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Yeah, something like that sounds perfect! But it does illegal now, and even if it wasn't, I would have had no idea how to find a job like that as a 12 year old growing up in the upper-middle-class suburbs.
Contra @FlyingLionWithABook, I do think you'd have to subsidize and regulate it a bit though. The idea would be for everyone to get a job like that, or at least most people. Including the very below-average kids. I don't care whether they're actually "productive" at it though, the point would be to gently guide them into the workforce, sort of like how we have Kindergarten set up to get kids used to being at school without really testing them on anything. All of the part-time minimum wage jobs I had in high school were absolutely miserable, just forcing kids through the wringer doing the worst stuff with the expectation that we'd all quit before too long anyway. And some of the managers and older coworkers were downright sadistic about it.
Actual employers and people who do productive work will violently hate and oppose this idea. Putting someone who needs constant supervision into a potentially dangerous workplace, or even one with a modicum of complication, is a massive burden that would require ruinous compensation. That super below-average kid who can't understand conditionals and violently assaults people for taking his nintendo switch away would be a net negative for any business saddled with his care. The very below-average kids aren't just unproductive, they're actively destructive in any kind of task that's worth doing. Even as a customer I don't actually want the super below-average forced into humiliating service positions they have no hope of ever performing adequately - hell, I don't want to have to see that as a human being.
The whole point of labor vs "education" is to let the useless fail out in a way schools don't allow (witness 95% graduation rates at schools with 0% math proficiency and 20% attendance).
Any top 60% teenager is going to be useful for something and quickly trainable to do a lot more. The 4th quintile is still usable in the right roles, and the faster the bottom quintile can be shuffled off to where they can't do any harm, the better. Could it be worse than letting them stab their teachers and fellow students for 19 years like we do now?
I already talked about my dad starting work early. He quickly got scouted by a (then) high tech company, who paid him to work 4 days a week and go to school for his engineering license requirements the other 3 days.
We have already had working systems for this in living memory. We're in that situation where we collectively forget how to do something and then come up with crazy explanations for why it must be impossible.
I don't have a problem with kids being able to take on some work or go get experience in the real world. Hell, I think that's a great idea - but the way that it is presented here has real problems and that's what I zeroed in on. Sure, your dad was a top performer and got scouted out super quick... but if he's super talented then he's by definition not part of the super below average cohort, who are the actual biggest problem with this proposal. Some people are just net negatives, and as someone who has been both an employer and an employee, I would violently detest whatever system decided to use my business as a daycare for some special needs kid whose interests are jacking off in public and physical violence. Of course, the other end of the bell curve has issues as well - if you discover the next Terence Tao, they should be studying advanced maths rather than cleaning out the deep fryer.
Ultimately I don't think the idea of having kids in school go out to join the workplace is a bad idea - I just think making it mandatory and forcing even the super-below average kids to go do humiliating jobs in service positions they can't even perform adequately is bad for everyone involved.
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To be clear, I didn't mean kids who have severe mental issues- they probably belong in special-ed or juvenile detention. (but what will you do witih them after they turn 18....?) Just basic, normal kids who might sometimes misbehave or slack off a bit, but are perfectly capable of following simple directions. There's no reason to think they'd be any worse at doing most low wage jobs than the people currently doing them, other than lack of experience.
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There's this weird wish among decent groups of all ideologies for basically tuning the clock back on actual advancement - whether it's my fellow lefties unhappy that America's a productive enough country we no longer can make cheap t-shirts here or conservatives upset the workforce is advanced that nobody would want to hire a 14 year old to do a manufacturing job.
It's actually a good thing for you to be a country where you're so advanced, 13 year old's are basically useless in the workforce! Sure, there are downsides, but there's a reason why the only places where there's massive amounts of low-productivity manufacturing work and cihld labor are some of the poorest places in the world.
13 year olds aren't meaningfully more useless than 18 year olds in many roles. Particularly when you are comparing an intelligent 13 y/o to a illiterate illegal 18 year old. What has happened is they've been regulated and credentialed out of competition. Plus once they are 16 or so, they are still being economically undercut by unregulate, illegal labor, meaning they can't get the entry level job that serves as a stepping stone to, for example, become a master carpenter. Thus the system pushes them into education because sheepskins is the only other way to get into those higher level jobs now.
I was going to say, a 13 year old can wash vegetables in the back of a grocery store as well as the 30 year old meth heads and illegals who do it now, and with fewer downsides.
Any with brains will be handling inventory and ordering in a year, once they learn the basics.
From 12-18 I worked in various spots. Mostly refereeing. There are almost no 12 year old referees anymore. The state makes it really hard to start before 15 now. Cant be solo before 16. I used to solo ref 10 year olds as a 13 year old who rode a bike to the field and it was fine. Now they have 30 year olds doing that.
Also at 18 I worked for a glass company right after HS. The owner wanted me to stay on full time. I went to college on a full ride for engineering instead. But, perhaps in a different economic system I could have become head of the plant with no degree and started earning 50k a year out of HS and 100k by age 22. But that is simply not done.
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You are literally replying to a thread about how that worked in practice.
Yes, it worked in a time when America was a less productive country doing lower quality work that was so less advanced an uneducated 13-year-old could pull it off.
You know what the most annoying part of this is? The smug dismissal that construction sites in America don't need sweeping because "we don't do that kind of work any more"
Yes we do, it's just that it's done by the most recent illegal Guatemalan villager who doesn't even speak enough Spanish to take regular orders.
The "lower quality work" is always with us, it's just that you guys have managed to import an underclass of slaves to do it for you out of sight.
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Hey, i had a job at 13. It sucked, but it was still a real job. I dont know why you think its impossible for 13 year olds to be useful (but somehow also smart enough to do college prep classes)
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No, it was not. It was a few decades ago doing work that hasn't substantially changed. If it was naturally declining they wouldn't have put so much work into making it illegal
Sure, as you said above, if you wanted something closer to German-style tracking when it comes to education, I could see the arguments for that. But, that's not saying, "hey, you're 14, go find a job because we're not going to even attempt to educate you anymore" like some here seem to prefer.
But, I think frankly, even in that world, the vast majority of workplaces aren't going to train a bunch of 15-year-olds to do work they can probably find somebody older to do at the same wages, without the extra worry, plus again, even by the standards of 30 years ago, a lot of those jobs aren't economically efficient to do in the US, and again, that's a good thing we're productive enough doing other things we don't need our 14 year olds working and instead, have the economic output that we can educate even the least-wealthy on the off-chance a few of them out of a hundred become something more than a lifetime factory worker like they would in your reality.
Also, a not-so-secret part of why even in a world where having college degrees being mandatory for jobs were illegal, a lot of workplaces would still prefer college-educated people because it shows them you can follow directions and finish something, even if the directions and tasks were possibly not related to the job.
And an even-less-secret part of that is that "a lot" is not nearly enough for degreeless people to worry about finding a job, which we see in today's world, in industries where degree requirements are optional, not illegal. At least I never worried about finding a job so far.
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making the life of all teenagers completely pointless and utterly dependant on their parents for everything is one heck of a downside. It notably leads to a lot less people having children. Works OK as long as we can keep filling the gaps using immigrants to handle all the low-wage jobs, but we'll be in trouble if that source of cheap disposable labor ever goes away.
This is just an extension of the weird rationalist view that everybody hates school and it's pointless.
You bring the median American 13-year-old from 1924 to live the life of a median American 13-year-old in 2024 and they'd kill their own mother to stay in 2024, so it's not as if the previous generations loved working.
Plus, no, it'll mostly be technological advances. The reason why we don't need 13-year-olds to work at the factory anymore isn't Mexican's, it's that for there to be a cost-effective factory in the US, your workers actually need to be fairly intelligent and efficient, even without a college education.
First, I think it's not at all obvious that a time-travelling 13-year-old would actually prefer it now. Maybe some would, but it would vary. I think a lot of them would really chafe at the lack of freedom now, and being forced to do everything digitally instead of physically. Immigrant children aren't always wide-eyed with glee at being brought here by their parents, you know.
Second- we mostly don't have factories anymore. At least, not factories that higher large amounts. Almost everyone now works in some sort of service-sector jobs. And many of those jobs are now crying out for lack of workers! McDonalds is closing early and raising prices almost everywhere, because they just can't find the staff. That's not a job that requires a college education, it just requires someone to work hard and be willing to learn.
In your idealized world where everyone spends their entire youth in school and is not allowed to work. Well, that was kind of what life was like for women, when they were restricted from most jobs. They didn't like it, it made them both bored and completely dependant on their husband. Allowing people to gain job skills and financial independance is a good thing!
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If everybody loved it, it wouldn't have to be mandatory, and it's not pointless in principle, just the way it's set up nowadays is.
This makes no sense. You spend approximately 0 hours learning how to handle modern technology in school, and even if you did, you don't need that knowledge for most service sector, and corporate office jobs.
While most people hated school, they did so for different reasons. Rationalists hated school for reasons that are strong enough that becoming adults won't change their mind--bullies, incompetent teaching, they already know what's being taught, etc. Normies hated school for reasons such as "I can't play video games if I have to study for an exam". Adults don't agree with those reasons.
For the vast majority, who hated school for normie reasons, school is not a downside, even if it was at the moment they were actually attending school. The view that even from an adult perspective school is bad is weird.
Well, feel free to go Kamala Campaign on me, but that's not particularly moving as an argument. It's not like I'm advocating to unleash mass-scale unschooling, I'm saying a system where you're not allowed / heavily discouraged from doing any productive work until much later on in your adulthood, and where advancement is gatekept based on spending time in classes, is insane. Historically that state of affairs is a little bit too recent to call departing from it "weird", in my opinion.
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