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Yeah, so the original article doesn't make any sense as an approach for society. Parents want their kids to learn algebra in the hope that they might get into a
by chongli 7y ago
Yeah, so the original article doesn't make any sense as an approach for society. Parents want their kids to learn algebra in the hope that they might get into an engineering program. Apprenticeships don't enter into the picture at all.
Imagine a mathematics professor trying to apprentice a teenager. It wouldn't work, since the knowledge gap between a high school grad and a working mathematician is huge. The kid wouldn't have anything useful to contribute for a very long time.
Perhaps this is why we only see apprenticeships in trades and the like. Those jobs don't require a huge base of knowledge just to be able to understand what's going on.
- jacobolus 7y ago> Imagine a mathematics professor trying to apprentice a teenager. It wouldn't work, [...] Not quite a high school student, but cf. https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-path-less-taken-to-the-peak-of-the-math-world-20170627/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-path-less-taken-to-the-peak...
- chongli 7y agoThis is an amazing story. I don’t think it’s what the author of the article had in mind though. It sounds like the original argument for apprenticeships is supposed to be a large scale thing, for potentially all students. I can’t see that working for the vast majority of stem students, only the very rare gifted ones.