My eldest child is pretty smart, she basically tested out of the public high school curriculum at age 12, however most of that was due to a voracious and wide ranging reading habit fed out of a pretty strong curiosity drive. College taught her to discipline her efforts toward a specific goal. Sort of like Luke Skywalker learning that even if the force is strong in you, being unable to apply it effectively makes you weak.
The primary difference between the "we're all here together" college and doing it remotely, is the exposure to other people having similar/different challenges and meeting them around you. Since folks are rarely good at everything having people around who are good at things you aren't good at lets you learn from them, and they from you. People deal with stress, and failure, and challenge in different ways. In a college community you get to see how others do that and decide if its going to work for you. That stuff you can't get remotely and that is unfortunate.
you act like he hasn't already learned linux administration/networking/programming on his own
It reads as if you have equated skill acquisition with knowledge acquisition, can you say more about what leads you to believe those are equivalent?
if you don't think there is a metric ton of domain specific knowledge represented in what he's already doing then you may not be as familiar with the topics as you think you are or are not remembering what it took to attain that familiarity.
but i am also privy to other areas of knowledge aqusition that might identify this minor more than i fear i have already
i guess that's the difference between people that inherited knowledge (without any need of it) instead of having to arrive at it (because they were feeding themselves and their kids with it).
that kind of explains why, of the over 200 interviews i've conducted, some of the college educated "programmers" i came across seemed knowledgeable; until i made them write code that is.
thanks for solving that conundrum.
The core of that argument, like this one, is that the fundamental assumptions about what the activity is providing are incorrect, and that leads to poor reasoning about the problem.
In my case the young man had made assumptions about signalling his body gave him with regard to being hungry or not as a signal of quality and/or acceptability. In the author's case the young man has conflated the value of education with the value of earning a living.
I agree with others here that if he is "that smart" he should be able to just finish up the high school curriculum and get that out of the way. I'd certainly consider home schooling him, since his business is so successful he should be able to hire himself an individual tutor, get the basics covered, get certified, and then get his degree. These folks typically deal with kids of movie stars or executives who are travelling a lot but they are out there.
If the kid is smart, and you want to reason with them, do it at the company level which he has so much of his identity invested in.
What is his gross margin? EIBTA? Net income? What are the strengths, weaknesse, opportunities, and threats for his business? What happens if Notch decides to cut off folks like him? What's the next step in his life? And the one after that. When he's dead what does his obituary say, "Man he ran the best Minecraft servers." ? He has shown that he can create a business, that is great, but does he have the stones to make bigger businesses? Or is he strictly small time, the 21st century equivalent of the guy who owns and runs the gas station on the corner his whole life? Who are his heroes? His anti-heroes?
Clearly he has had success in his goals, but he doesn't know what he doesn't know. The goal of an education is to give you the tools to attack the problem of developing knowledge when you are confronted with a lack and a need to know. Its artificial in the education system (do you really need to know about ancient history?) but the tools and techniques are widely applicable.