How do parents make sure their kids study their assess off? I value education highly, but my kid does not want to study. Hates it. It is painful. I cannot bring myself to force it to happen. Not sure that I could force it to happen anyway.
An idea I had when I left school and was confronted with the reality that is the job market: We should put 11 year olds in factory conveyor belt work for a month. 12 year olds for 2 months, 13 year olds for 3 months, 14 year olds for 4 months. Quite boring to read isn't it?
Then we tell them, see? You don't have to study at all! There is plenty of work for you!
Ideally they should not be paid. It should be a service provided for free to the [ideally] already wealthy owner of the factory. Yes, you just spend 4 months making money for someone who already has a lot of money.
It sounds lame but it is a nice thing to do compared to confronting kids with their new factory life sentence after they failed school.
Let them buy their own gadgets from their own paychecks. Let them work, or show them, some really tough physical labor jobs and the lifestyle those jobs enable.
Why do you want your child to "study their ass off"? I'd expect the answer is something along the lines that they'll be able to work their ass off for an employer later in life. Perhaps your child has caught onto this and is not interested. I never have been either.
I am around ~40 now. The Asian/Russian Jewish kids I grew up with whose parents made them "study their ass off" are now by-and-large folks with families, homes, interesting and challenging careers, etc.
The kids who didn't... aren't. I want to give my kids a better shot at a better outcome in life. There's no guarantees but I want to maximize their chances and knowing how to learn and work is a key input to that.
You mentioned in another post some pointless teacher-pleasing that you engaged in, I am not sure why you think that's the only or even a common path. Most of these kids I am talking about adopted their parents' "invest in yourself" mentality, and also by-and-large found their studies challenging and interesting. You seem to be taking your own worst-case and projecting it onto the world.
What's worse - my worst-case or those kids you mention who didn't make it? I fully agree with you that the country is brutal to the uneducated, forced as they are into low status (and yet often surprisingly socially important) jobs which provide marginal incomes. I'm not willing to use "Shame, guilt, social pressure, and beatings if necessary" (as a sibling commenter of mine suggested) on a child to enforce this system in which we reside. Are you?
There was actually a recent article on this subject in The Cut
The author's son seems to already be experiencing the existential dread of this system in kindergarten. Meanwhile rates of teenage depression and suicide increase while life expectancy in the US decreases. I'll never understand this place.
