Huh, so if they have a beneficial effect I wonder what happens if you disrupt their lifecycle. Are they, for instance, sensitive to certain cleansing compounds, etc.
I enjoyed school quite a lot, though admittedly the environments of my high school and college were quite special.
It was basically an undergraduate experience in terms of intellectual rigor, and the group of classmates I had around me genuinely cared for and looked after each other. A majority of our teachers were wonderful mentors who treated us with high expectations but respect and support.
Then college (at a tech school) was basically grad school level in terms of expecting students to participate in research and make original intellectual contributions.
I think my experience shouldn’t be so rare and special as many young people would enjoy and benefit from it as well. Undoubtedly there are other awesome options that don’t involve as much formal schooling. There should be options available as one size doesn’t fit all.
“There’s the old apocryphal story that in 1967, they went to the basement of the Pentagon, when the mainframe computers took up the whole basement, and they put on the old punch cards everything you could quantify. Numbers of ships, numbers of tanks, numbers of helicopters, artillery, machine gun, ammo—everything you could quantify,” says James Willbanks, the chair of military history at U.S. Army Command and General Staff College. “They put it in the hopper and said, ‘When will we win in Vietnam?’ They went away on Friday and the thing ground away all weekend. [They] came back on Monday and there was one card in the output tray. And it said, 'You won in 1965.’”