= Students must be allowed to progress as fast as they want
One of the main reasons for <Students must have a flexible choice of what to learn>{full}.
We've created a system where people just wait, and wait, and wait, never really doing what they really want.
They wait through school to get into university.
They wait through university to get to masters.
They wait through masters to get to <PhD>.
They wait through <PhD> to become a PI.
And for the minuscule fraction of those that make it, <academia is broken>[they become fund proposal writers].
And if you make any wrong choice along the, it's all over, you can't continue anymore, the cost would be too great.
So you just become <software engineer> or a consultant until you die.
Is this the society that we really want?
From <True Genius: The Life and Science of John Bardeen> Chapter 2 "Roots":
> John (\[<John Bardeen>[Bardeen]\].) and Bill (\[his brother\]) entered the combined seventh-eighth grade at "Uni High," Wisconsin's University High School, in the same year-John from third grade and William from fifth.
Established in September 1911, the school had been conceived as a laboratory for training high school instructors and for testing progressive ideas in education. In its philosophy and organization, Uni resembled the Dewey School. The students were accelerated as much as possible to keep lessons challenging. One goal was to "introduce pupils to high school methods and subjects before they reached the 9th grade." The fourth quarter, offered during the summer, allowed students who had missed work or had fallen behind to catch up. It also enabled the brightest students to complete senior high school in only three years
...
Even with the disruption of Althea’s death, John completed all his Uni High course work by age thirteen. But as he was "a little leery about graduating so young," he and Bill decided to attend Madison Central High School for two years, taking additional mathematics, science, and literature courses not offered at Uni. By the time John had turned fifteen and Bill seventeen, the two had completed every course of interest at Madison Central. There was no longer any reason to postpone entering college. In the fall of 1923 they both entered the freshman class at the University of Wisconsin.
Meanwhile, at the <University of Oxford> https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2005/aug/21/highereducation.accesstouniversity Oxford to turn away child prodigies
> We have been pushed to consider it, not because of concerns about whether it is psychologically healthy for children to study here, but because of child protection laws which have come into play this year for the first time.
FUUUUUUUCK. And so, in protecting children, we also rob them of their own future. But the official policy as of 2023 is unchanged at least in theory: https://uni-of-oxford.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/557/~/do-oxford-undergraduate-courses-have-a-minimum-age-requirement%3F Article also mentions Yinan Wang. Can't find his profiles now.
Bibliography:
* <Mentava>
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