The Bottom Line Vine

From a Business Week editorial by Newt Gingrich…

“It’s time to declare the end of adolescence. As a social institution, it’s been a failure… Adolescence was invented in the 19th century to enable middle-class families to keep their children out of sweatshops. But it has degenerated into a process of enforced boredom and age segregation that has produced one of the most destructive social arrangements in human history: consigning 13-year-old males to learning from 15-year-old males.”

Good ol’ Newt is always good for a little controversy, but he raises some interesting points. One idea that I find particularly interesting is the proposal he makes at the end of the article that reads a little less draconian than the title…

“High school students who can graduate a year early get the 12th year’s cost of schooling as an automatic scholarship to any college or technical school they want to attend. If they graduate two years early, they get two years of scholarships. At no added cost to taxpayers, we would give students an incentive to study as hard as they can and maximize the speed at which they learn.”

I like this idea. It’s a voluntary and incentive based way to encourage hard work in school. Plus it allows a particularly motivated young person to take a little control of their career path early on, hopefully bringing smart, motivated and hardworking people into the workforce sooner rather than later.

Read the whole article at BusinessWeek.com.

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