March 24, 2007

Value of Youth

Thrilling social analysis from one of my favorite teacher/writers Linda S. Taylor concerning the patterns of youth. Watching rural america from the bottom up rather than the top down has increase my perspective on this particular issue. Kids having kids is part of the problem. People are not taught work ethic, and children have no means to develop it, except through family.

Ummm? I'll never really know but my guess is that [time spent babysitting] very much [affected delayed parenting]. We may have here a partial solution for the problem of illegitimacy – Jobs for teens! Especially lots of babysitting jobs!

The problem of work ethic lies partly in not being able to pay youth less for learning jobs that do not provide full value. Youth are told to volunteer their time after school to get ahead in the system, but they see adults get full pay to not do the work that they as a volunteer get to do and so they quit, both on themselves and on the work. Compelled education provides rewards for extra time spent beyond school, but it has become a free ride club for the connected, with go home and play video games for the disconnected majority. At the extreme - there is march madness, where the NCAA milks the rewards for extreme competition between unpaid youth.

Youth wish to be valued at minimum wage for work when they hit 18 for skills they never learned how to do, because they were prohibited from the mowing lawns, shop-clerking and any form of labor requiring toolwork. How are they supposed to develop the skills needed to do real tasks overnight, on their 18th birthday, without having been put to task as teenagers? Put a book under the pillow and learn by osmosis?


Too many people, not enough real work and brutal competition, leave only the super-motivated and the oblivious youth playing the game, while everybody else plays distraction games and does things that occupy time rather than invest that time into future value by reading and learning. If education were not compelled, and the social welfare fraud dismantled, then people would be rewarded to produce from their work. Seems lemming culcha considers shuffling paper as production. Bits in a computer is like dust in the wind. The only way to learn something is to spend time to master the nuance.

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