors; either the idea of school is high-status or low-status, and that determines whether the teachers love or hate their jobs, etc.
Strongly upvoted for clarification and much greater plausibility given that clarification.
“Back then it was called Czechoslovakia. I am puzzled about the disagreement votes, given that I have hedged my statement as “try to teach you, even if not very efficiently”. Not sure how people do things on the other side of the planet, but I imagine that there are these things called textbooks, which are full of information, and they at least make you read them. I am not saying that the information is especially useful, or especially well explained; just that it is there, and the school exposes you to it.”
Typically the material covered in a given day was a repeat, nearly word for word, of the previous day’s lecture, or the previous month’s. Seventh grade mathematics spent over a month on adding negative numbers, despite the fact that pretty much everyone already knew how to, and that if someone had somehow managed to avoid understanding how despite the same lecture being given every day, presumably they would need some other method of instruction than repeating it again. While this could, perhaps, be considered trying to teach a few days’ worth of material over months and years, that is so far from what any sane person would do if they actually wanted students to learn that I think it’s fair to disagree with saying that American schools aim to teach. If the Czechoslovakian system was better, well and good. I can actually believe that; for all the faults of the Eastern Bloc, it was reportedly quite good at education, and I learned a decent amount studying on my own from an excellent Russian textbook called алгебра и начало анализа.
There were textbooks, but they never made us read them. We typically did not have time to do so, with study time instead going to the aforementioned mostly-useless lectures and equally repetitive and useless homework.
“There were subjects that I hated, mostly history. That one was taught literally as a list of facts that I considered utterly irrelevant—I couldn’t care less about what year exactly which king was born, or what year exactly was a battle that happened centuries ago. There were subjects that I would have learned on my own anyway, especially math and computer science. A subject where the school provided the most added value for me, was probably chemistry. Explained sufficiently well that some information stuck in my brain, and yet not something I would have studied on my own.”
Most of this seems like a good case against schooling. Your experience with chemistry is a fair point, but how much value have you gotten out of your chemistry knowledge, and if the answer is a lot, due to a job or the like, wouldn’t you have studied it when you needed it? If the answer is that you never needed it for work, yet are much happier for the sheer beauty of the knowledge (admittedly plausible; there are many things in life that may not be immediately necessary to know, but are still incredibly fun to understand), and would never have studied it unless forced, that is a valid point in favor of compulsory schooling. I submit that it is outweighed by all the downsides, but that is a valid point. At a minimum we can agree that the American schooling system ought to be more like the Czechoslovakian one.
“Perhaps this is another case of what I call “America succeeds to go to all extremes simultaneously”. Excellent universities, dystopian elementary and high schools. In Eastern Europe things are more… mediocre, at both extremes. The universities are meh, but the elementary schools are kinda okay, mostly. Or maybe one of us generalizes too much from personal experience. It would be interesting to make a survey (not limited to the rationalist community).”
That is a good point, and quite plausible. To be perfectly honest, I have a hard time imagining a non-dystopian elementary or high school; the concept sounds like a non-dystopian prison sentence. It is very interesting to talk to someone who apparently went through a plausibly non-evil school system.
“I was seriously considering the possibility of homeschooling my children, but it turned out that my daughter enjoys school (she is currently in 2nd grade), so I am like: “well, if there is no problem, I do not need to solve it”. Of course, enjoying and learning new things are not the same; she probably likes the fact that she is one of the best in the classroom. Then she does Khan Academy and Duolingo at home. That doesn’t really seem like an argument in favor of the system… unless the point is that she has enough time and energy left to pursue her own goals. (I am quite tired when I get home from work.)”
If she enjoys it, fair enough, though I would strongly recommend keeping an eye out for the possibility that it’s a poor use of her time or may become so, even if she’s happy so far. But if she’s learning (and Khan Academy and Duolingo will see to it that she is) and happy, it sounds like things are going well.
“Dunno, maybe it’s like the mass transit. Some places give up on the idea completely, and then it becomes really bad. Other places make it a priority, and then it is not necessarily great, but it is okay. There might literally be two attractors; either the idea of school is high-status or low-status, and that determines whether the teachers love or hate their jobs, etc.”
That is an interesting idea. It seems implausible that public school could have reasonable incentives, given the inherent isolation of government programs from market forces and meaningful feedback. However the existence of a high status equilibrium for teachers resulting in at least a strikingly less horrific system is possible, and might explain why the Czechoslovakian educational system was apparently much better.
I would also like to thank you for the very polite tone of your reply. I am also trying to be polite and respectful, but this is enough of a touchy subject for me due to how horrific my schooling was that my previous comment held more than a little anger. Despite this you responded extremely well.
Well, what you describe is much worse than I imagined… and I still have a problem imagining that this is a typical American school experience. No offense, but I would need more people to confirm this, before I update on American education in general.
I have often heard that American schools are “teaching to the test”. Would you agree with that statement? If yes, how does that square with… not even reading the textbooks, and adding negative numbers in seventh grade? Were the seventh grade tests about adding negative numbers?
On the other hand, I have also heard that as a consequence of “No Child Left Behind”, teachers are focusing on the students that perform worst. So, maybe the least performing student in your seventh grade had a problem with adding negative numbers? That would kinda explain.
Or do the both things combined together mean that American teachers are “teaching the worst performing student to the test”? Sad, but possible, given the incentives. (“No Child Left Behind” was replaced in 2015 by a new law, hopefully better.)
I admit that if I never attended school, and spent maybe 1⁄3 of the extra free time reading books (sounds likely, I have read tons of books as a child), I probably would have grabbed a few chemistry books, too, just out of curiosity. So maybe the benefit of the school was smaller than I imagine.
I still give the school credit for curating the information: filtering out knowledge from bullshit, and ordering the knowledge from simple to more complex. In the alternative reality where I learned chemistry from library books, who knows, maybe a book written by a convincing homeopath would get to my hands first, and I would waste lots of time studying bullshit.
The benefits of chemistry for my life would be: (1) It increases the general protection against bullshit. Like, when I heard about homeopathy, I remembered what I learned at school, and I noticed that this is not how atoms and molecules actually work. Water is a liquid, the molecules are randomly bouncing around all the time, million times per second, so they are not going to “remember” the shape of a larger molecule that floated around them a few days ago. (2) My wife is a biochemist; the fact that I have some general background in chemistry and biology makes it easier for me to understand her work. Similarly, people spent a lot of time debating covid recently, having some general background in chemistry and biology made the vaccines less mysterious. Both of these things have happened at random, but I was generally prepared.
My relation to knowledge… uhm, let me put it this way: It is the fucking 21st century, people are flying in space, engineering genes, the satellites allow you to make a phone call to the other side of the planet, insane amounts of knowledge are freely available online, we are on the verge of developing an artificial intelligence… so the idea that someone doesn’t know that the planet is round or that the matter is made of atoms, just feels horribly wrong, like a form of child abuse, like living in 21st century using a medieval brain.
Of course, the question is where to draw the line. If someone cannot solve a quadratic equation, that’s not a big deal, assuming that they know something else. But they definitely should have seen the graph of an exponential equation, because that’s just everywhere around us (economy, covid). Everyone should know about atoms and molecules (not the names of all of them, just the general idea of tiny balls bouncing around), the speed of light, planets orbiting stars, the difference between fire and nuclear reaction. That living organisms are composed of cells, what is photosynthesis, what is DNA, that all living things descend from a common ancestor. Etc. Not knowing these things, it’s like being locked in a dark basement, while everyone else participates in the 21st century civilization.
The school is the institution that was supposed to provide this. And maybe it should be abolished and replaced with a series of books, or a website… I just don’t know how to make everyone actually read those books. Because the fact is that most people do not read books. (This is what the rationalist community does not represent.) I know many people who told me that they haven’t read a book since finishing school. I am afraid that without the general background from school, these people would be ripe for all kinds of bullshit and conspiracy theories (that is, even more than they are now). Consider the impact on democracy, if people had even less of an idea about how things actually work (plus active misinformation from bad actors such as Russia today).
...oops, this became a long rant, and I guess I sound like a zealot.
(If such thing exists, I would expect to find it somewhere in Scandinavia. Joking aside, American prisons seem to be especially dystopian.)
Elementary school is mass babysitting. Where would most of the kids go otherwise, if both parents have a job? Then again, perhaps government should provide optional free babysitting for the masses. In perfect case, free babysitting where the kids can either play all day long, or can choose to go to a quiet room and read a book or use a computer.
I get it. I hated a few subjects in school, and I was bullied shortly. So I can imagine that some people maybe got 10x of the same. Would make me quite angry, too. Also, my experience was probably above average, living in the capital city, attending selective schools. I am happy that homeschooling exists as an alternative for the unlucky ones.
The thing about communist Czechoslovakia was that communism is a blank-slate ideology, which—if you think about the logical consequences—makes teaching one of the most important jobs, in theory. Also, in communism smart people did not have many opportunities to use their talents, so many of them chose education; it provided them relative autonomy, contact with other smart people, and if they taught mathematics or natural sciences they were relatively free from the influences of ideology. This caused the relatively higher quality of education. (There was still a lot of emphasis on memorization and obedience.) When communism was over, maybe 1⁄4 of teachers at my high school quit and started their own companies, most of them profitable. Good for them, but the quality of education plummeted. Sadly, resources are limited, and in a free society, education competes with everything else and often loses. Then again, we do not have toilet paper shortages anymore...
I was enthusiastic about online education; things like Khan Academy, Coursera, Udacity, etc. Turns out, the greatest weakness of online education is lack of self-discipline. The universities that tried asynchronous online education found out that most students did not even click on the lessons during the semester, and when they finally started learning two days before the exam, it was too late. Which is the reason why now many online courses switched to synchronous education. (Even if it’s just you and the computer, you must do the specified lesson on a specified day. A complete nonsense if you are not a student. But a necessity for the universities that use this.)
Many of my friends are teachers, and I am procrastinating at writing a blog about the ongoing Czech reform of math education (called “Hejný method”, here is a video that is not the best explanation, but has English subtitles. Examples of problems: Snakes, Cobwebs, Sum Triangles, Exhibitions). If I hopefully write that blog in 2023, it will be reposted on LW.
However, Valentine says that something similar was already tried in USA long ago, and failed horribly.
Adult laborers would have competition! Wiki says:
The “International Labor Organization” also seems responsible for a bunch of subsequent anti-child-labor activism. Although I’m not sure how much one would expect them to represent the economic interests of adult workers—it’s a U.N. agency apparently with an interesting tripartite governing structure, only one part of which nominally represents workers.
Of course, the meme of “protect children against horrible factory conditions” probably has enough staying power (it’s literally “think of the children”) that it doesn’t particularly need special interests to promote it. But it would be interesting to know how much it is in fact being promoted by adult laborers who are very conscious of the downward pressure child labor would impose on their wages.
Anyway, at least for intellectual/office labor (such as programming), as long as the hours aren’t crazy, if a company can find a use for kids’ labor I see no serious argument for preventing it. And, really, it would likely be highly educational.
Looking it up… In the U.S., federally at least, it seems that 16-year-olds “can be employed for unlimited hours in any occupation other than those declared hazardous by the Secretary of Labor”, which seems reasonable; but for 15 and under, it outlaws work during school hours, which pretty much coincide with office hours and therefore cripples most options. And under-14s have a somewhat bizarre list of carve-outs:
Whenever someone says “We have laws for X because of [principles]”, my response is generally, “No, we have laws for X because a ruling body of politicians passed them at some point, and no ruling body of politicians has repealed them yet. If you think [principles] are the dominating factor in what laws get passed, you will go wrong quite often.” This is a decent example.
Societies evolve. Regardless of why the law was originally created, laws that follow principles are easier to keep going than laws that violate them. In a functional society most of the surviving laws will follow principles even if they were created for other reasons. While this won’t be true of every single law, it’s a huge influence.
Also, I think you’re not granting enough charity to whether that set of carveouts could be described by principles. Jobs that are inherently part time, high status, small scale, or involve parents, and are not dangerous, are much more likely to be good for, or at least not harmful to, the children. You could describe that a “bizarre list”, but I’d call that a “list of jobs where the incentives are relatively good”.
This is true, but (a) I think many people think they’re a lot closer to being absolutely determined by principles than is accurate, and (b) this is very especially so for school stuff. Today’s school is the result of a many-generational tug-of-war between many disparate parties, some with more power than others; and the thing they’re pulling is a bureaucracy that is plenty old enough to be expected to follow Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy.
Some people think that “the point” of schools is to teach kids. Others think… well, I’ll list the hypotheses that have come up in this thread alone:
educating the kids in math, history, etc.
putting the kids in a place where they’ll learn social skills
sorting the kids (“signaling”) by conformity+intelligence+conscientiousness
sorting the kids by social class
babysitting the kids
Others I’ve heard elsewhere:
promoting cross-generational upward mobility (the opposite of a prior claim)
making kids into obedient little factory workers
religious indoctrination (not recently, but centuries ago)
ideological indoctrination
I could go on. But even with all of the above, from what I’ve seen of school, in many cases the dominating concern seems to be:
the convenience of those who run the school
To the extent that the external tug-of-war cancels out, school administrators are free to optimize for their own interests at the expense of any of school’s nominal goals (whatever you think they might be). And they often do. Some administrators, and especially teachers, are idealistic, but the system has a reputation for burning that away.
Does being a child star in Hollywood strike you as a safe, healthy environment? More so than other jobs not on that list, such as doing paperwork in an office?
Or do you think that the upsides of being a child star outweigh the dangers? Then can you think of other jobs where the upsides outweigh the dangers, but aren’t on that list?
I think what happened had a lot more to do with “people liking the existence of child actors” and/or “the lobbying power of Hollywood directors (who don’t have good substitutes for child actors)” than with “people faithfully implementing an explicit set of principles with coherent tradeoffs”. (Come to think of it, with AI deepfakes and stuff, maybe adults will be good substitutes for child actors; I wouldn’t be entirely surprised if people then tried to ban real child actors.)
“Incentives are relatively good” doesn’t mean “bad things can’t happen”. Of course it’s still possible for bad things to happen.
I would, however, point out that it’s hard to have a factory full of 10000 child actors, and hard to make significantly more money by ensuring the child actors have bad working conditions. And while there are jokes about out of work actors, an actor who does have a job is likely to be paid more than a factory worker. And there are laws about child actors which discourage some kinds of exploitation.
Yes, some of this is true of other jobs. But a system which evolves piecemeal without being directly designed will mostly involve jobs that are likely to turn up in real life. It won’t include all categories of safe jobs. I suspect that the number of children who are able and willing to do office paperwork for normal office wages just isn’t very big.
I’m not so sure! Some of my best work was done from the ages of 15-16. (I am currently 19.)
I am all for stimulating stuff to do. That sounds like a case where personal lack of money is not a significant factor. To me it would seem that doing that stuff as a hobbyist would be largely similar (ie money is a nice bonus but tinkering would happen anyway because of intrinsic interest / general development).
Not being able to mess with computers because your parents needed hands to pull potatoes from fields would probably also made it hard to be a relevant blip when that employer was searching for talent. I am also more worried about when it systematically affects a lot of people, when “so where do you work?” you would get an eyebrow raising answer “I in fact do not work, but my mother insisted that I should go to school” from a 10 year old. It would actually probably be working a fast food joint to pay on the family car loan interest.
If we could make work so enriching that it would bring people up all their life then maybe it would be developmentally desirable environment. But as long as you will have adult unemployed people, I consider the job of children to be playing and any employed minor to be a person that is inappropriately not playing. Then offcourse if a framework where education is preparation to be a cog in a factory leads to schools being even more stiffling than actual factories, having a artifically stably bad environment is worse than unstably bad environment.
In certain sense this “prepatory phase” lasts until the end of tetriary education. I am of the impression that “mid stage” people do not push off their work to pick up new skill. By doing the aquisitions early in life we have it “installed” and pay dividends during most of the lenght of life. But the environment where you develop the capabilities and where you can use out of them are different. And the transition costs between them are not always trivial.