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You are assuming that a 15 year old who's pushed out of school necessarily gets a job and a career, and I'm not so sure that's true. We live in a broken society and it seems like lots of these kids would just do drugs and hang around gangs.
Yes there's lots of not-terribly-bright but not actually bad kids around, and lots of them would benefit immensely from expanded school to work programs or Germany-style tracking into apprenticeships. But you'll notice those are well supervised situations where they don't have unlimited freedom to make their own decisions, because making their own decisions and handling freedom is not something teenagers tend to be good at.
This was a widespread course of action 60 years ago. We decided that it was more cost-effective to farm out the job that cohort did to other countries while warehousing them for a few more years- missing that developmental milestone has consequences, but ones that have been successfully privatized (it costs society nothing to have them sit in their parents' basements and lie relatively flat instead).
>gives [demographic] zero chances to develop a trait to the point they're actively discouraged from doing so
>complains that [demographic] don't exhibit that trait
>claims it's immutable biological fact of [demographic]'s inherent inferiority even though history of every time period outside of the last 40 years conclusively proves otherwise
>confused_nick_young.jpg
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You don't actually need much money if you're living with your parents(and even if average teens are gainfully employed, most people don't want to rent to them) and petty crime that gangs will introduce them to is a pretty natural progression from begging.
I totally agree that getting 16 year old boys who aren't doing well in school onto the construction site instead is at least worth trying in most cases. I do think, however, that getting them to actually do this is really really hard and that the normal incentive structures of American society would lead to the opposite results from a mass program of pushing the bottom quintile of students out of class.
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