Bartender_Venator
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User ID: 2349
Bartender_Venator
2d ago
I think a couple people have arrived at it independently, too good to leave on the table.
From what I have seen, Westminster/St. Paul's will ask/soft-require students to do the kind of research papers you likely wouldn't see as assignments until a 200-level college class in the States, then submit them for prizes (one I recall hearing about was on the origins of state criminal prosecution as a concept in medieval England). This is on top of exams - all British schools are forced to teach heavily to the test, and the exams are extremely formulaic, but the essays they ask for are more complex than those generally asked of American high schoolers ("evaluate the arguments for and against this idea and come to a conclusion" rather than "argue for your position"). No idea about STEM, but basically I'd say that non-STEM students from top British schools come to uni roughly equivalent to a comparable American student who already has one year of college under his belt.
Tutoring is common among these kids in three broad categories: kids who aren't bright/focused enough, kids who want to study a subject not offered at their school or study more subjects than the school lets them take at once (after 16, British kids typically narrow down to 3/4 subjects), and kids looking at American universities taking American-specific tutoring like for the SAT. There are probably some tiger parents around but generally the Asian kids going to top British schools have much chiller families and assimilate into school culture well.
Bartender_Venator
6d ago
Thanks a lot, Thomas, now I have the song stick in my head every time I check themotte...
Bartender_Venator
6d ago
I have actually browbeaten all of my physicist friends into reading The Age of the World-Picture plus his essay Science and Reflection, and the uniform response has been "he gets how it really works." Having Werner Heisenberg to bounce ideas off probably helped. Someday I will write some effortpoasts on continental philosophy of science for rationalists - Feyerabend is the one everybody knows, but Heidegger, Junger, and even Deleuze are closer to what I hear from actual scientists about the process of research than anything from analytics.
Many of the most successful professional-track zoomers I know kept an early relationship, married young, and went through all those difficult setting-your-life-up times as a team instead of alone. And you certainly don't need a house for the first or even second kid, two-bedroom and three-bedroom apartments are fine. But our cultural expectations are calibrated on the very wealthy and thus don't even present that as an option for the Aspirational 14%.
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