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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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