hehe, no, I have hope that he's going to find his 'groove' in life, right now just about everything seems to be against him. Most of the stuff there applies word-for-word to him.
I'm not hoping for him to get hired by anybody any time soon, but at least it seems there are alternative paths other than the regular ones.
I wish kids were taught this at a young age. I learned it at seventeen; two years later, I'm still struggling with a lot of the things I've needed to unlearn. I have friends my age who still don't believe this, who are forcing themselves on generic career paths because they don't think anything else is an option. I worry for them pretty often.
Well, the funny thing here is my own career path was not exactly textbook either, and still I worry about my son.
As for yourself keep an open mind, definitely not everything about 'regular' education is bad, but some people have a hard time adapting to the system and the system definitely won't adapt to them, if you are one of these then go ahead and carve your own path, I'm sure we'll be hearing great things about you one of these days.
A lot of people here are very good at learning things on their own, and very quickly at that. This is most definitely not true of a lot of the population. Having a talent for picking up new things helps a ton in giving you the confidence to pursue "non-generic" career paths, and I don't know that teaching kids that they can pursue these kinds of paths will make much difference if they don't have a talent for it.
-5 because he signed his comment with an initial? That's silly. He asked a question that led to a set of useful comments. Signing a name is a little silly, but I don't recall its being against HN etiquette and it's too minimal to be considered spamming.
-m