In my experience and observation, as the age and school level increases, there's more actual learning going on.

By the time you're 16, I'd say a significant amount of school time is decently geared toward learning, and you're old enough to supplement that yourself during spares or downtime if you want to.

At younger ages though, it definitely seems like more of a daycare service than a learning focused environment. The free daycare is important, but I do feel bad for the kids who are stuck in that absurd environment. Someone can come up to you and stab you with a pencil for no reason and that's just par for the course.

Because of child labor laws.

In which country are 16 year olds not allowed to work?

In my nation 16-year olds may work outside of school hours (school is mandatory until they are 18 years old). There are other hard limits on which types of jobs and the time of day they may work. Work shall never interfere with school.

Which suggests that the child labor laws for 16-year-olds are there to keep 16-year-olds in school, rather than school being there as a place to put 16-year-olds who are banned from employment.

In Germany you can leave school at 16 and work full-time.

That is not true for most states in Germany.

After 10 years of mandatory school most states have what is called "Berufsschulpflicht" until you are at least 18 years old.

That means you have to learn a job, which is not the same as working full-time and still considered education.

16 year olds in Germany are employed and they can work 40 hours a week.

Claiming that 16 year olds "can not work because they have mandatory school" is false.

Have you met a 16-year old?

They are old enough to drive certain vehicles and old enough to buy alcohol. If we trust them with that surely we can let them do things during the day without constant adult supervision.

The legal drinking age in Finland is 18 or 20, depending on the ABV.

Where us the drinking age 16?

In Denmark anything less that 16.5% can be purchased by 16 year olds.

This is crazy. 16.5 is stronger than regular wine.

That's exactly the point. It's a middle ground ABV where there aren't a ton of products and below which are mostly fermented beverages and above which is distilled liquor.

I was talking about Germany.

Belgium as well.

In Switzerland, it is 16 for beer and wine, and 18 for spirits (or drinks that contain spirits, like "alcopops", even if they have a low ABV). I think Austria and Germany are the same.

Most US states, last I checked. Note: drinking age, not age to buy alcohol. Usually there's some rule about parental consent or only at home.

Do you remember yourself at the age of 16?

Sure.

> They are old enough to drive certain vehicles and old enough to buy alcohol

Hopefully not at the same time.

They would drive to and from the store. Drinking what they bought is a different matter.

It was meant to be a joke.

Depends on what. I can't even trust the 40 year developers in my team at work. "Hacky if foreach loop will fix later"

Trust is a privilege that must be earned not given. Prove to me you're trustworthy and I'll give you trust.

One untrustworthy 16 year old can cause hell chaos in a group of trustworthy teenagers. I've seen it when I was a youth worker.

Trust is by far most often given and earned (or lost) post facto. In fact, that's an essential characteristic of a society.

> Depends on what. I can't even trust the 40 year developers in my team at work. "Hacky if foreach loop will fix later"

Whenever people make statements like this, I always wonder what their peers think of them. This dismissive attitude is so off-putting.

People who make statements like that are the kind of people you dread will pick up your pull request. You just know you're going to go from maybe spending an hour cleaning up some suggestions to a 3-day philosophical battle to get them to a point where they deign to accept your PR.

I really don't have time to care about what my peers think of me. It's work. I don't want to communicate with them outside work. Work isn't a friend zone

I want working maintainable code to enable me to do my job. If people dread submitting a PR because they can't write code with effort, good. I like my ships built strong not weak like your ego.

If they fix their problem, good. Trust given, more than happy to salute however time and time they've proven to me they don't.

These developers have proven to me they won't. These are developers who are those who do not fix the issuing code and will just move on to the next problem hacking it to make it work.

If you've never worked with such, then lucky. If this sting for you, time to grow up and put effort in to your work.

Ok, so the PR never gets approved and their work never makes it into prod, right?

No. I put my view on to reject PR and they go to the next best person to approve.

Blag the senior with bullshite of: "I will fix this in the next revision, it works for now" and don't.

I'm not to engage further as you're only ever going to repeat yourself in more obnoxious ways, but I will say that if you treat people in real life the way you comment here, you will only ever be tolerated at best. Never respected and never liked.

Even the people you consider peers will abhor that you think and speak like this about people.

You don't say. The feelings mutual, your attitude is something far from desirable.

Looking at your past comments: "Perhaps self-reflection is in order", I agree. You're very hostile, angry? You should look in to that.

I wish you the best in life, I truly do, you have some growing up to do.

> I don't want to communicate with them outside work. Work isn't a friend zone

Neither of these things was suggested or raised so this is quite a bizarre rant to go on.

Even if you care about neither of those things, what your peers think of you still matters because you must work with them.

No, they really don't. They submit their code. I submit mine. If they have a problem with mine, I'll fix what they have issues with if they are reasonable, why wouldn't I?

Where I work in enterprise your peers change daily. With my role and importance to the company implementing hacky code puts me at risk and so I will of course push back. The people I knew last months may not even work in the company.

The view of I must be a horrible person comes from the Comment OP being angry at me for having a reasonable standards to an Enterprise standard of code. "It works im done. Next please"

If their code isn't up to scratch I will tell them and reject it. The issue I have is lazy developers who implement hacks and don't actually go and fix the code.

I am being made the bad person from someone's angry hospitality. All I was saying is that lazy developers are lazy developers and that I axe their work because it's sloppy and doesn't deserve to be on show.

I don't trust them and they prove to me I can't. They don't own to their mistakes nor fix their problems.

Now your left with a code base forever with tech debt because of a hacky foreach if loop.

You're telling me you've never worked with anyone who does half arsed work? Where you need to pick up their slack? Lucky you.

Because if you can't do a proper job at least on elementary level then what do you do then when they refuse to fix their mess?

I'm not even sure what you're talking about. Is this a JavaScript complaint and they were meant to use a for..of? Are you an FP purist and think they were supposed to use map/filter?

This sounds like you have some very specific trauma around a very specific "foreach if loop", because I would personally never throw around such a specific-but-not-specific example of tech debt. Tech debt is extremely contextual.

In a very real way, adolescents rise to the responsibilities given to them. Usually teenagers that need modulating is a reflection on their upbringing rather than any innate flaw.

Yes, they can be fully functioning young adults if not raised terribly

And what percentage of entire population of them is not raised terribly?

Their fingers are too big to fit in electrical sockets, they should be fine.

No worries. A tongue will always fit. Especially after some alcohol.

Child care? This is legally required school attendance for under 18 year olds.

Most school days are way shorter than that. The curriculum seems to keep my kids intellectually engaged. Commenting as a finn.

Sure, different countries have different norms.

In Finland 16 olds are not allowed to drink and access to alcohol is state controlled.

IMHO learning foreign languages, math, history, biology and physics is not child care.

This is in preparation to getting access to upper secondary education (vocational or academic). Usually you start this at 16.

This is not a simple question but one part of the answer is that students are a) ready for upper secondary education b) their grades can be used to grade access to schools with top upper secondary schools being extremely hard to get into.

Ofc if you ask “why would a society do this” I guess the reason is that an educated population is expected to be more productive AND because the law requires schooling up to 18 it also implies all students must have access to free schools with close to zero material costs. So it’s intended also to level the playing field for all social classes.

Is this worse or better than germanys system is impossible for me to tell.