The big news yesterday, before that storm ripped up Oklahoma, was Yahoo’s buyout of Tumblr. This is the biggest news from Yahoo, since Marissa Mayer stepped into the work-family-feminism battle.
Yesterday’s stories about Tumblr latched onto the untraditional education of the founder, David Karp. From the Times,
When David Karp was 14, he was clearly a bright teenager. Quiet, somewhat reclusive, bored with his classes at the Bronx High School of Science. He spent most of his free time in his bedroom, glued to his computer.
But instead of trying to pry him away from his machine or coaxing him outside to get some fresh air, his mother, Barbara Ackerman, had another solution: she suggested that he drop out of high school to be home-schooled.
“I saw him at school all day and absorbed all night into his computer,” said Ms. Ackerman, reached by phone Monday afternoon. “It became very clear that David needed the space to live his passion. Which was computers. All things computers.”
Karp never finished high school and never went to college. And he’s super successful. (More on Karp here.) He is the poster-boy for Peter Thiel and other entrepreneurial promoters.
Should we follow David’s mother’s path? Should we let our kids focus entirely on computers and ditch college? Last night, I coaxed (alright, yelled at) both of my boys away from the computer and gently urged them (yelled) to take their bikes for a ride. Maybe, I’m an idiot.
Apt. 11d 
Well, Karp himself says others should mostly stay in school: http://www.businessinsider.com/david-karp-tech-wunderkind-should-graduate-2013-5
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Kids who want to be musicians and artists have been ditching school for years. One of my son’s friends did all her high school online so that she could spend most of her time at Julliard. There are some elite music teachers who will refuse to teach your kid if they are still ‘doing traditional school’ because they regard it as a waste of time and something that interferes with practicing. There was a discussion on Dance Moms awhile ago about the kids being homeschooled so they could focus on dance. The arts community seems to both accept the notion of kids being very talented and knowing it quite early, and kids focussing very early on those talents. I think you could perhaps argue that there is such a thing as a ‘computer prodigy’ – as a variant of math prodigies — and that they also require the sort of highly specialized education they will never get in school.
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Better to use as an example the 10,000 kids who immersed themselves in computer games and did not finish high school and are unemployed/unemployable, than the one success story of a high school drop out.
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I think there is a difference between playing games on the computer and kids who tinker with code. The latter may be more likely to benefit from leaving traditional school.
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Yeah, I think unless your kid is clearly super-brilliant at one particular thing like music, sports, or computers, it’s best to make him or her go outside and play every once in a while (and for most regular school is probably a good option). As a kid I’d have read nonstop during the summer if my mother hadn’t made me go outside and do things. Though now that I think about it, maybe I would have excelled just a little bit more and would be teaching at an R1 instead of a state school if I’d had that extra reading time…
Thinking about it makes me want to spend my summer just reading books.
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Ditto on what Marianne said. If I left my kids at the computer all day, it would be games, games, games. Not sure that’s healthy. I’m going to teach them coding this summer, with the idea that they get more screen time if they spend some of it coding. We’ll see how that goes – playing outside may look attractive as compared to coding.
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My brother was a computer genius, and I think it’s usually pretty clear from early on. He bought a phonebook-sized C++ manual with his allowance and started coding at age 12, when we got our first computer. By age 14, he was earning $100/hour as a computer consultant after school. By 17 he had built several of his own computers out of old scavenged parts and got offered a full time job as a programmer at what was back then a major tech company, though he turned it down to finish HS and go to college. My parents definitely made him go out and do other things, and I even prodigies or geniuses can benefit from being more well-rounded.
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In our school district, we have a hockey academy and swimming academy (yes, I’m in Canada ;->). The students who attend these academies have modified schedules so that they can attend school for half days freeing them up to train in the afternoons.
Our local ski hill has a high-level ski athlete who used a mixture of online courses and regular courses to complete her coursework for this school year while training and competing.
If Karp was an athlete instead of someone with a passion for computers, what might have happened? If perhaps, there was a specialized program/internship within his district for him and others like him, would he have stayed in school? I have to wonder.
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Karp attended the Calhoun School from age 3 through 8th grade, then the Bronx High School of Science for 1 year. His mother teaches science at Calhoun.
Can an independent school science teacher supervise her high school aged son’s independent study course (i.e., “homeschooling”)? Yes. Very, very few families fall into that category.
There has always been a small number of people who are geniuses and autodidacts. The modern world now rewards those sorts of people, when they are able to create new computer products. Stamp collecting, not so much.
Even there, though, notice that the sale to Yahoo means his time leading Tumblr is effectively at an end. There is also a trend of tech entrepreneurs handing over the management of a company to people who have passed all the tests of schooling and business.
In my opinion, many skills useful in this new age can be taught, although they come naturally to some. Some of the skills are “old-fashioned.” I think schools should teach logic and rhetoric. Languages are useful too, as computers are programmed in machine languages. Discrete math may be more useful than calculus, although high-level programmers will be able to handle calculus.
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In my opinion, many skills useful in this new age can be taught, although they come naturally to some. Some of the skills are “old-fashioned.” I think schools should teach logic and rhetoric. Languages are useful too, as computers are programmed in machine languages. Discrete math may be more useful than calculus, although high-level programmers will be able to handle calculus.
My brother now does AI and he finds knowledge of Greek philosophy to be extremely useful.
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I am bubbles, which is my password for low-level stuff. Obviously, changing blog formats is challenging my aging mind.
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Yes on the creation v consumption on screen time. Neither of my kids are fixed to the computer playing games. But they do use photoshop and write and research and I’d also be cool with coding.
The difference for dance and sports compared to learning cognitive skillis is that the useful skill has to be picked up young (probably music, too). One might make the argument for pure coding and math, but the premise is certainly less clear.
And our local ballet company has a returning education program, to raise scholarship funds so that the dancers can go to school at 24 and find something to do for the rest of their lives.
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My kid just doesn’t have a particular passion for anything in particular (but would happily sit on the computer and gchat with friends–in fact, she is chatting with me right now from the first floor). Hard to imagine ever supporting her with homeschooling just b/c she doesn’t bring a lot of focus to any inquiry; school is helpful to her in providing some structure. I do wish there were more flexible paths, though, so that it was easier for kids with particular talents to merge school and non-school activities (hockey and swimming academies seem like an interesting idea for those they serve–near here there are some ski academies that take kids from regular schools for the winter for high-level ski training).
On another note: I’ve been reading the RSS feed but not commenting the past few posts. I like the new look!
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Thanks, Susan!
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In the past few years, I’ve taught high school girls who were also training for the Olympics, in gymnastics and swimming. My school worked out programs and distance options so they didn’t have to drop out of either school or their training programs. I think this kind of thing happens fairly often in the independent school world, like where Karp’s mother teaches (taught?), so I wonder if that made her more amenable also.
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Whether you should do this, I think, depends on where your kids are. If they are in the top of the 99th percentile (like Karp clearly was — bored out of his skull at one of the best public schools in NY) then they can do pretty much anything and they’ll do fine.
On the other hand, if they are somewhere in the 90-99th percentile or lower then they’d probably be better off in school.
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Bill Gates famously dropped out of college, started Microsoft, became the richest man in the world and along the way hired almost 100,000 people. A great success story, by any measure. But most of those 100,000 finished college. Especially the more highly paid ones. Without the degree you need an incredible record of accomplishment behind you to keep up. It may not be fair, and it is definitely wasteful in some cases, but it is undoubtedly true.
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A few internet searches to ponder.
“world of Warcraft” unemployed
unemployed Halo
unemployed “call of duty” -veterans
vs.
unemployed Java Cobol
unemployed “Ruby on Rails”
One can use a computer in many ways. If a child is diving deeply into the second group, he may take unusual paths to his adult life, but he has good chances.
As for the other, I think you can repeat these searches with variants. There is a clear pattern.
I would worry about allowing a child to become overly specialized in a career with few job openings, such as professional musician (cellist). Even worse would be aiming at a life as a professional athlete, as even if the child were naturally exceptional, an injury could end the career, leaving the child with fewer “tools in the toolbox” to find another calling.
Becoming specialized in hardware and software is different, because the skills do transfer. Many organizations need IT departments, and will continue to need IT departments. There are more IT people working in schools (only-let alone all the other groups which need IT support) than there are professional musicians supporting themselves playing in symphonies.
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