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Abolish High School (2015)

• bradlys 5y ago
  I think having alternatives to high school is good. That said, I’ve experienced what happens when high schoolers infiltrate the community colleges - it feels like high school all over again. A bit better, sure. But the level of immaturity and the disruptions are very similar. God help you if you get a group project with 15 year olds. Ultimately, there are many people at a young age who have no interests in being a part of the type of society that has been around for the last 30-40 years. And they are a sizable portion of youths. Nihilism (in many forms...) is strong at that age and so is the lack of interest in hard work. Ultimately, what do you do for those kids for them to be happy? UBI would really be the only thing... That’s the only way you could get these counter-culture kids who are more focused on disruption out. Also, most kids who are problematic in school tend to have problematic parents. Trickles down real well that stuff.
  • mixmastamyk 5y ago
    Smart, interested 15s sure. The kind of folks you mention, why would they even come? Or not drop after the first test.
    • bradlys 5y ago
      > The kind of folks you mention, why would they even come? Or not drop after the first test. Why would they ever go to high school to begin with? Why not just drop? Same reason they all go - societal pressure. Besides, being a disruption or a PITA does not mean you fail academically. You can do quite well academically but absolutely be a huge PITA to all your peers. I think you overestimate the intellect and interest required to succeed in an academic environment. We don't live in some weird society where only the most intellectually gifted (however you define that) and most interested are capable of succeeding in college or academica.
      • barry-cotter 5y ago
        > Why would they ever go to high school to begin with? Why not just drop? Same reason they all go - societal pressure. Truancy laws aren’t societal pressure. They’re a threat, enforced, that if you don’t send your child to school men with guns will lock you up. Disruptions and PITA do not want to be in school, for the large majority. For all of them, they do not want to be in that class. If they were free not to go they wouldn’t. You’re quite right that standards have been dropped enormously since when academia was the pursuit of a small minority but they haven’t slipped to where someone of average intelligence can graduate from a four year university. Standards still exist.
        • bradlys 5y ago
          > but they haven’t slipped to where someone of average intelligence can graduate from a four year university. I don’t know what you think intelligence is but I’m gonna say this is easily disproved by the number of dumb as dumbbells folks I see out there with degrees... Truancy laws only get enforced in certain regions and vary on rules... I saw plenty of kids dropping out where I grew up.
          • barry-cotter 5y ago
            I strongly suspect you are dealing with a range restriction problem. Dumb and dumb for a university graduate are not the same. Dumb for a university graduate: can’t do algebra Dumb for a high school graduate: can’t divide a five digit number by a two digit number with pencil and paper Dumb for the general population: can’t do arithmetic
            • chaosharmonic 5y ago
              This also depends somewhat on area of study, honestly. Having majored in music (and picked up most of my technical skills just out of a habit for tinkering), my running joke was always that none of my classes required me to count past 32.
  • souprock 5y ago
    I sent two of my kids to community college at 13. The only immaturity problem was that one of the two was a slacker about getting assignments done, but older people at the school also had that issue often enough. The other kid now has a 4.0 GPA on 48 credits, and you'd have never guessed she wasn't an adult.
    • bradlys 5y ago
      Congrats? I’m speaking from my own experience in a school that had 25%+ high school children in it (effectively 50% because many adult students were part time). It was high school 2.0. Your own experience of your children going to school doesn’t reflect the experience of what others had to deal with at that school or in relation to your children... grades be damned.
      • souprock 5y ago
        It really is high school 2.0, as you can tell by the classes offered. There are classes that are below what is traditional for high school, but college credit is given. You can get college credit for the very first introductory algebra class. That's honors 7th grade, or regular 9th grade. About the same applies for English composition and science. It's not just older people who wish to avoid being in classes with immature young people. The mature young people are also trying to get away from the awfulness.
  • runawaybottle 5y ago
    Mostly agreeing with you: What is this fantasy that abolishing school will do for these kids? They won’t magically discover themselves, as we are all beholden to the normal distribution. At some point or another, your ass is going to have to wake up at 8am every day and get to a desk and sit for 8 hours (yes, even at your dream job at Google) with people you may or may not like, just so you can have a small afternoon on a Sunday walking the dog or watching a movie. That’s reality. Childhood is already a massive fantasy. Half the reason why many adults are maladjusted is because they can’t get out of the fantasy of childhood. No, your parents won’t pay your bills. Yeah, you will have a boss. Mmmhmm, it’s going to suck and you are going to have to find a way to get along. Oh, and that competition and bullying you were worried about, multiply that by 100 at any well paying office job. Hi, welcome to the world, hope you have some experience dealing with people because shit just got real. Learn that at the youngest age(s) possible, because the harsh reality is no one later in life is going to wait around for you to ‘figure it out’. The whole world will pass you by and no one will bat an eye.
• notdang 5y ago
  I grew up in a poor country with a lot of problems, however it gave me an extremely decent education up to the high school. My parents wouldn't have been able to do it alone. So no, for me and my peers abolishing the high school wouldn't have been an option.
  • adamnemecek 5y ago
    I'm not sure how old you are but I think that the internet has legit made formal education obsolete.
    • grenoire 5y ago
      Formal education for certain things; there are a lot of other things that require you to be taught by somebody else, in person. Things that make up the physical infrastructure which we rely on, in particular. Nevertheless, it's not obsolete until we can reliably teach people how to teach themselves. We are far, far from that point. Access to knowledge is a teeny tiny part of the entire challenge.
      • adamnemecek 5y ago
        Sure, however the problem is that school as it works now is too time consuming and it doesn't feel like it uses my time wisely.
    • zhdc1 5y ago
      It hasn't. In person learning is still the way to go.
    • MattGaiser 5y ago
      No, as most people will not do it on their own without being forced to. Many others will cheat their way through and claim more than they actually know. We have solved the information access problem, but that was not the only barrier.
      • staticassertion 5y ago
• MattGaiser 5y ago
  A couple of years ago I got an honourable mention in an essay competition on school shootings and in it I discussed how schools are the one place in most people's lives that they have no power to escape. [0] You can quit a crappy job. You can transfer to a different university. You can ghost your friends. In nearly every social system after high school, there is some measure of self selection. But you have no power to extract yourself from that environment unless your parents are willing to send you to private school or move. I am not sure there is a need to abolish high school, but rather just provide additional resolutions for those for whom it is a very poor fit and better clamp down on those who want to harm others in the ecosystem. Schools handle edge cases very poorly and they do an even worse job of managing those who wish to do harm. [0] http://www.psychological-observations.com/918-jmh-international-essays-on-the-psychology-of-anger-and-or-violence/jmh-international-prize-essay-contest-2016/358-jmh-2016-essay-6 http://www.psychological-observations.com/918-jmh-internatio...
  • mulderc 5y ago
    I imagine this varies significantly from place to place but when I was in high school you could pretty easily switch to other public high schools in the area and there were several charter schools and alternative schools available for students not well served by the public schools. Since this was a fairly rural area in a fairly average state, I have always thought that this type of school choice was fairly common but I could be wrong.
    • xyzzy_plugh 5y ago
      I don't believe that is common, especially in more urban areas where there is only one public school option. Often there are huge waitlists to change public schools, if they have any availability at all.
    • MattGaiser 5y ago
      It probably depends a lot on funding and student classification. I know that I had access to a lot of options as a student coded "gifted" but if I went public, then there would be a need for a special exemption (as the property taxes were registered to the Catholic board), but one of my cousins was stuck in a crappy school as there was nothing special about him.
• fsckboy 5y ago
  fyi/point of interest, the author, Rebecca Solnit, is essentially the originator of the "mansplaining" concept. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/06/books/review/recollections-of-my-nonexistence-rebecca-solnit.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/06/books/review/recollection... I have previously read up on that and her original exemplar story and I don't think she was as insightful about herself and her own role in that moment as she was about the guy mansplaining to her, but still, she definitely had her finger on the pulse of a cultural phenomenon.
• staticassertion 5y ago
  In the 5 years that I was enrolled in high school I likely attended considerably less than most others do in their 4 years. Instead, I skipped classes and walked around NYC. Sometimes I'd go to the Hudson river and read - sometimes books for school, or sometimes books I'd picked up myself. I'd go to Barnes and Nobles sometimes, the big one in Union Square, and sit and read. I was really into physics back then so I'd grab some pop physics book and dig into it. One class I enjoyed had us read Pere Goriot, which I loved, and kicked off a 'sit on the Hudson with some Balzac' phase. And of course sometimes I'd play video games or sleep in, or just try to relax. I'm not going to pretend that there wasn't a lot of leisure in there, and I don't think that's a bad thing at all. When I did go to school I was pretty social. I skipped class, chilled in various places and hung out with people. I went to classes that I thought were fun if I wanted to, but usually that would become too annoying to schedule around the classes I had no interest in, so I'd fall behind in the good ones and kinda throw the baby out with the bathwater. I never really experienced bullying, and the schools I went to were pretty good about that sort of thing. Still, I did witness it - there's no school I've seen that doesn't have a "weird kid" who people tease. I found the article's focus on that interesting, because I hadn't considered it. High school added tons of anxiety to my life because being truant is actually not that easy to pull off, and is something where the government at some point gets involved. I was absolutely labeled as lazy and written off by many, which I think anyone who knows me today would laugh at, since I'm a CEO and work constantly. For those who were actually different enough to be bullied I can't even really imagine what that must have been like. And we tell kids "high school ends eventually", but it's 4 years of your life in misery, critical, developmental years, and instead of asking what the fuck we're doing we just tell them "it'll be over soon" where "soon" is not at all soon. What high school gave me was a place to meet people my age, to pick up some interesting books and knowledge (I'd sometimes meet with teachers after class to discuss or trade books), and really, primarily, to date and get a lot of social experience. To me, everything else was to the detriment of my life. I greatly resent much of what was imposed on me, I feel more strongly than ever at this stage in my life that high school was an unjustified, gross burden that made learning harder for me than it should have been. Like the author I still support the idea of giving young people structured places to learn, but we need to seriously re-evaluate the goals. While many of my peers took on tons of debt, I thankfully was not accepted into any private university, instead starting my adult life with some odd jobs here or there before finally attending state school, where I dropped out after 5 semesters and began working as a software engineer. All of high school for them was gearing up to this great thing, college, which now most of them associate with massive debt - some of them owing hundreds of thousands of dollars to this day. It shouldn't be hard to point at the system and go "yeah that's fucked up", but of course, I'm nearly 30 now and the pains of high school aren't exactly top of mind.
• burlesona 5y ago
  This really resonates for me. High school was a colossal waste of time, and a very unhealthy environment, that I think made me a worse person for a time. I’ve been thinking a lot about how to help my kids skip high school, but I don’t quite know how to do it. As the author, I don’t think that it should be banned, but I agree that kids should not be forced to attend. If anything, merely removing the mandate might make the experience of those who stay a lot better. For me a lot of the stress came from the hostility and bullying that the kids who did not want to be there inflicted on anyone who dared to show interest in class, ask questions, or, gasp, pass classes. Has anyone found an alternative path for their kids to avoid high school, and if so how did it go?
  • krrrh 5y ago
    No sure about your state but I’ve known people in Canada who avoided it by doing core subjects via correspondence programs. It freed up time for them to pursue other interests or work. It didn’t seem to be a barrier to them getting into any public universities, but I don’t know how that works in the US where elite education seems to matter a lot more.
  • browningstreet 5y ago
    We are homeschooling my son and he’s be a senior this next term. It’s gone very well for us, academically and socially and the like, but now we have to make him a transcript for college applications and he followed a job-standard curriculum. We were counting on the SAT scores being an important part of his transcript, we’ll see how changes in that vein work out. Every year we ask him if he’d like to return to conventional schooling, he’s not tempted at all. His not-school devotions are numerous, so it’s also been rewarding from a family perspective.
    • chrisseaton 5y ago
      > he followed a job-standard curriculum What's a 'job-standard curriculum'?
      • linux_is_nice 5y ago
• ashleyn 5y ago
  The older I get, the more I realise "high school" wasn't really the problem at all. High school, like any other government institution, is ultimately a reflection of the values of the people who run them. And in some places - those values aren't necessarily the best.
  • noobermin 5y ago
    When a system relies on "good people" and where "bad people" ruin it, the system itself isn't great, it's broken.
    • asdff 5y ago
      There is no system that can't be co-opted and ruined by bad people.
      • mixmastamyk 5y ago
        US Constitution, first thing to come to mind.
        • viburnum 5y ago
          US constitution is bad though. Nobody is good enough to make it work.
          • mixmastamyk 5y ago
            It works when folks aren’t hysterical.
        • sneak 5y ago
          Slavery (as well as the continued and sustained widespread lack of due process/equal protection) stands as a great proof of asdff's point given your example.
          • mixmastamyk 5y ago
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• jonshariat 5y ago
  American education is old and dated. So inefficient and does a lot of harm. There are plenty of great TED talks on this very subject as well. Will it change? It doesn't seem anything major can change in the US with the current state of politics, but there are some options open to those parents with $ or a willingness to build their own education via the amazing quality resources online from top schools, creative teachers on YouTube, etc.
  • colour 5y ago
    I don't think it's anything but myth that it be a any better outside the borders of America.
• BlackVanilla 5y ago
  I recently found out about Summit Public Schools. By the sounds of it, this model aims to provide students with more autonomy than they would in a normal school. There is an emphasis on self-directed learning and teachers act more as mentors than lecturers. If your metric to measure success is admission to unviersity, it works! They claim 98% of their students are accepted onto 4-year courses and have twice the graduation rate relative to the US average. [1] Even if that isn't your metric for success (there are good reasons why it shouldn't be) it at least demonstrates ability. Perhaps this is a good bridge between school and homeschooling as we know it. I'm sure you can tell from reading this that I only have surface-level understanding, so I'd be interested to hear from anybody who knows more about these schools or other schools that do similar things. Or indeed anybody who wants to shake up education/has some good ideas! You can read more here: https://summitps.org/ https://summitps.org/ [1] https://summitps.org/the-summit-model/our-results/ https://summitps.org/the-summit-model/our-results/
• idoh 5y ago
  Let's not abolish it, but let's provide some alternatives. If you can demonstrate some proficiency across the three Rs, then why does it matter if you go to high school or not?
  • staticassertion 5y ago
    The article explicitly states that by 'abolish' they mean provide alternatives.
• kulig 5y ago
  It's fucked up because the people in power probably werent bullied. Teachers most likely werent bullied either. So nobody ever puts an end to the misery. I've heard people saying they were bullied in school because somebody once said their football team sucked. And then went on to say they felt grateful because it made them a stronger person. Its just a tornado of misinformation, and kids getting bullied to the point of suicide never get the help they need.
• rufus_foreman 5y ago
  I dropped out of high school when I was 16, winter of 1986. Happiest day of my life.
• Zababa 5y ago
  I've had to change school a few times due to bullying. Thus my experience was the opposite: the worst bullying I endured was when I was between 9 and 12 years old. High school was mostly fine, and most of the people that I met were fine, although I had to deal with a bit of homophobia. It's impressive how adults reject the fault of bullying on the victim. I had to not react, to learn to ignore the bullies, as if they were some hurricane and had no control over their own actions. Compared to this, university was a breath of fresh air. I could mostly choose to not go to class, the site was completely open to the exterior, teachers were ready to help people in need and left alone people that wanted to be left alone. I've preferred talking to older people most of my life, so I find the idea of the author of multi-generational groups appealing. Maybe don't remove high school, but at least leave the option for people that don't work like most other people that seem to enjoy high school. Also, have zero tolerance for bullying. When the thing you learn in school is that there's no justice and you can't count on people supposed to protect you, it's a bit hard to be mentally healthy after.
  • kart23 5y ago
    yeah, middle school sucks way more. It wasn't that bad for me, but looking back some people were just treated awfully by everyone. Bullying can really mess with your head at that age, people with self-esteem issues are really badly affected by it, and I've seen those effects last well into high school too.
    • handrous 5y ago
      Talk to some teachers who've been around for a while, and they'll give you an ear-full about how much middle school sucks. Something happens to kids around 6th grade, probably to do with starting to value peer-approval over authority-approval, and they start getting wilder. The work gets harder. Class-switching may start that early, depending on the school. Puberty. Kids from several elementary schools are thrown in with one another, in an abruptly-much-larger class with tons of strangers. A bunch of the kids develop mental health issues. A bunch start hurting themselves or get suicidal, and attempts may be made, some with, uh, "success". Drug use begins to enter the picture. All forms of bullying, including the "mean girl" type, get way worse in a hurry. It is obviously hell for the kids. There's a consistent and widely-observed school performance dip in about 6-8th grade. I have a feeling our usual structure for schools for those age ranges, in the US at least, is in some way fundamentally and seriously wrong.
• Invictus0 5y ago
  If I had kids I would certainly not send them to high school. Are we so unimaginative to think that there is not a better way? I think roughly 12/13 is the age we should start giving young people more autonomy in their education; they're old enough to have learned how to take care of themselves as a human being and to start taking initiative and develop leadership skills.
• StephenSmith 5y ago
  Shout out to The North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics, of which several states have sister schools. https://www.ncssm.edu/ https://www.ncssm.edu/ Quick summary, it's a public, boarding school that you apply to that has almost every AP course you can think of plus courses beyond AP. Pre-college essentially. I was able to skip two years of an engineering degree by attending. It's not a perfect solution, but it offers a way for students who are ready for college early to transition sooner. It also gives the state an excuse to not offer AP in every county, they can just point to NCSSM as an option.
• endisneigh 5y ago
  This is a poorly researched article. I won't bother critiquing every part, but I'll get to the meat: > Abolishing high school could mean many things. It could mean compressing the time teenagers have to sort out their hierarchies and pillory outsiders, by turning schools into minimalist places in which people only study and learn. This is impossible to begin with. Any institution that has more than a single individual will naturally result in stratification and hierarchies. Any student who doesn't want to go to high school can already do so by opting into home schooling if their parents agree and support that (and can provide resources). Furthermore, how exactly would you only "study and learn?" the author hardly gives proper examples of any of their ambitious ideas. > All the elaborate rites of dances and games could take place under other auspices. (Many Europeans and Asians I’ve spoken to went to classes each day and then left school to do other things with other people, forgoing the elaborate excess of extracurricular activities that is found at American schools.) The article handwaves how exactly you would replace all of the non academic portions of high school by vaguely mentioning anecdotes. > It could mean schools in which age segregation is not so strict, where a twelve-year-old might mentor a seven-year-old and be mentored by a seventeen-year-old; schools in which internships, apprenticeships, and other programs would let older students transition into the adult world before senior year. (Again, there are plenty of precedents from around the world.) The author doesn't bother to even explain why this would be beneficial, and what the potential downsides could be. Though I am personally a supporter of mixed-age classrooms, some research has shown it's not good (https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.3102/00346543066003307 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.3102/003465430660033...). Interestingly many people who have poor social skills wish to avoid people, but in reality that just delays the inevitable poor encounters you will have with others. What's better is to teach people to have good social skills. It's a shame that schools don't explicitly do this. The author also seems to conveniently ignore the extreme differences between people during high school age. Per the authors own definition high school has already been "abolished" as all of the things they speak of are already possible.
  • Zababa 5y ago
    > Any student who doesn't want to go to high school can already do so by opting into home schooling if their parents agree and support that (and can provide resources). The whole point of public school is to not depend on "if their parents agree and support that (and can provide resources)." because it didn't work. > The article handwaves how exactly you would replace all of the non academic portions of high school by vaguely mentioning anecdotes. Which non academic portions of high school? And what they're mentioning is not anecdots, it's how extra curricular activites works in other countries. You don't go to them through high school, they're independant associations focused on a sport, an instrument or something. Where you can also get your social interactions. > Interestingly many people who have poor social skills wish to avoid people, but in reality that just delays the inevitable poor encounters you will have with others. You can have good social skills and not enjoy the company of other high schoolers. In that case forcing you to spend time with other high schoolers makes no sense at all. You're also free to walk away from most bad encounters later in your life, while you can't really walk away from bullying. I also don't see how high school does anything to teach social skills to people that don't have them. There's no courses for it, you can experiment with your classmates but failure can mean humiliation and bullying for the next 4 years. I don't think that's a good environment to develop a skill.
• dalbasal 5y ago
  My younger cousin attended a small, alternative, mixed age high school. It seemed quite pleasant. Students interacted with teachers like they would with parents' friends. They'd make themselves a cuppa and chat like regular people during breaks. The social dynamic of mixed age groups was notably unschoolish too. I had hated school, so I was quite impressed. I'm inclined to think that a lot what we think of as how schools are, socially is a product of age segregation. Narcissism of Small Differences comes to mind. That said, I don't think there is a single solution for all. The reality is that a lot of kids have a very rough time at schools for a lot of reasons, and we consistently underestimate how bad that can be. Another point stood out to me here: "High school is often considered a definitive American experience...." Besides high school, this could be college relationships, marriage, motherhood, sex life, career, etc. Our idealisations often seem to oppress us. When life doesn't live up to 90210, or Hackers and Painters, or Sex in The City... its an unbearable failure. IDK what the solutions are. Ideals are inspiring as well as oppressive. I think with "psychology" broadly, it isn't always necessary to deal with every problem head on. Healthier relationships, decrease the risk of drug addiction, for example. We need healthier schools, broadly.
  • JJMcJ 5y ago
    > High school is often considered a definitive American experience Not always in a positive way, it should be emphasized.
    • dalbasal 5y ago
      Sure, and I actually think the artistic antithesis is quite important. That said, even depictions of high school losers usually still depict an idealisation. Despite being outcast, the protagonist still has their tight knit friendship group, love interest, etc. If that doesn't materialize, there's a profound sense of loss.. grief even.
• hardwaregeek 5y ago
  I don’t agree with everything in the article but I really liked the age segregation point. It’s incredible how much we drill into people’s heads that students need to be the same age. Why? We’ve all known 9th graders more mature, whether academically or personally, than 12th graders. And there’s so many students shunted off to college way before they’re ready out of fear of “falling behind”. I’ve taken two gap years at this point, one after high school and one this past year due to covid. So yes, I’ve “fallen behind” my classmates. I’ve also gotten work experience, significantly improved my mental health and traveled. And oh no, I’m so late for what? Joining the workforce? Who cares? I’m probably gonna be working for 40 years. Two years isn't going to make a difference.
  • noobermin 5y ago
    There are definitely other horrible tropes and attitudes at work here as well, such as age discrimination for junior positions at companies that pressures kids to be ready made for employment at 23 but be cast with a skeptical eye at 27. It's ridiculous.
• LatteLazy 5y ago
  I always assumed US high schools were meant to make citizens hate tyranny via experiencing tyranny. On that basis they are actually 99% effective...
• rossnordby 5y ago
  I've wondered about how well something like this would work: 1. Schools open early and accept students as early as they do now, but classes start around noon and extend to 4-6 PM. Students are not required to arrive early; the school opens early to provide a safe place and schedule flexibility for parents and buses. 2. Breakfast and lunch are offered to ensure food security. 3. Every student has 5+ hours of 1:1 or small group tutoring weekly. This is where the bulk of educator funding would likely end up. 4. Open format "study hall" periods with staff available to assist. 5. No homework; personal exercises are handled in study hall. 6. For any lecture format material, provide high quality centrally produced media. On premise educators focus most of their time on interaction and adapting to where the students are. 7. Much less age stratification; progress through class content would be heavily individualized by the 1:1 and small group interaction. 8. Unprison the experience- you can go to the bathroom or eat a snack, or even leave. This reuses of all existing infrastructure, reorganizes educator hours into what is (as far as I know) a more effective structure, reduces required student time, and seems like this should fit in the current budgets (which are around the $12000/year/pupil averaged over the US). And, critically, this doesn't force teenagers with delayed circadian rhythms to wake up at 5:45 AM to catch the bus. I'm pretty sure if you changed nothing else and just had high school run from noon to 4PM, you'd have a transformative improvement in outcomes even though the total number of hours would be significantly reduced.
  • endisneigh 5y ago
    You vastly underestimate how much money it would take to do (3) alone, let alone anything else on here. Your assumption around the usage of educator hours is incorrect. I suppose it's worth seeing how you believe educator hours are currently used?
    • rossnordby 5y ago
      I'll admit I haven't put this through an extremely thorough vetting process, and I haven't proposed this in congress or anything yet :P That said, I roughly assumed a private tutor cost of $50/hour, 5 hours a week, for 36 weeks per year. That alone would come out to $9000, hence the 'small group' suggestion- if each tutor is working with on average 3 students at once, it's a bit more tractable. I'm not sure what assumption you think I'm making about current educator hours- the proposal is for a radically different usage.
• ardit33 5y ago
  My experience with the american HS has been great. I went in Halifax County High, in rural Virginia, in the late 90s. It is rated 5.5/10, so average school I guess and it was racially diverse. I attended it as an exchange student, (From Albania), from my senior year. I took mostly AP classes, and they were pretty good, as the average student was very/well motivated. They were smart and most went to good colleges after it. I got the chance to advance many of my skills, computer wise, and even took programming, which was great as it cemented my desire to pursue CS. (Pascal was the language being taught in 99). Things like AP physics and biology/chemistry were way behind my Albanian education. I can't image what Gen Ed physics would look like. (probably comparable to middle school level in former commie Europe). AP Calc, was challenging and on par with former communist country education (but very few people take those classes). Gen. Ed classes, (the ones where average people take) were a mixed bag, as they had plenty of students that clearly didn't want to be there, and just wanted a pass grade and move on. I also got to join the soccer team and I loved it. Made lots of friends, never got into a fight (perhaps because I was the only foreign student, and people were super friendly), went to the prom, and all that. Became friends with the popular/'in' group of girls, had a gf., etc... It was something like out of the movies. For me it was a great experience, and it really really depends on how you use it. If you take mostly AP classes, or participate in sports, it is a great thing. If you take the gen. ed classes, you will end up in classes that are designed more to just teach the bare minimum, as most students there don't have any interest in being there to begin with. The trend of reducing AP classes in the name of 'equity' is very troubling, as it remove the chances of smart students to have a stimulating environment, and let them learn at their faster pace.
  • dorchadas 5y ago
    > The trend of reducing AP classes in the name of 'equity' is very troubling, as it remove the chances of smart students to have a stimulating environment, and let them learn at their faster pace. This is happening at the school I worked at. They're offing the AP courses in the name of dual credit, which is absolutely useless if you want to do anything halfway related to the degree. But parents like how it looks better because "college credit" is always seen as good, even when it doesn't transfer because it's from a local community college that state universities laugh at. I've had students in the past told they wouldn't have to repeat it in college to just have to do just that as it wouldn't count towards their major, whereas a more rigorous AP class would have. It's all because our guidance officer might be the most incompetent person in the world at her job. In the words of one of the few remaining AP teachers, "Her children aren't accelerated so she's going to make sure nobody is." And it's not far off, with her telling kids to take easier classes and not challenge themselves, etc. It's awful, thank God I'm on a leave of absence this coming school year.
• Animats 5y ago
  This is more about growing up gay than about high school, as is clear if you read other writing by the same author. This is a smart, frustrated writer. It's not about picking the students that won't benefit from more education and sending them off to vocational training, then the fields and mines, as was normal until the mid-20th century. The UK did that explicitly until 1976, with the "Eleven-Plus" exam.[1] Many areas of the US did it, but this varied locally. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eleven-plus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eleven-plus
• noobermin 5y ago
  Surprised to see this with a discussion of age stratification. It's so ingrained into American culture now that being friends with someone of a different age either carries pedophilic insinuation or assume the younger is above the AOC, some nearly related sexual fetish (MILF,DILF,etc). It's not like especially if someone is very young or very old they can be on the same level maturity wise but at least in my personal life friends who were much older than me have always been enriching probably because they can offer life advice I wouldn't otherwise have. The age stratification in general feels like a piece of a more general trend in America where people in general are closing off from others, in this case, their families in fear of essentially anyone who could be a sexual predator in their minds. Kind of an aside but back on topic, high school honestly fits into this, a place your kids can go and be safe while you work, which is essentially how it functions.
  • hdctambien 5y ago
    > a place your kids can go and be safe while you work The last 18 months have shown us that this is really what parents (and the economy) want out of school. Education comes after babysitting on the list of priorities.
• nxc18 5y ago
  Interesting article. I agree with most of the proposed reforms, but take issue with freely using ‘abolish’ to describe non-abolition reforms. Something they teach in high school, that is particularly harmful IMO, is persuasive writing through bold statements and elimination of perceived uncertainty or nuance. Don’t say abolish of what you really mean is change. Other critiques: - High school isn’t really so different from real life outside; all those high schoolers were eventually released into the community and did not magically change - I’ve been called a faggot and had hateful speech directed at me more often in Portland OR than I ever did in my rural New England high school; homophobia and racism and bullying aren’t high school problems, they are American society problems - The author’s parents clearly did a very bad job socializing her when she was young. That made high school harder than it had to be - School quality varies dramatically. The proposed reforms would go a long way towards fixing the bad schools. I went to a progressive reform-minded high school and it was great - Bad behavior among boys on the football team is a lot more about the football team and the people that self-select into that group than about high school itself. TBIs that come out of it aren’t exactly helping the situation either - Learning how to survive in a world of people who are different from you and with whom you share mutual dislike is actually pretty important. Some people can skip high school and be fine, but often not. I’m not convinced the people who skip out on high school because they just love reading so much are actually ending up better off. When I was a kid I preferred candy to vegetables, but it was pretty important to be nudged towards vegetables. (To be fair my parents were bad at cooking vegetables and that didn’t help matters). Physical education, when done well (e.g. includes options like yoga, a range of choices, adult-style activities like strength training and rock climbing) is extremely valuable. - Please please please stop saying ‘abolish’ when you mean ‘change’
• mixmastamyk 5y ago
  Why doesn't significant punishment of bullies ever seem to be an option? To the extent that any other possible idea is entertained first? I personally learned a lot in high school, though I took the harder AP classes.
  • hdctambien 5y ago
    I can't speak for every (or most, or even some) case of bullying. But keep in mind when someone says "I was bullied and the teachers did nothing" they are saying that from the memory of a 10 - 17 year old with little to no insight of what was happening from the perspective of the adults. There are a million things that could result in a student bullying other kids. Are their parents drug addicts? Alive? Are they living out of their car? Does the bully go to bed hungry because the only time he gets meals is from school? Is the bully depressed and cutting themselves? Is the bully a drug addict? Is the bully working a night job so he can help his family pay rent? None of these are things you can (legally) tell the target of their bullying and should be dealt with in ways other than "significant punishment". So from the perspective of the bullied, it looks like nothing is being done. But in the background, there are probably several adults working to remediate the situation. Also, there probably aren't enough counselors/admins and your bully just isn't high enough on the bully-list to be dealt with (ie, that kid that is hitting people in the face with chairs needs to be dealt with before the kid that calls other kids names... and there are still 10 unfilled positions at the school). Or the staff doesn't have the right training. Or maybe the bully is just an a-hole. Or the bully is a [rich|important|litigious] person's kid.
    • mixmastamyk 5y ago
      The freedom to swing your fists ends at my nose. Maybe you have a bad home life, and maybe someone could help with that, but physical and mental assault must stop immediately.
  • barry-cotter 5y ago
    > Wonder what allows a school to at least consider permanent expulsion? The student has to be convicted of: > murder > drug dealing > aggravated assault > rape > possession of a deadly weapon https://educationrealist.wordpress.com/2019/08/06/public-school-is-a-property-right-the-connor-betts-case/ https://educationrealist.wordpress.com/2019/08/06/public-sch...
• 29athrowaway 5y ago
  High school is a moratorium for crime. Assault and battery are legal among students. High school teachers can be toxic people, but that's the only way in which they can deal with even more toxic students. In many cases it's just a place where parents can drop their kids while they're at work. Nobody is learning anything.
• dang 5y ago
  Past thread related via title (but not article): Let's Abolish High School - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=756407 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=756407 - Aug 2009 (113 comments)
• hourislate 5y ago
  The whole educational and professional training system is a very elaborate filter, which just weeds out people who are too independent, and who think for themselves, and who don't know how to be submissive, and so on -- because they're dysfunctional to the institutions. -Noam Chomsky
• esturk 5y ago
  After looking up the author's background, it appears she accomplished this in California back in the 70s. I'm not sure if this is still possible because the minimum age to take the GED in CA is now at 18+. The alternative to that is to take the California High School Proficiency Exam (CHSPE) which requires a minimum age of 16+.
• akuro 5y ago
  I went into high school as a curious kid who loved reading and enjoyed opportunities to be creative. I left high school as a nervous wreck who was terrified to apply myself in any academic situation because I'd been mocked so much - by teachers and students alike - for various failures. It took me eight years to break out of that mindset, but I'm now doing well. In fact, my job makes heavy use of the subject that I was most afraid of due to my high school experience: mathematics. The process of becoming confident in mathematical problem solving and working through my considerable personal mental hangups was a dreadful experience. Many or even most people do not break out from the hang-ups they learn during high school, especially with mathematics. EI have nothing but animosity for the high school system and would welcome any change that makes it less prominent in the lives of teens and young adults. I'd say that a college module system like that which the OP describes is a vastly superior alternative. I think that intellectual life and social life should be separated as much as possible, which I believe is for the most part the default setting in most universities.
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• birktj 5y ago
  In Norway you get to choose your high school after middle school, all the pupils in a region is ranked solely based on their grades from middle school and for the ones who are sick of books they can go to a more trade-oriented high school (training to become a mechanic, electrician, etc). Obviously it is not perfect and in the district the choices can be quite limited, but it definitely prevents the stereotypical American high school. Taking my school as an example it was pretty much filled with nerds, many being active in politics, math competitions, etc. I remember very well it being the first time no-one in the class wanted to do football in PE. Some people criticize it for being worse for the students who don't do well in middle school and end up with very little choices and also separating stronger students. But for the stronger students it so nice with everybody being at least somewhat interested in learning and the teachers being very relaxed.
  • tkgally 5y ago
    Japan has something similar. When children finish junior high school at age fifteen, they apply to high schools they want to attend. Some high schools have college-prep curricula, some are vocational, and some are comprehensive. Some schools are very competitive to enter, while others admit nearly anybody. Teenagers are not required to attend high school and some start working full-time after finishing junior high school. Special day and evening high-school programs are available for them if they want to keep studying while they work. In areas with high population densities, such as Tokyo or Osaka, there might be dozens of high schools, both public and private, within commuting distance by public transportation. In rural areas and on remote islands, the choice is much more limited; I've known people who moved to a city at age fifteen and lived with relatives or alone in order to attend a college-prep high school. My two daughters grew up in Tokyo and Yokohama and went through public schools. When they were in junior high school I accompanied them on visits to several local high schools while they were deciding where to apply. The older one ended up attending a comprehensive high school because it gave her an opportunity to study a variety of subjects. The younger one wanted to do computers, so she chose a vocational high school that had a programming track. They both got through their schools unscathed, though neither seemed to have had a particularly inspiring experience. I myself attended an urban public high school in Southern California in the 1970s. My experience was similar to those of many commenters here: it was largely a waste of time for me, and it could sometimes be very unpleasant. I was happy and relieved when I got out and started college. Based on my limited experience, I can’t say that the Japanese high-school system is any better than the American. But the Japanese system is very different, and if systemic reform is ever attempted in the U.S. educators and politicians would be wise to study it and other countries’ systems to see if anything positive can be borrowed from them.
• 0xbadcafebee 5y ago
  > Abolishing high school could mean many things. Then why not find a different word which does not literally mean "To do away with; put an end to; annul. To destroy completely." I hate it when a good idea gets derailed by a moronic slogan.
• HDMI_Cable 5y ago
  High school seems like a highly personalized experience. Reading most of these comments, one would expect that high school is a form of punishment. For me, and most people I know however, high school was a deeply positive experience. I don't know how/if schooling needs to be fixed, but one thing that strikes me is the range in experiences. I guess one part of it is that people who have had an overall good experience (or even a mediocre one) are less likely to talk about it. I wonder what percentage of people truly hated high school.
  • kaesar14 5y ago
    What could be done to alter the range? It seems like when there’s something like high school that everyone experiences, there’s bound to be good and bad. Also had a deeply positive experience in high school. For all its faults in America, and there are many, I was enriched intellectually and socially, and I look back on those days fondly.
  • dannyw 5y ago
    I've met my current friend group during high school and it's been 15 years...
• SneakyTornado29 5y ago
  Flipped classroom structure :)
• mapgrep 5y ago
  This article is a good platform for a series of solid specific observations. I particularly liked this one toward the end: “ It could mean compressing the time teenagers have to sort out their hierarchies and pillory outsiders, by turning schools into minimalist places in which people only study and learn. All the elaborate rites of dances and games could take place under other auspices. (Many Europeans and Asians I’ve spoken to went to classes each day and then left school to do other things with other people, forgoing the elaborate excess of extracurricular activities that is found at American schools.)” Hallelujah. End the role of high school as a monolith for teen life. I also liked the call for more fluid stratification of students: “ It could mean schools in which age segregation is not so strict, where a twelve-year-old might mentor a seven-year-old and be mentored by a seventeen-year-old; schools in which internships, apprenticeships, and other programs would let older students transition into the adult world before senior year. ” This all essentially boils down to “freedom.” Meaning also flexibility and choice. For all the expectations piled on high school students they are given very little agency.
  • barry-cotter 5y ago
    > Many Europeans and Asians I’ve spoken to went to classes each day and then left school to do other things with other people In China those things would often be cram schools. In Korea that’s even more common, practically universal. If you think the college rat race and obsession with prestige in the US is bad it’s nothing like as bad as in developed East Asia. (Japan may be slightly less awful but still much worse than anywhere in the cultural as opposed to political West.)
    • dannyw 5y ago
      Australian here, a more limited role of extracurricular activities do t always mean more cramming. I know that's not what you said, but that's the implication I got from your comment
  • ng12 5y ago
    > Many Europeans and Asians I’ve spoken to went to classes each day and then left school to do other things with other people, forgoing the elaborate excess of extracurricular activities that is found at American schools. This doesn't ring true to me. Unless you played sports there was really no reason to hang around after school. Contrast this to many Japanese schools where being part of a school club is more or less expected.
• karaterobot 5y ago
  The author says that high school teaches conformity and alienation, and can "flatten your soul", and then shortly afterwards suggests getting kids into the job market sooner might be a solution for this. Ha ha, good luck with that.
• cupcake-unicorn 5y ago
  I was an undiagnosed autistic growing up and I begged my parents to homeschool me. Thankfully my two best friends were already doing so and we were in a liberal area where we could make this happen and my parents (less so my dad) were reasonably open to it. His main objection, "You'll never get into college" was put to rest when I found data showing that being a homeschooler puts you in a smaller pool than "Random highschool grad" and college admissions people are smart enough to keep an eye out for home schoolers, so in all my chances actually went up. I don't have my GED but I do have a BA which broke German bureaucracy when I went over there to continue studies. Anyway grade school was tough enough for me and I very much believe that I would have ended up hospitalized or suicidal/dead had I gone through highschool. Giving options to children who are non neurotypical (I don't envy ADHD kids) and suffer from behavioral issues is crucial. A lot of people without these problems have very serious psychological scarring from high school so put a kid suffering more challenges in the mix and it becomes clear what you're dealing with. I was able to study what I wanted, at the level that was appropriate for me, on my own time. I ended up taking a number of distance learning classes as well as community college classes and got college credits for them. I was really held back in middle school with this. A lot of people ask "weren't you lonely" but I didn't have anything in common with most other kids and the school environment was toxic and overstimulating to me. I hate that people's knee jerk reaction is "You must have been soo lonely" and it really shows you the truth about high school honestly..it's NOT about learning..it's almost some hazing ritual that people are stockholm syndrome'd into. I don't have the link now but I saw some surveys and it's something like 99% of home schooled students wouldn't take it back for the world.
  • barry-cotter 5y ago
    > I don't have my GED but I do have a BA which broke German bureaucracy when I went over there to continue studies. Do tell. What problems did that cause? How were they resolved?
    • cupcake-unicorn 5y ago
      Hah, just more of a funny story, I had to do a lot of back and forth when filling out my MS application paperwork and they were thinking that I "didn't fill it out" or something like that. I literally had nothing to give them. They conceded in the end but I guess in the US I've never ran into places pushing it because I have "just" my BA
• gbronner 5y ago
  I went to a school with no letter grades, and skipped a year. Our school used to copy the nyt crossword puzzle, and it was considered ok to work on it in lieu of paying attention. Some teachers would simply tell me not to bother showing up, and I managed to get credit for a number of classes without going by simply convincing my teachers that I'd read the book and understood the material. For autodidactic people such as the myself and presumably the author, this was great. Many of my classmates required more structured experiences, and I don't think this model works for most people. Abolishing high school is nice for the people who read hacker news, but probably wouldn't work for the vast majority of students
• sdlion 5y ago
  I went to a technical high school in Mexico. Here's divided as 6 years of grade school, 3 of Middle school and 3 of High school. After finishing this "bachelor" high school you get a technician degree. Mine was an electronics technician. And well, I met some of my best friends there and equals even when most of them went to different majors in college. I think is great when you can get specialized subjects in such environment since people with similar interests can interact between them more easily. Granted, there were bullied people, others that just wouldn't fit, but for the most of us (on classrooms over 40 students) we went along fine. And certainly I felt it a better environment than middle school (12-15yo). Friends that really didn't like it, weren't that interested in electronics or science, but still we got along. But well, in the end, Mexico is a place where we care about our relationships. Maybe too much. I don't think the concept of high school is wrong. On any country contacts are important and usually change your life, and any social hub in life is a chance. It's just that, environment and motivation matters.
• Helloworldboy 5y ago
  The YC echo chamber in full effect. Most americans have fond memories of high school, including myself and all of my friends from that time period.
• schoolgown 5y ago
  From another perspective, I am a current high school student trying to decide on a future path. While I also think high school is a waste of time that I don't learn much from, I'm not sure that the other options are actually better, at least for my personal goal of attending selective colleges after high school. I will become eligible for a dual-enrollment program at local community colleges soon, where students get a 2-year associate degree and high school diploma at the same time. This includes the option to take classes at the college full-time, effectively never actually attending the high school. However, from what I've seen, choosing this path instead of AP courses reflects negatively on the student when applying to selective colleges. It seems best suited for completing a 4-year degree at an in-state university after high school. While this minimizes the time spent in education, I'm not sure it's the best option if my goal is to get the best possible education (i.e. including post-secondary). It also poses a logistical challenge due to lack of transportation to and from the college. On the other hand, the practice of staying in high school and taking as many AP classes as possible does little for the social environment at the school. It helps appease college admissions officers, but it's not an ideal solution either.
• nate_meurer 5y ago
  > By artificially creating social units in which everyone is the same age, the ability of children to help and to learn from each other is greatly reduced Also, given the huge variation in the ages of puberty and rates at which kids develop, it makes perfect sense that kids would find peers in a variety of age groups. My daughters are homeschooled, and have thus been free to form their own social groups from scratch, and they both gravitate toward age groups not their own. My eldest (high school) hangs out mostly with girls several years her senior, but in their weekly in-person enrichment program she chooses to spend most of her time with the little kids, as sort of a teachers assistant. She doesn't exactly know why, but it's clear that the both the older peers and the little guys feed her soul. She has relatively little interaction with kids in her own grade, and if she were forced to it would clearly rob her of something very important.
• DataJunkie 5y ago
  I enjoyed this read. Rant: My mother was a teacher and she had to deal with a lot of political crap because she taught what was important (phonics) in Kindergarten during a time when schools were banishing phonics and preferred whole language (early to mid 1990s). That was just one of the things that drove my mom to retire from teaching, the BS from the ivory tower. I gained a rebellious streak towards the K-12 education system based on my own experience and seeing what she had to put up with. Her students and parents loved her. Elementary school was a joke. Middle school was very formative to me. I learned a ton. I was bullied a ton, which didn't help. Then I went to high school... Honors English? We read a few books that I don't even remember, and spent the rest of the time playing... I kid you not... Charades. Things only got worse when the athletic coaches would teach the Honors classes. After a couple of years of this, I became a very mouthy kid frequently talking back to teachers. (Oddly enough, I rarely got in trouble for it.) Point being, they had one view of what a kid should be doing, and the buckets into which kids should fall. They also had no desire to deal with different learning styes. I would have absolutely loved to take advanced statistics, advanced writing or computer science in high school instead of wasting time trying to help the school district boost its standardized testing scores. One of these teachers really had it out for me (a video production teacher). She told me I would be in prison by 20 because I had no respect for her. Add to that, my counselor convinced me my GPA was shit (3.6) and would be lucky to get into a Cal State (is that a bad thing?). My parents and I had enough. I withdrew and took the rest of my courses via mail and graduated a year early and in the meantime took community college classes. And guess what? I learned to love math. That happens when the instructor actually understands what they are teaching. This caused some problems with the UC system, but we were able to convince them that community college basically replaced my senior year. And that video teacher? I eventually ran into her again, as she was advertising some high school media program at the community college. She said "What a surprise to see you here!" She had earlier tried to convince me that ITT Tech, Devry, etc. was more my style. I looked her straight in the eyes and said "Go fck yourself, Nancy." It felt so cathartic telling her off. That Fall I started as a Freshman at UCLA. Based on my experience, I am approving of parents choosing to do one of the following: 1) putting their kids in private school as a form a daycare. Private schools have the funds to offer tons of extracurriculars such as makerspaces for students to play around in. That's important to me. Public schools do not have the resources to do this. And then get a tutor for the important subjects. Travel. Do educational trips. Don't assume your children are learning anything in the classroom. 2) teach your kids that HS is a joke, and just get through it and don't let any of the teachers put you down. Work hard and do the best you can. If it's not working, get out. 3) Do some sort of personalized program (sometimes referred to as "continuation school" where you attend class or tutoring as needed, and the rest of the time is enrichment. Continuation school was always said to be the "troublemakers." In my opinion, it's those that refuse to accept the status quo, and perhaps do have some other issues that the comprehensive high school does not want to deal with, because God forbid these students actually act human. 4) test out, just know that some university systems will then require you to transfer instead of start as a Freshman. University is totally different. I am proud of my public university education. I could not have asked for any more. I ended up going through to my Ph.D. Now, as a university instructor, I try my best to not judge students and understand that their performance is but a snapshot of what they accomplished in a short period of time. Who am I to stop students from following their dreams? Who am I to make a judgment of their professional worth? I wish others would think the same way.
• sytelus 5y ago
  This is extra-ordinarily negligent article. TLDR; author was transffered from junion high to "alternative high school" where district dumped insubordinate students. In author's own experience, it was completely dysfunctional environment. He says teenage girls there dated drug dealers. Author was apparently hard working so he survived and went to college nonetheless. I doubt his peers had same fate. But now he proposes that all high schools should be obolished because he turned out all ok.
• Biganon 5y ago
  Daisy Coleman committed suicide last year. Her mother killed herself a few months later. Meanwhile, her rapist is walking free, because daddy is powerful.
• betwixthewires 5y ago
  Well, I agree with the title, and some of the reasoning, but it doesn't go far enough. I think school in general is stupid. It's an extreme view, I know. I think education is good. But that's not what school is. Everything a kid learns in 13 years could he learned in 5, and then they leave missing very important skills. Many kids that graduate high school then choose to take on 5 to 6 figures in debt as their first financial decision of their lives, out of this weird pressure to know what they want to spend the rest of their lives doing, which they're somehow expected to know after spending 13 of the previous 18 years of their lives having to ask permission to take a shit. In my opinion, school turns people, most of whom have amazing potential, into losers. The major motivation to have a mandatory school system is to take productive adults who would spend a decade caring for 2 or 3 children and put them to work and outsource the rearing of their children to one professional child raiser per 30 or so kids. Very economical. But it is hell on our kids, and hell on our civics. 5 years. That's all it takes to learn what you need to know in school. Reading, writing, some literature, arithmetic geometry and algebra, basic physics, chemistry and biology, some domestic history and civics and some world history, then toss in a bit about how to handle finances and you're done. 5 years. And that's much more than we are requited to know within the 13 we spend right now. And we can teach our own kids. And we should. If I can't be trusted to teach my kid what I learned in school, what does that say about the school I went to?
  • coldtea 5y ago
    >I think education is good. But that's not what school is. Everything a kid learns in 13 years could he learned in 5 Everything except socializing witht their peers over a period of time they develop psysiologically (kid to puberty to adulthood). That school can be a hostile environment is part of this too, since even more so can be the rest of life it prepares people for. At least in school you can learn about bad people in a low stakes situation (not being part of the cool gang, getting mocked for your appereance, or not being invited to a party, for example) - in real life not knowing how to deal with such people can cost you your job, money, health, even life. It's also about what exactly kids will do when they're 10-12 (after those "5 years of condensed school"). Just run around when their parents work? And where does the optimism that kids can learn "in 5 years" what they are taught in 13? Most kids don't even learn what they are taught in 13 - even in the US where the curriculum and demands are laughable by European standards. >And we can teach our own kids. And we should. That would be a nightmare and is rightly forbidden in many parts of the world. The kid will not be socialized with his peers, will be taught what some (probably biased, abusive, or paranoid) parent wants to teach them, and generally be kept out of society. Forget abusive school environments, home-schooling is an order of magnitude better way to raise a dysfunctional adult. There are many ammendments that can be made to the greatly ineffictive school system, but "home-schooling" and "condense it to 5 years" are not the ones I'd choose. Well paid, highly motivated teachers would be a good place to start thou, as they can make all the difference - and old adults will still reminisce about those school teachers that made a difference to their lives or instilled them passion for this or that subject.
• donatj 5y ago
  I have been saying since I was in high school in the late-90s/early-2000s that there’s isn’t enough being said and done about actually figuring out what about modern high school incites so much violence, and not just the deadly kind. All the energy goes into locking kids down more, controlling their lives, and doesn’t actually cure the disease. In my fifteen years of office work, the worst I have encountered is a single shouting match between a developer and his boss. The developer started it, and ended up finding a new job within the week. Contrast that with my four years of high school where I was physically assaulted at least twice, and encountered fights almost weekly. I didn’t have the luxury of consensual association with that institution. I couldn’t just leave if things took a turn. I think imposing so much inescapable structure can cause certain types of kids to lash-out like a trapped animal, because in an entirely literal sense they are. I certainly felt very trapped myself in a very real sense. Having talked with teachers and administrators about this, they can’t seem to fathom what I am saying. I think it comes down to educational work having a self selection for people who thrive in such a structured environment. Many of them having never experienced anything else, going straight from college into teaching.
• deleted 5y ago
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• MyHypatia 5y ago
  Now I'm wondering if abolishing high schools will also make work places more tolerable. The complaints I personally have (and hear from others) about work often resemble the complaints about social dynamics in high school. Basically, you have to do well enough in school/job to keep the teacher/boss happy. If you do too well your classmates/coworkers resent you and start sabotaging you. If you really do too well and make the teacher/boss feel unneeded they start sabotaging you as well to put you in your place. In my experience the vast majority of people (adults and teenagers) are not introspective enough to recognize or admit when they start behaving in this destructive way. I started seeing this in high school and assumed that people would grow out of it. I now realize most people never grow out of this, and sabotage other people as a way to manage their insecurities. If I hadn't started experiencing this in high school, I might have had a harder time recognizing it in the work place. On the other hand, maybe high school is training people to behave like this.