>OMG. Disaster AND total implausibility.
One of the most interesting books I read study soc of education was Bronfenbrenner's comparative study of soviety and u.s. schooling. For Bronfenbrenner, one of the things that made the u.s. system so bad was the age grading and the insistence on separating children from adults. By doing so, children came to have no sense of the world of work, they didn't understand what their parents did, how things were made, etc. etc. In other words, schooling _could_ be used as a way of making work _less_ alienated. Alas, we shove our kids into artificial environments and pretend to ourselves and them that it's preparing them for the real world.
While the problem of kids having to work their way through school IS an issue, there is another problem: that of continually shoving them off into some holding warehouse where they simulate being adults. It's just another way of lengthening childhood.
Joanna had a point about maturity. There is something to the fact that we mature emotionally and, no doubt, mentally. Eric Fromm made mention of some research to support this --though I can't recall the title at the mo'. I think it's spot on. Why does there have to be some _stage_ of life where we attend college anyway? How's about reduced work hours for all, with time for us all to attend a course or two -- if you want to imagine utopia!
k