belkarx

The Western world is facing a crisis of stretched adolescence, keeping children exclusively "learning" for longer than necessary. Imagine that you are a student, around 14 years old. You fall into the top 5%, not the extremely motivated startup founder or math prodigy that you hear about on the news, but comfortably more intelligent and curious than the others. The system sucks some of your free time with busywork, but you build up a knowledge base, and start working on small projects related to your area of interest. Now what? Young people are capable. Their neurons are fully myelinated, their worldview is fresh, their passion is strong. But we don't use them. In fact we make it difficult for them to thrive: labor laws make it bothersome for companies to take on anyone under 18, even if they can demonstrate competence, so that path is rocky. Research internships and freelancing are more viable, but still extremely underused. Perhaps it's because the school system drowns people in busywork, forcing them to study things just to forget them within a few days,[1] and personal projects are stifled under the workload. Competent teens fall into apathy because the work is too easy, application of anything more difficult is inaccessible, and there's only so much knowledge-gathering they can do before they want to do something. We need to put frameworks in place to take advantage of capable high school students. The current assumption is that the most qualified will find a way, and while that may be true, that leaves behind a huge untapped resource. Not everyone is hyper-ambitious but if provided engaging work or more exposure to interesting problems, they can be both useful and satisfied, and the world benefits. The Internet provides some of these opportunities, however working with "professionals" on larger problems is an experience that cannot be replicated. The combination of years of wisdom and accumulated knowledge with a modern view of a problem without the inse