[16-year-old Kayla Heard] lives with her mother and brother on the banks of the Hood Canal in Union, Wash. Next month, she will become the youngest person ever to graduate from Washington State University. She pursued her degree online.This is damned crazy, isn't it?
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So positive was Kayla's undergraduate online experience, she hopes to attend law school online and to that end will spend her summer filling out applications.
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The homeschooler, who will pursue international law, hopes to work abroad one day.
I explained my position in a comment, but just to reiterate, I honestly believe this child's parents are grossly negligent, especially if they promote her getting an online degree.
I am all for nurturing prodigies. If our society somehow (against all odds) produces the next Mozart or Keats, we should celebrate their gifts and do everything we can as a society to aid their progress.
But I want to be crystal clear: getting an online college degree at 16 is neither an indication of prodigy or a process that truly can nurture intellectual gifts. Likewise, getting an online degree in law does nothing to nurture one's innate abilities, nor does it particularly improve one's employability.
This individual is obviously gifted. But checking off perfunctory requirements in a race to get the high school diploma, the B.A., the graduate degree, is an absurd task that detracts from their overall intellect by denying them an opportunity to nurture their talents in other ways. Instead of knowledge being an end in itself, knowledge becomes a means to attaining another notch in the belt, whereby the individual can plow through to another degree.
If Kayla does graduate with a law degree at 19, I would never in a million years hire her as a young attorney. No one should. An important part of being a lawyer (or any profession) is having some level of emotional development. I'm all for homeschooling for elementary school in some cases, but if you rarely leave the house and interact with others, you have no business representing anyone.
If we're ever going to change things in American education, we have to start recognizing some fundamental truths. One such truth is that no matter how smart and how driven you are, you simply cannot always get your dream job. A real parent would grab young Kayla by the shoulders and tell her that if she wants to be an international lawyer, she needs to go to a real brick-and-mortar law school, and that going to an online law school will prove to be a worthless sojourn that may actually foreclose her from working in the firms that do international law.
If we're ever to restore our system of education, we must stop telling these lies. People are not skeptics merely because they are "jealous" of another's abilities. They are skeptics because blind faith in anything - including the "I can do anything" mantra - is one of the worst attributes of humanity.
What happens to these poor children is that they are pumped up by a dim-witted Hollywood-fueled society who wants to tell them they are amazing and push them through the ranks of schooling. But at the end of the tunnel, what happens? They wind up with PhD's fighting for faculty positions like the other schmucks who wound up in graduate school. Or, in Kayla's case, they wind up as unemployed attorneys because in the rah-rah lead-up to her online law degree no one told her that no one at the big law firms is interested in a degree from Concord.
There's a disconnect between what the market really wants and between what people tell these kids the market wants. That's ultimately the problem. The truth is that the only people who want a 19-year-old lawyer are people who looking for amusement, that news article about the youngest-person-ever doing something. The people who actually pay lawyers to do international law work have no business for a 19-year-old lawyer who's never been in a brick-and-mortar school.
Who ultimately loses in this arrangement? The kids, and no one else. The amused get what they want - while calling those of us with an ounce of realism "jealous" - and the employers continue employing people who are actually qualified in their eyes. The kid is stuck with whatever baggage the ignorance of the promoters left him with.
In the end, that's ultimately the problem with our entire educational system: no one's really and honestly interested in making the actual students fit market needs. The teachers teach to tests so they can pass politicians' low hurdles. The college professors teach their research interests. The advisers advise to pre-set scheduling sheets. The law professors never bother actually preparing their students for practice, so long as they set up a class that will make exam-grading easy and allow them to teach socratically.
And so employers are left finding clumsy heuristics. If a student has a B.S. degree, surely at some point, they learned how to function in an office and do basic mathematics. If a student has a M.B.A., surely at some point someone taught them how to manage inventory and do basic accounting. And so with every generation, another degree is required. In my parents' generation, getting a bachelor's set one for the labor market. In my older cousin's, getting a master's degree meant you were in good shape. In my generation, not even an advanced graduate degree can save you unless it's in a niche field of need.
To fix our education system, we have to stop thinking this way. But poor Kayla obviously has too many people in her life telling her that her next step should always be to get a degree. Whoever told her officially entering college at 10 was a good idea should be slapped across the face, and whoever is telling her now that entering a law curriculum at 16 is a good idea should be slapped across the face. And the journalists who perpetuate these myths by appealing to the stupid should be slapped across the face.
The best thing Kayla can do right now is avoid school like the plague for a good 3-4 years. Grow up (from 16-20 is a crucial and large developmental step for anyone) a bit. Travel, work, learn in those ways that people used to learn but now they eschew in favor of yet another degree. Do something else, but for the love of all that's good and holy, do not stay in the education vortex. The world (the real world, the one that matters) simply does not reward you for racing through an education, regardless of what the Hollywood-minded tell you.
And sadly, you are not "unique" enough to change the fundamentals of the world. No one is, and anyone who tells you otherwise is derelict in their duty as a parent, adviser, or global citizen. Knowledge is power, but it has to be the right kind of knowledge, and until you learn the world enough to know who gets hired as international lawyers, you'd be wise to stay away from legal education.
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