I've personally always favored self-study and I wanted to promote that idea here. I think there are many advantages to it, such as the ability to work at your own speed and the ability to concentrate on the areas that you're most interested in ...
So how about a combination of the two and setting up an organised mentoring programme.
Something like, beginner posts his current level, and future interests ... experienced developer agrees to help direct their efforts.
...
Well, that's a good idea. Unfortunately, making it an "organized program" implies that folks on both sides have to make commitments to it (primarily time commitments); otherwise, it's not really going to be very organized. My concern is that our mentor candidates simply aren't capable of making a commitment such as that. As I said earlier, I suspect that most developers can hardly find the time to work on their own projects (I know that's absolutely true about myself).
Having said that though, it's important to add that I believe most developers would be happy to help others as they can. I'll speak only for myself: I'd be happy to help by answering the occasional question; but my ability to do so will be spotty at best, since my schedule simply won't permit any more than that. I do already try to help whenever I can.
Maybe a solution (a partial one, at least) is to create a forum just for newbie developers to ask questions that veteran developers can answer as their availability allows. Think of this as a one-to-many approach which optimizes use of our current resources (as opposed to the one-to-one approach which I think just won't work here due to lack of resources). The archive from this forum would prove invaluable to later budding developers and it will probably also provide the raw material to build a new developers FAQ.
We do already have the "Everything Development" forum with a bunch of sub-forums for specific topics. This new forum would probably be exclusively for newbie questions on all development topics and would hopefully encourage newbies to post their questions there. (I can imagine that some newbie developers might feel intimidated posting in the primary developnent forums.) It might also encourage newbies to cooperate with each other in their shared learning experience (yikes, that sounds little too touchy-feeling....
So, what do you think of that? It might fall a little short of "developer school" but it may be the best we can do with our current resources. Perhaps we can name the forum "Developer School" (or "Development 101").
~ray