My first patent (for a hybrid analog/digital method of detecting pulse centroids for noisy signals) was awarded when I was 14… but, then, my father was a Chief Scientist in a large electronics design department and I had all kinds of electronic parts as toys since I was a toddler, and at some point he started taking me to his office so I started interacting with real engineers building real computers. (When I’ve read Robert W. Wood’s memoirs I discovered that he had a similar experience in his teenage years; in Surely You’re Joking Richard Feynman writes about playing with real-world tech—fixing radios—when he was 12 years old).
I think the current idea of academia as a carefully isolated age-segregated bubble of theoretical learning is seriously misguided, and that guilds running apprenticeships was a much more useful form of education, at least during teenage years. You need to develop problem-solving skills in the real world before going for theory—then you get the benefit of intuition and understanding of how the theories relate to the reality, and how to effortlessly cross the artificial boundaries between disciplines when you need to something in the real world (which has no such boundaries).
By the time I finished the university I already got one of the top civilian awards from the government for contributions to the computer industry. Starting playing with things in the adult world as a teenager has benefits!
As for deference to authority, I never learned it. Lack of it served me well by quickly getting me out of places where I was wasting my time (not that being fired feels good), but it all worked out OK as nobody can fire me now:)
Can you think of any way to fix the system without forcing everyone into an apprenticeship? The status quo in America right now is respect of the system for most because it’s easy and a clean path … hands-on learning wouldn’t appeal to all
The same argument applies to academic learning… it doesn’t appeal to all.
What we need is diversity in education—scrap the system of academic accreditation and the prohibitions on “child labor”. So that more academic-inclined kids may go for academic courses while more hands-on oriented kids would join companies and learn on the job (actually there is some of that in family-owned businesses even now; unfortunately the estate taxes tend to destroy generational family business operations).
My first patent (for a hybrid analog/digital method of detecting pulse centroids for noisy signals) was awarded when I was 14… but, then, my father was a Chief Scientist in a large electronics design department and I had all kinds of electronic parts as toys since I was a toddler, and at some point he started taking me to his office so I started interacting with real engineers building real computers. (When I’ve read Robert W. Wood’s memoirs I discovered that he had a similar experience in his teenage years; in Surely You’re Joking Richard Feynman writes about playing with real-world tech—fixing radios—when he was 12 years old).
I think the current idea of academia as a carefully isolated age-segregated bubble of theoretical learning is seriously misguided, and that guilds running apprenticeships was a much more useful form of education, at least during teenage years. You need to develop problem-solving skills in the real world before going for theory—then you get the benefit of intuition and understanding of how the theories relate to the reality, and how to effortlessly cross the artificial boundaries between disciplines when you need to something in the real world (which has no such boundaries).
By the time I finished the university I already got one of the top civilian awards from the government for contributions to the computer industry. Starting playing with things in the adult world as a teenager has benefits!
As for deference to authority, I never learned it. Lack of it served me well by quickly getting me out of places where I was wasting my time (not that being fired feels good), but it all worked out OK as nobody can fire me now:)
Can you think of any way to fix the system without forcing everyone into an apprenticeship? The status quo in America right now is respect of the system for most because it’s easy and a clean path … hands-on learning wouldn’t appeal to all
The same argument applies to academic learning… it doesn’t appeal to all.
What we need is diversity in education—scrap the system of academic accreditation and the prohibitions on “child labor”. So that more academic-inclined kids may go for academic courses while more hands-on oriented kids would join companies and learn on the job (actually there is some of that in family-owned businesses even now; unfortunately the estate taxes tend to destroy generational family business operations).