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Education in this country needs to be totally reformed. High school is basically day care in most places. No reason the average 4 year degree cannot be complete

Education in this country needs to be totally reformed. High school is basically day care in most places. No reason the average 4 year degree cannot be completed at ages 14-18. Then if people want to get a masters they can go ahead, but it shouldn't be expected like going off to college is.

SimbaOnSteroids 9y ago
Idk about you,maybe you won the Putnam, but when I was 15-20 my brain was still working on getting fiber down for the last mile of the prefrontal cortex. The bandwidth required to really grok calculus (or even write a coherent essay on the metaphors of The Great Gatsby) would have been a bit untenable. Don't get me wrong, I would have loved to have been given these types of challenges at a younger age, if only to be forced to learn time management skills sooner. However the intuitive understanding of something like the mechanism by which integrals work would have been lacking, and resulted in an employee that lacked the ability to use the lesson taught by that particular type of abstraction in a diverse and creative way.
- BearGoesChirp 9y ago
  > I was 15-20 my brain was still working on getting fiber down for the last mile of the prefrontal cortex. From what research I've read, that is happening later than 15-20. Its more in the early to mid 20s.
  - SimbaOnSteroids 9y ago
    That was the implication I was trying to make, I apparently failed in that regard.
crispyambulance 9y ago
While I am sure that some exceptional people can complete a 4 year university degree by age 18, there is no basis to say that's even remotely possible for the norm. For many complex and intertwined reasons (not all of which have to do with school) high schools are, in many places, failing to teach many students the fundamentals in mathematics, reading and writing. I think that this new emphasis on training programs misses the fact that many students will simply be unprepared unless they first learn what they were supposed to learn in high school.

SimbaOnSteroids 9y ago

Idk about you,maybe you won the Putnam, but when I was 15-20 my brain was still working on getting fiber down for the last mile of the prefrontal cortex. The bandwidth required to really grok calculus (or even write a coherent essay on the metaphors of The Great Gatsby) would have been a bit untenable. Don't get me wrong, I would have loved to have been given these types of challenges at a younger age, if only to be forced to learn time management skills sooner. However the intuitive understanding of something like the mechanism by which integrals work would have been lacking, and resulted in an employee that lacked the ability to use the lesson taught by that particular type of abstraction in a diverse and creative way.

BearGoesChirp 9y ago
> I was 15-20 my brain was still working on getting fiber down for the last mile of the prefrontal cortex. From what research I've read, that is happening later than 15-20. Its more in the early to mid 20s.
- SimbaOnSteroids 9y ago
  That was the implication I was trying to make, I apparently failed in that regard.

crispyambulance 9y ago

While I am sure that some exceptional people can complete a 4 year university degree by age 18, there is no basis to say that's even remotely possible for the norm. For many complex and intertwined reasons (not all of which have to do with school) high schools are, in many places, failing to teach many students the fundamentals in mathematics, reading and writing. I think that this new emphasis on training programs misses the fact that many students will simply be unprepared unless they first learn what they were supposed to learn in high school.