What if we let school children advance into a sort of "first retirement"?

What happens to the children who are not self starters and do not accelerate? Which I think is most of the kids.

After a decade, maybe sooner, some kids with drive, not just smarts will get there. Those kids will enjoy something that other children will hopefully desparately want to emulate. Specifically escape!

If you attempt to implement something like this that seems to directly treat school / education as a type of confinement (such as prison) to be “escaped”, then you’ll have people (students, mainly, but some parents as well) attempting to game the system to see that happen… whether or not educational objectives have been attained.

And even suggesting that at some point in a child’s life that “further education is unnecessary” negates the entire purpose of education, as well as ignores that it should be a lifetime process, not a “goal”.

Finally, I can’t imagine a way to “set peer goalposts” and mentor / monitor children in a school district of any size through something so nebulous (and so prone to politicking) in any objective way.

Sorry, but I hate your idea.

I could sort of see what you were going for until I got to that part where the “well-endowed” “push through.”

I’m afraid this sounds like the lament of a bored kid who believes himself to be extra smart. I’m not particularly sympathetic, and this focus on developing free time seems sure to shoot the program in it’s own foot.

Personally, I think free time is a great thing, and it can be a great way to learn if, as @marinelife pointed out, people know where the key to their own engine is. Free time means more fluthering, which is a fine thing to do. Perhaps even socially redeeming. More likely it’s just having fun. Which is good, but not as well appreciated as perhaps it should be.

But handing out free time to adolescents when they have few opportunities to do something useful is a sure recipe for disaster.

This sounds a bit like a school I’ve heard of, but I don’t remember what it’s called. It’s a school that doesn’t really have a set curriculum and children are able to pace their own education. The children move through the different areas of the school on their own timeline, so you could have young children mixed in with older children. Then, when the child (actually teenager because I believe there is an age limit) feels they are ready to graduate, they have to discuss it with their school counselors and they arrange for the child to take a graduation exam (so that they have a recognized high school diploma).

It’s an interesting concept, but it really sounds like it would only work for children that are good at being self-motivators.

Well, we have some pointed answers here…and by pointed I mean daggerlike.

It seems in my district this is happening today with things called magnet schools. Not just the incredibly brilliant are attending, but also the hard workers.

You would not “escape” school until the appointed time when you are supposed to normally graduate. You would just be given more freedom.

I like freedom.

BTW @wundayatta failed to critically read the bit about endowment and pushing through.

@Seaofclouds Summerhill

@Ltryptophan lighten up, it was a joke

Oh.. you were being funny.

Well, wasting the lives of children so that teachers can get paid ain’t funny.

We should help kids learn as much as they can as soon as they can, and make the most of their lives. Letting them linger in the governments education machine that is second rate among nations, and first rate among costs is a joke.

It needs fixing. So, while we are at it I think it should be streamlined to save us money, save the kids time, and give people a chance to get a footing in life that is not based on colleges getting the tuition money they now have come to expect. Don’t read that to mean they shouldn’t go to college. Read it to mean they shouldn’t be forced to go to college to survive in a manner that doesn’t make them a slave to the interests of those who do.

Empower people early. That is the point I am making. Give the kids tools to build their own futures. By 18 people should understand the elaborate credit markets. By 18 people should understand that a downpayment on a house is something that they should have been working on. Lets give people the strength and wisdom early so that they can start making something of their lives immediately.

I am a bored kid, who is extra smart. I am bored with the country as it is. I am bored with the intentional partial crippling of entire peoples to keep them subjects to anyone but themselves.

It is time that we give individuals, fellow citizens, humans who were perchance born to this country the opportunity that its bounty should prevail them.

How? By arming them with skills to face life. By checking to see if those skills are functional or if they have fallen on deaf ears. And to make sure that the social safety net is not a handout of perishables, but rather a gifting of honest veritable credentials that have inherent value.

When our high schools are the diving boards to remedial community college classes, something is very wrong.

So…we should focus on who comes next. How will we give them the vision to succeed.

It is no laughing matter I’m afraid.