
Teenagers and Careers: Is Apprenticeship an Answer? - anuleczka
http://www.thesimpledollar.com/2010/04/28/teenagers-and-careers-is-apprenticeship-an-answer/
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madmanslitany
There's another pg essay out there that talks about "premature optimization,"
which is what I generally think of apprenticeships. Giving teenagers a chance
to see what really goes into a particular career is a great idea, but I
wouldn't put much stock into it being more than a complement to traditional
schooling, in which case it reduces to another form of internship or co-op,
which, again, are great for giving students a taste of professional life, but
are in no way a good replacement for the breadth of a good education.

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barry-cotter
Yes, but not as the author conceives it.

10 hours a week would not be an optimal way of organising it, especially if
it'd be 2 hours here and there. You want large blocks of time in which you can
pass on implicit as well as explicit knowledge.

 _Let’s say there’s a teenager out there who dreams of being a writer._

Very, very bad example. Solitary profession, very few people make a living out
of it, mostly introverts.

 _The school puts out a notice in the community looking for a writer who would
take on an apprentice ten hours a week. The apprenticeship would pay something
around minimum wage, but would also involve the apprentice building something
of value on their own with at least some of that time._

Who pays them? If this is educational why are they being paid? Why should the
writer help the apprentice at all? I can see an amanuensis relationship, but
this apprentice will not be a net gain to the writer for a very long time, but
a cost. It certainly isn't worth the writer's while to pay them.

 _So, for example, I might have the apprentice spend five hours a week doing
grunt work for me, then I would spend five hours each week with that person
helping them to build a blog to share their writing, polish their writing
skills, and so forth._

What grunt work? Why not pay someone who knows what they're doing instead?

If they want to learn to write I'd set up something like the Clarion Writer's
Workshop, a short, intensed and focused group where you come together for
daily meetings, readings and critique from someone who knows what they're
doing, but most of all you write.

If they want to write for a living then a possible apprenticeship model would
be journalism. One month study, three months internship, six cycles, you don't
get paid. I cannot see how this would not be a better deal than a Masters in
Journalism.

On the same lines Germany has a _proper_ apprenticeship system, 3 months
professional school study, 3 months work experience, you stay with the same
company the whole time (gotta find one to sponsor you first) and generally
they hire you afterwards. We have something similar for some trades in
Ireland, but not to the same extent.

I see no pressing reason this couldn't be open to 14 year olds. Three years of
not getting paid to be in school or three years of not getting paid to earn a
trade.

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xiaoma
I could see this working well for a small number of teenagers, especially in
programming. However, the vast majority of teenagers' help isn't worth
anything near minimum wage.

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anuleczka
Really? Why do you think that? I know plenty of teenagers who got jobs outside
of retail or food service, did meaningful work, and got paid decently for it.
I think if given a challenge, most teens would do surprisingly good work --
the problem is that we _expect_ teenagers to be useless, so they behave
accordingly.

~~~
xiaoma
Did they do that apprentices or were they using skills they picked up before
starting?

~~~
anuleczka
In my case, I did a high school apprenticeship at NASA (and they did actually
call it that a few years ago). No real lab experience outside of a basic
chemistry class. Same thing for my 14 peers in the program.

