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Subsidization is not necessary. I started working part time minimum wage jobs when I was 14, high schoolers are more than capable of handling minimum wage work. It’s not like they’ll be sent to the salt mines (for one thing, salt mining pays a lot more than minimum wage).
There's so many easy jobs for a site boy, which seems to be a completely vanished role now. I was doing "construction work" at 12, even though most of it was sweep, fetch, and carry with a bit of "show the kid how to do this" whenever there was a slow minute.
By the time I was 15 I had a reputation and was worth an adult's salary, which really helped out with the "girlfriends are fucking expensive" issue.
Come to think of it Obama's rules probably made that job very illegal. But if I'd knocked up my HSGF and not gone to college, I could have still made a decent living and been a highly paid specialist by 20.
Yeah, something like that sounds perfect! But it does illegal now, and even if it wasn't, I would have had no idea how to find a job like that as a 12 year old growing up in the upper-middle-class suburbs.
Contra @FlyingLionWithABook, I do think you'd have to subsidize and regulate it a bit though. The idea would be for everyone to get a job like that, or at least most people. Including the very below-average kids. I don't care whether they're actually "productive" at it though, the point would be to gently guide them into the workforce, sort of like how we have Kindergarten set up to get kids used to being at school without really testing them on anything. All of the part-time minimum wage jobs I had in high school were absolutely miserable, just forcing kids through the wringer doing the worst stuff with the expectation that we'd all quit before too long anyway. And some of the managers and older coworkers were downright sadistic about it.
Actual employers and people who do productive work will violently hate and oppose this idea. Putting someone who needs constant supervision into a potentially dangerous workplace, or even one with a modicum of complication, is a massive burden that would require ruinous compensation. That super below-average kid who can't understand conditionals and violently assaults people for taking his nintendo switch away would be a net negative for any business saddled with his care. The very below-average kids aren't just unproductive, they're actively destructive in any kind of task that's worth doing. Even as a customer I don't actually want the super below-average forced into humiliating service positions they have no hope of ever performing adequately - hell, I don't want to have to see that as a human being.
There's this weird wish among decent groups of all ideologies for basically tuning the clock back on actual advancement - whether it's my fellow lefties unhappy that America's a productive enough country we no longer can make cheap t-shirts here or conservatives upset the workforce is advanced that nobody would want to hire a 14 year old to do a manufacturing job.
It's actually a good thing for you to be a country where you're so advanced, 13 year old's are basically useless in the workforce! Sure, there are downsides, but there's a reason why the only places where there's massive amounts of low-productivity manufacturing work and cihld labor are some of the poorest places in the world.
making the life of all teenagers completely pointless and utterly dependant on their parents for everything is one heck of a downside. It notably leads to a lot less people having children. Works OK as long as we can keep filling the gaps using immigrants to handle all the low-wage jobs, but we'll be in trouble if that source of cheap disposable labor ever goes away.
This is just an extension of the weird rationalist view that everybody hates school and it's pointless.
You bring the median American 13-year-old from 1924 to live the life of a median American 13-year-old in 2024 and they'd kill their own mother to stay in 2024, so it's not as if the previous generations loved working.
Plus, no, it'll mostly be technological advances. The reason why we don't need 13-year-olds to work at the factory anymore isn't Mexican's, it's that for there to be a cost-effective factory in the US, your workers actually need to be fairly intelligent and efficient, even without a college education.
If everybody loved it, it wouldn't have to be mandatory, and it's not pointless in principle, just the way it's set up nowadays is.
This makes no sense. You spend approximately 0 hours learning how to handle modern technology in school, and even if you did, you don't need that knowledge for most service sector, and corporate office jobs.
While most people hated school, they did so for different reasons. Rationalists hated school for reasons that are strong enough that becoming adults won't change their mind--bullies, incompetent teaching, they already know what's being taught, etc. Normies hated school for reasons such as "I can't play video games if I have to study for an exam". Adults don't agree with those reasons.
For the vast majority, who hated school for normie reasons, school is not a downside, even if it was at the moment they were actually attending school. The view that even from an adult perspective school is bad is weird.
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