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> No company wants that code, or being saddled with a few dozen teenagers, some of which are completely useless. This is an efficient summary of the social at

> No company wants that code, or being saddled with a few dozen teenagers, some of which are completely useless. This is an efficient summary of the social attitude I'm criticizing. People believe that children and teenagers are useless. They believe this because the structure of modern education requires young people to be useless. Every adult in their lives repeats variants of "you cannot and should not be trusted to do real work that other people need", and so young people grow up believing that. If instead of resenting their presence and demanding that they be warehoused away in the name of efficiency, adults in contemporary society ought to look forward to training young people to be useful. If you take this attitude, and regard every young person as a future ally in your endeavors to maintain civilization to a high standard, it becomes clear that what's being done in most schools is inefficient, poorly-managed, and counterproductive.

dale_glass 3y ago
And that works in some contexts, like farming, where you give the kids a simple task like "paint a fence", "carry this from A to B", or "chop some wood". Approximately no company wants to deal with an unskilled person. It takes a pro weeks to even start doing something useful in most organizations, let alone to be an useful addition to the team. If teenagers could be expected to produce useful code, then we'd have companies hiring new, unexperienced developers, but pretty much nobody wants to. Now of course there are some really clever 12 year olds out there that can actually do cool things. But they're a very small proportion, and if you only deal with them then it's no longer education, but a mentorship for a select few.
discussDev 3y ago
I think you should let kids be creative and TRY to make useful things, but the quality of most things I made in school when I was creative and developing things was rather low quality in general because I needed to have all the learning experiences. So I don't think in general kids should be trying to build quality useful things but maybe we can just let them take a shot at everything to see how to do it instead.
- secabeen 3y ago
  There is something pretty similar this called Project-Based Learning which tries to get there. Kids are tasked to find something that they're interested in, then the lessons that need to happen are modulated by their unique personal projects. It doesn't produce useful things, but it does produce things that they care about, which is nearly as good.

dale_glass 3y ago

And that works in some contexts, like farming, where you give the kids a simple task like "paint a fence", "carry this from A to B", or "chop some wood". Approximately no company wants to deal with an unskilled person. It takes a pro weeks to even start doing something useful in most organizations, let alone to be an useful addition to the team. If teenagers could be expected to produce useful code, then we'd have companies hiring new, unexperienced developers, but pretty much nobody wants to. Now of course there are some really clever 12 year olds out there that can actually do cool things. But they're a very small proportion, and if you only deal with them then it's no longer education, but a mentorship for a select few.

discussDev 3y ago

I think you should let kids be creative and TRY to make useful things, but the quality of most things I made in school when I was creative and developing things was rather low quality in general because I needed to have all the learning experiences. So I don't think in general kids should be trying to build quality useful things but maybe we can just let them take a shot at everything to see how to do it instead.

secabeen 3y ago
There is something pretty similar this called Project-Based Learning which tries to get there. Kids are tasked to find something that they're interested in, then the lessons that need to happen are modulated by their unique personal projects. It doesn't produce useful things, but it does produce things that they care about, which is nearly as good.