Apprenticeship, Mentoring, and Home Schooling
A question came up on one of the forums relating to mentoring high school students. This is certainly an important question.
Formal classroom education has been substituted for apprenticeship programs for at least a century. Decade by decade, the state gains greater control over the minds of students by requiring long hours of classroom instruction. This instruction is compulsory. In most states, the school has to grant a license to any student who works after school.
All of this has to do with indoctrination. It also has to do with a form of occupational licensure. Students in the late 19th century were expected to end their formal education sometime around the eighth grade. Then they were to go into salaried positions in small businesses. It was assumed that they would learn on the job whatever they needed in order to advance their careers. Because the state has steadily extended the requirements of classroom education, these older opportunities have dried up.
One of the reasons why I decided to set a limit of an hour per lesson for the Ron Paul Curriculum was that I hoped that students would not spend more than five hours a day in academic learning. There are no major homework assignments in the curriculum until the junior year: term papers. The student listens to an audio lecture for half an hour, and he does a half hour of reading. The total is about five hours per day.
I did this deliberately. I am a great believer in apprenticeship programs. If a student can get a job during the day, but still complete his academic work, I am in favor of it. A homeschool student has this advantage: he can work in the mornings. Most students are unable to do this. If a business wants to hire an entry-level employee, it can hire a homeschooler, and the homeschooler then does his schoolwork in the afternoon. There's nothing wrong with this schedule. It may not work for some students because of internal time clocks, but it can work with some of them. If there is enough money involved, students can learn to readjust their internal clocks. They may not want to do this for getting up early to do school work, but for going to work and making money, students may be willing to make the adjustments.
Working on the job is not really the equivalent of an apprenticeship program. There is probably no one-on-one instruction by a mentor. But a student who shows promise at the age of 14 may catch the attention of a business owner. This would have to be a small-business owner, but that is an excellent person to provide mentoring opportunities.
If a student goes to college by staying at home, taking exams instead of attending classes, he can keep his high school job and still graduate at age 21 or 22. In other words, he doesn't lose any time in comparison with his peers, and he is able to earn income through the whole four-year period. Also, he cuts his college expenses to about $15,000. He can make far more than this in a part-time job over a four-year period.
The student has to sell himself to a potential mentor. The basic case is this. First, the student has worked for several years during high school. He has performed well enough to keep his job. Second, he has good time-management skills, because he has been able to graduate by taking high school courses in the afternoon. Third, he is not going away to college. Fourth, he is going to get a college degree. So, someone who wants to keep a student like this on the payroll is in a position to do so, beginning when this student is about 17 years old. By the time he is 21, he will be a college graduate. He will also have spent over five years working in the company. He will know the corporate climate. He will understand the basics of keeping a job. Presumably, he will have been moving up in terms of authority.
Now the businessman is in a position to hire a highly trained young adult. The screening process is long over. This student has an inside track to middle management.
If he doesn't want to do this for a living, he can start his own business.
In the Ron Paul Curriculum, we recommend two optional tracks: (1) advanced college entrance, based on taking CLEP exams, or (2) part-time work in a local business. We also recommend starting a home business. This is part of the actual curriculum. A student who has taken one business course, and especially the student who has taken both business courses, is in a position to start a home business. In this case, the student probably is not going to take a dozen CLEP exams, nor is he going to work as an apprentice.
A homeschool high school student is in a position to get an entry-level job at age 14. He probably will not be in a position to work with a mentor until he has graduated from high school. He is going to have to prove himself first. He has to do grunt-level work in order to rise high enough on the corporate ladder to become eligible to be an apprentice.