While I agree with this sentiment to an extent, I hate when people bring it up like this. There's a lot of good reasons for schools to have rigid rules other th

While I agree with this sentiment to an extent, I hate when people bring it up like this. There's a lot of good reasons for schools to have rigid rules other than the cynical idea that schools are purely there to teach kids to conform so that they'll make good, obedient workers. For one, parents expect that schools are, at least to some extent, keeping their kids safe and out of trouble during school hours. It may not always work out that way, but when the rule is that they have to be in class, at least the school isn't endorsing them leaving, so there's a lot less liability. Also, there's a lot of gray area that arises if you start making exceptions. How old is old enough for high achievers to skip school? Obviously, you're not going to let a first grader skip school, but when does it start becoming ok? And how high achieving do they have to be? If a kid has a B+ in one class, is he still allowed to skip school? And when do you tell a straight-A student whose grades start to slip that he has to start coming to class again? If he gets one B on one test, that's probably just a fluke, but where do you draw the line and tell him he's not doing well enough? Plus the lower-achieving kids would complain of unfairness. And it's a lot harder to enforce rules against truancy when some people are allowed to leave. People would see kids leaving school, but might assume that they're just approved truants. It also raises the incentive to cheat. A student could cheat on every assignment and test to keep up his A averages so that he can keep skipping school, and then he'd really be learning absolutely nothing. That's an extreme case, and he'd probably get caught eventually, but when you reward high marks on tests, people will go to great lengths to do better, but they might not be the lengths you want.