In "The Most Precious Resource is Agency", 2021, Simon Saris notes that Leonardo was working in Verrocchio's studio at 14, Andrew Carnegie in a telegraph office at 13.
Do children today have useful childhoods?
For a 13 year old today, what is the equivalent of being a telegraph office boy, where he can learn technology while contributing? What about for a 16 year old? 21 year old? What is today’s equivalent to being a studio apprentice of Verrocchio?
Where are the studios, anyway?
The world until recently was overflowing with onramps of opportunity, even for children, and we seem to do poorly at producing new ones. Thirteen-year-old Steve Jobs called Bill Hewlett and received a summer job at HP, which would be unsurprising in Carnegie’s time, was certainly surprising for 1968, and is obviously verboten today.
I suppose this fits in with the Peter Thiel-led attack on schooling. But it does make me wonder. My readers know I spend a lot of time wondering why the mental health of young Americans is so bad. Could part of the problem be that many young people spend too much time in school, and would be better off working, or doing some kind of directly job-related skills training? Saris thinks so:
Instead of an adolescence full of rites of passage, where one attempts to master something and accept responsibility, we have made it full of waiting, and doing work—for school is work—that nearly everyone knows is fake. . . . Who could blame young adults for thinking that work is fake and meaningless if we prescribe fake and meaningless work for the first two decades of their existence? By confining meaningful work to an adult-only activity, it is little wonder that adolescence is a period of great depression. It would be surprising if it was not.But against all attacks on school we have to set the massive data showing that schooling transforms lives and communities everywhere in the world it is introduced.
But then again, that doesn't mean everyone should go to college or take lots of academic subjects in high school.
Anyway I am intrigued by the notion that the problems of young people might have something to do with our insisting that they stay in school so long and our refusal to let them take on work that feels meaningful to them.
6 comments:
@John
The questions *you* ask are important, and I agree not everyone needs decades of academic work. But Saris' essay sounds like an annoyance at best. In these matters, the silliest thing one can do is to take the life stories of people like Leonardo and Andrew Carnegie as just-so exemplars of the path to success and happiness for the masses.
According to Wikipedia, Carnegie started work at age 13 as a "bobbin boy." Well, one of the kids who did that became Andrew Carnegie. Millions of others died young, or became self-hating factory drones who blew their wages on drink and abused their families.
I'm sure one could meanwhile find many examples of high achievers who went through the whole decades-long school mill and ended up with Nobel Prizes, or whatever. The Thieloids' beef with school is personal and emotional, not analytical.
The fact is that a few people are high achieving, and most are not, and there's no system we can rig that will somehow turn everyone into a go-getter. The question we need to answer is, what will produce less misery for the most?
Given your age, John, didn't -you- grow up enjoying the classic post-war American freedom of childhood without the specter of employment looming over you?
I keep seeing these kinds of discussions lately, always being spearheaded by the Baby Boomers and Generation X, flirting with the idea of reintroducing child labor into America, and it not only disgusts me with its staggering capitalist-obsessed cynicism, it also shocks me with the stunning audacity of the hypocrisy involved.
The sheer gall it takes to grow up as the most privileged-in-aggregate Americans (or possibly even humans!) in history, and to then look at young people today and think, "You know what would help children these days? Sending them to the factories." Because that's exactly what you are in fact proposing - regardless of your myopic inability to look past staggeringly exceptional outliers like Steve Jobs (born into wealth, security, privilege, and colossal good luck).
The Steve Jobs-es of the world don't need childhood jobs. They have no trouble whatsoever pursuing whatever careers or skillsets they want. If one of them wants a job or intern as a teenager, they can and will get it. The only logical conclusion one can draw when examining a proposal for "giving jobs to kids" is cynical exploitation of the mass majority of people who are NOT the Steve Jobs-es of the world.
I'm also just sick and tired of hearing the older generations keep speculating about "Why are kids these days so miserable?" in the form of more and more unhinged and out-of-touch absurdist fantasies, while simultaneously steadfastly refusing to ask young people themselves why they are miserable, to say nothing of actually listening to and believing what they say in response.
Anyway I am intrigued by the notion that the problems of young people might have something to do with our insisting that they stay in school so long and our refusal to let them take on work that feels meaningful to them.
You're close, in a way. Staying in school itself isn't a problem - but the shift from college being something virtually anyone could afford to attend simply by working a part time job, to being something that REQUIRES either a college fund from your parents or taking on utterly crippling debt to pay absurdly bloated modern day tuition rates IS a problem.
As for the matter of meaningful work, it's not that people aren't allowed to take on meaningful work. It's that such meaningful work largely does not exist - at least, not in great enough numbers, or with enough unfilled positions.
Of course, people can put up with unfulfilling work if they are otherwise well compensated. You can find your job boring or even miserable, but if you are paid well, receive ample benefits, have good hours and vacation time, and can rely on your job remaining stable, you can make up for the monotony of your job by living well in the rest of your life.
Except that's impossible to do if don't get paid well, receive ample benefits, have good hours and vacation time, or have much in the way of job security - and young people these days overwhelmingly lack all of those things, on top of having jobs they find unfulfilling and unpleasant. There's no upside to balance out the downside - and this despite corporate profits continuing to regularly shatter records.
Lots of people have run the numbers, top economists included, and noted that most corporations could substantially increase all their workers' pay and compensation rates, and still not suffer in any meaningful way. They just choose not to. They absolutely could be making their workers lives better, for a comparative pittance, but they simply refuse to.
Corporations simply have no desire and no social or legal obligation to either A) make jobs more enjoyable and fulfilling for employees, or B) make up for (inevitable) unfulfilling jobs with generous compensation. Companies COULD make the lives of their employees drastically better with only modest investments of resources. But they don't CARE about the lives of their employees. They literally ONLY care about profits and shareholder ROI.
I can't believe I seriously have to say this, but... bringing back child labor isn't going to fix anything - it's going to make things worse.
If we actually wanted to fix things, we'd simply legally require companies to pay better wages and provide better working conditions. It isn't complicated, or difficult, or mysterious. The solution is simple, easy, and obvious. But it's a solution that would require corporations and the ultra rich to become slightly less obscenely wealthy, and so they will fight it tooth and nail, on mere principle, and we'll just throw up our hands and let them have their way.
@G-
Yeah, the other thing I suspect about our civilization is that most of the work we do is not healthy for our souls.
If you look at what jobs kids can get, it pretty much boils down to fast food or low-end retail. Not much happiness there.
Except for the few really smart nerds who are coding their own games at 13.
@John
"Yeah, the other thing I suspect about our civilization is that most of the work we do is not healthy for our souls."
Indeed. But that raises the question, what is good for our souls? Or perhaps more to the point, what, if anything, would be good for the souls of most people? (By the insertion, "if anything," I do not mean to prejudice the answer and imply that I think most people are simply flawed and doomed; I only mean to suggest how difficult I believe the question is.)
I have certainly encountered some students whose souls would seem to have benefited by a path that took them out of college, often toward a trade or some work that was outdoors. I would note that in their particular cases, the force keeping them from this seemed to be their parents, not the system in itself or the students' lack of self-knowledge.
And there were others--and of course this group includes myself--who were in their element reading and intellectualizing.
So I think some would find their home in either of the two extremes presented by the Saris essay. But I predict such a simple division would leave out many, many others.
The guest review of Victor Frankl's "Man's Search for Meaning" recently posted on Scott Siskind's blog seems relevant here. I strongly recommend it, especially the section on orcs. The author here refers to both the Tolkien and the Russian cannon-fodder kind, and puts me in mind of the line attributed to Tolkien (which, tragically, I think is probably apocryphal): "We were all orcs in the Great War."
Thinking further on this question and its difficulty, I am reminded also of Siskind's dictum: "Nothing makes sense except in terms of inter-individual variation."
Part of what makes the question both hard and urgent is that individual variation.
It is very important, in order to lessen conflict, not to speak in terms of what "we" as humans need. There is simply too much variation.
It occurs to me to wonder what deformations are being built into AI by the approach that treats all human production as an aggregate, rather than integrating an appreciation of that variability (as well as changeability and flexibility) that are such, to me, essential marks of our species.
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