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I say with full confidence that high school was a complete waste of time and sanity. It’s basically a four year prison, menial labor and all. Did you know that

I say with full confidence that high school was a complete waste of time and sanity. It’s basically a four year prison, menial labor and all. Did you know that the pilgrims came to America on a ship named the Mayflower? Well there’s a test coming up and you’ll have to memorize that and several other factoids. More than half of the assignments were pointless trivia that aren’t applicable to any modern career path.

lettergram 5y ago
A friend of mine was home schooled and started college at 13. He graduated with a dual bachelors at 17 and a masters at 18. His parents gave him a choice at 13 what he wanted to do -- high school or college and he selected college. Frankly, it's astonishing how much of a waste of time high school is.
the-dude 5y ago
I had a wonderful 6 years in The Netherlands. Great teachers, great opportunities. Just walked into the 'teachers room' at lunch break and asked if I could use a microscope to inspect an UV-erasable EEPROM : Sure, go ahead. Wanted to write a program instead of doing the final physics experiment : Uhhh, well, why not
- devn0ll 5y ago
  As a Dutchie as well: I Agree. And also this is, I think, the reason why the USA is so far behind the rest of the world at the moment (in regards to reality): An open, honest and factually based education.
  - AndrewUnmuted 5y ago
    Where are all of the USA's world-class innovators, engineers, scientists, and academics getting their education, then? The Netherlands school system is falling victim to the exact same controversies the USA and other systems around the world are facing... [0] [0] https://nltimes.nl/2021/06/03/netherlands-slammed-prioritizing-children-pandemic https://nltimes.nl/2021/06/03/netherlands-slammed-prioritizi...
    - devn0ll 5y ago
      Ah, now that I'm rereading my own comment I see I'm beeing a bit "flippant" (?). Please believe me I did not mean in that way. So what point am I making: I've read that schools are teaching creationism, others spend 80% of their time on sports, something with greeting the flag every morning with a speech? A lot of time is spent on teaching how to make arguments (How to plead your case) instead of trying to work together in finding truth. And most of all: do not criticise, but a "do as told" mentality. Again: Sorry for that almost mean-spirited first comment of mine.
      - PragmaticPulp 5y ago
        > So what point am I making: I've read that schools are teaching creationism... The difference between the America as portrayed in sensationalized news headlines and the America I live in is vast. No, creationism isn't standard curriculum in high schools and no, students aren't spending 80% of their time on sports. When you see these things in news stories, their newsworthiness stems from the fact that it's abnormal, not because it's the norm. America has half the population of all of Europe and a similar amount of landmass. It's a big enough country that if you go looking, you're going to find pockets of weird culture. The mistake is to assume that when journalists highlight the worst of these, that it's actually representative of the norm. Judging the US by these stories would be similar to me judging your European education by some of the wild anecdotes my Romanian coworker relayed about his high school experience there. I suspect his experience has nothing to do with yours, naturally. However, when people read horror stories about bad US schools, they assume it applies to every single high school in the entire country for some reason.
- PragmaticPulp 5y ago
  For what it’s worth, I had a great high school experience in the United States. Everyone I know in person also had a good high school experience. Teachers were very invested in student experiences and encouraged a lot of exploration and alternative activities like you experienced. We also had plenty of advanced AP classes that could be used as college credit and I even took some advanced classes at the local state university as part of my high school curriculum. We also had a lot of fun and the social environment was generally good. There were troublemakers and pockets of drama, of course, but it wasn’t the central theme of anyone’s experience. For some reason, the HN and Reddit bubbles seem to collect a lot of people who loathed high school education. Even in adulthood and traveling around the country I’ve never encountered as many negative stories about high school as I read on HN. Take what you read here with a grain of salt. There appears to be some significant selection bias going on in the stories.
  - the-dude 5y ago
    Thanks for your input!
- agentwiggles 5y ago
  In high school chemistry, I was given the option to either take the final exam, or do a project involving experimentation. I built a potato gun and tested different fuels. It wasn't very scientifically rigorous (hard to measure how much fuel went into the firing chamber, distance measurements were sloppy, and we didn't take the weight of individual potato projectiles into account). But it was incredibly fun, and the report I produced earned me an A. That was probably the best "scientific" experience I had in all my years of schooling including college. Having to think about all the different variables really helped me grok the scientific process. We thought up ways that we could start to control things like fuel load and projectile weight and just generally had a blast.
TimPC 5y ago
My high school experience was fairly valuable in certain areas and a waste of time in others. The improvements to my writing and critical thinking were invaluable. Most of the specific knowledge ended up less so. I had a number of great teachers. My school had an enriched program that allowed teachers to get an elite class that they could teach towards and had the added benefit of vastly reducing behaviour problems and bullying in those classes. I think US schools are unusually dystopian compared to the worldwide experience. At least that’s the impression I get from hearing stories.
- JackFr 5y ago
  > At least that’s the impression I get from hearing stories. You're getting the wrong impression. The vast majority of people have a high school experience which is wholly unremarkable in the telling which you don't hear about. Those with horrific experiences -- they've got a story to tell.
  - TimPC 5y ago
    Good to know. I’ll try and keep that in mind.
  - kayodelycaon 5y ago
    I'm one of the people with stories to tell and this is exactly correct. You only hear about deviations from the norm. Most of the people I know (outside of my bipolar support group) don't have much to say about their childhood.
- Izkata 5y ago
  My (US) experience is pretty much the same as yours, though my main valuable topic was math (and math teachers as well, plus one teacher who only taught electives about life after school - resumes/job interviews and stuff like that). It seems to be highly variable and depend on the individual schools.
  - TimPC 5y ago
    I learnt a lot in Math and did well but didn’t feel there was anything in the curriculum I couldn’t have learned independently. English had a lot of subjectivity and soft-skills that required some external calibration for me.
pupdogg 5y ago
I concur. I can also say with confidence that both High School and College were a complete waste of time and money! I learned more on HN via discussions and informative links than going through a cookie-cutter curriculum in college. I also attribute my little success in business to my mentor and not college.
dec0dedab0de 5y ago
For me the value in high school was more about making friends than anything else. As far as the actual curriculum there was some value getting a taste of things I would never have really looked at otherwise. Accounting, wood working, and gourmet cooking have come in handy in my normal life. Oddly enough, nothing that I learned in computer classes has helped me.
- b0afc375b5 5y ago
  Exactly, it is to my firm uneducated belief that school is 80% socializing and 20% education. Where people really learn is at home, doing homework.
  - dvdkon 5y ago
    Well, in that case I didn't learn much in high school, I avoided homework like the plague.
  - decasteve 5y ago
    I struggle with the "socialization" argument for school. It's an institutional environment systemically stratified by age. How in any way does this model community life outside of school? Compared to homeschooling in a class of one, school is a more social environment. Learning with only those your own age, taught almost exclusively by women between 25-50 (65 at most, but rarely)--is that not an odd way to structure a human environment? In my anecdotal experience, put a school age kid with a young toddler, or a senior over the age of 70, and an empathy switch gets turned on. This kind of socialization is undervalued.
howaboutnope 5y ago
> If you quietly accept and go along no matter what your feelings are, ultimately you internalize what you're saying, because it's too hard to believe one thing and say another. I can see it very strikingly in my own background. Go to any elite university and you are usually speaking to very disciplined people, people who have been selected for obedience. And that makes sense. If you've resisted the temptation to tell the teacher, "You're an asshole," which maybe he or she is, and if you don't say, "That's idiotic," when you get a stupid assignment, you will gradually pass through the required filters. You will end up at a good college and eventually with a good job. -- Noam Chomsky
- brodouevencode 5y ago
  Off topic, but slowly realizing Noam is just a contrarian. Happen to agree with him on this one though.
  - TimTheTinker 5y ago
    People who courageously speak what they believe to be true despite the personal costs involved are essential to the preservation and advancement society - where would we be today without them?
  - howaboutnope 5y ago
    That's hardly doing him justice.. https://www.salon.com/2012/06/17/when_chomsky_wept/ https://www.salon.com/2012/06/17/when_chomsky_wept/ Call it a fluff piece, sure, there certainly isn't even an attempt of criticism in it, but it still matches all I ever witnessed from him.
_jal 5y ago
High school taught me a lot about what to avoid, and how to game bullshit systems. It taught me that, while I had no idea what I wanted, I did not want the life I was seeing kids around me trapped in to. So I learned to give gatekeepers what they wanted and got out of that crappy little sinkhole. Didn't learn much of anything academic, though.
magicalhippo 5y ago
I really struggled with the primary language class, Norwegian in my case. Especially the historical parts were a motivational black hole. I get that one should learn some basics, like that we had some famous writers like Ibsen, but I feel it should be sufficient for most people to know roughly which century he lived, not the exact years of his birth and death. If you want to become a historian you'll have plenty of time to memorize those details later. I also realized later that we spent very little time at practical writing. I mean sure we wrote stories and such, but very little of it were practically oriented. Yet that's what most people end up needing. Like, writing a report, or heck a letter/email regarding a specific topic. We also didn't spend much time on understanding and interpreting text. We had some poems we had to interpret, but I think we should have had more of it. And not just poems and such but also more technical texts. Again a very useful skill compared to knowing that Camilla Collett was the sister of Henrik Wergeland, and when exactly they lived. This became clear when I had to write reports, participated in discussions in newsgroups and emails etc, and later assignments at uni. Anyway, rant over.
JTbane 5y ago
Honestly agree, the only things of value I learned were algebra, grammar and maybe literature?
dkarl 5y ago
> Well there’s a test coming up and you’ll have to memorize that and several other factoids. More than half of the assignments were pointless trivia that aren’t applicable to any modern career path. I think you're processing your memories through an adult lens and forgetting that if you judge them by adult standards, teenagers are shallow, horrible people. Of course we shouldn't judge teenagers by adult standards, because it isn't fair (children of all ages are pretty shitty people by adult standards) but we have to keep in mind that our memories of high school are memories that were formed by teenagers. I have heard so many times adults saying to me "if only my teachers had taught me X, I would have been so shocked and engaged" where X is something that their long-suffering teachers did, in fact, teach year after year to generations of bored and indifferent students. In the United States, classic examples are US imperial rule of the Philippines, the Sedition Acts, the Tuskeegee experiments, and the slaughter, subjugation, and displacement of Native Americans, all subjects that were covered in my high school history class to the complete indifference of just about everybody. I can't imagine the feelings of a teacher with an adult understanding of these things having to cope year after year with the dismissive reactions of teenagers. They can stand in front of a class as long as they want trying to explain how our involvement in the Philippines and our actions against democratically elected rulers in other countries complicate our image of ourselves as champions of freedom and self-determination, or how even a nation whose patriotic myths are cloaked in rhetoric about freedom has repeatedly struggled to reconcile patriotism with freedom of speech, but to a teenager it's going to be "ugggghhhhh stop talking about stuff we don't care about and just tell us what dumb factoid we have to remember for the test." Why do you still remember that the ship was called the Mayflower? Well, for whatever reason that fact is pretty vivid to people of all ages and easy to remember, and so it is used as a reference point and an easy answer on tests. What your teachers really wanted you to remember was that the Pilgrims were deeply, devoutly religious even by the standards of their own time, and thought they had a covenant with God and a duty to create a society that would be a model for every other in the world (holy shit, how wild is that?) and this extremely early thread was woven into the myth of American exceptionalism that is part of the political rhetoric of every single presidential and congressional election to this day, with its significance still contested. But that's not what a teenager is going to take out of high school history class. What they're going to remember is 1) they didn't want to be there, and 2) it was stupid. Again, not to be harsh on teenagers. It's normal for them to be that way, and it's not fair to judge them by adult standards. And maybe this is a strong argument for abolishing high school as we know it. If kids hate it and resent it, and they forget all of the good stuff and only remember the useless stuff anyway, then why bother with it? If people find things like the Tuskeegee experiment and the Triangle Shirtwaist fire utterly stupid and meaningless in their teens and revelatory in their twenties, why do we dedicate so much time and effort to teaching them in their teens? Maybe we can do better.

lettergram 5y ago

A friend of mine was home schooled and started college at 13. He graduated with a dual bachelors at 17 and a masters at 18. His parents gave him a choice at 13 what he wanted to do -- high school or college and he selected college. Frankly, it's astonishing how much of a waste of time high school is.

the-dude 5y ago

I had a wonderful 6 years in The Netherlands. Great teachers, great opportunities. Just walked into the 'teachers room' at lunch break and asked if I could use a microscope to inspect an UV-erasable EEPROM : Sure, go ahead. Wanted to write a program instead of doing the final physics experiment : Uhhh, well, why not

devn0ll 5y ago
As a Dutchie as well: I Agree. And also this is, I think, the reason why the USA is so far behind the rest of the world at the moment (in regards to reality): An open, honest and factually based education.
- AndrewUnmuted 5y ago
  Where are all of the USA's world-class innovators, engineers, scientists, and academics getting their education, then? The Netherlands school system is falling victim to the exact same controversies the USA and other systems around the world are facing... [0] [0] https://nltimes.nl/2021/06/03/netherlands-slammed-prioritizing-children-pandemic https://nltimes.nl/2021/06/03/netherlands-slammed-prioritizi...
  - devn0ll 5y ago
    Ah, now that I'm rereading my own comment I see I'm beeing a bit "flippant" (?). Please believe me I did not mean in that way. So what point am I making: I've read that schools are teaching creationism, others spend 80% of their time on sports, something with greeting the flag every morning with a speech? A lot of time is spent on teaching how to make arguments (How to plead your case) instead of trying to work together in finding truth. And most of all: do not criticise, but a "do as told" mentality. Again: Sorry for that almost mean-spirited first comment of mine.
    - PragmaticPulp 5y ago
      > So what point am I making: I've read that schools are teaching creationism... The difference between the America as portrayed in sensationalized news headlines and the America I live in is vast. No, creationism isn't standard curriculum in high schools and no, students aren't spending 80% of their time on sports. When you see these things in news stories, their newsworthiness stems from the fact that it's abnormal, not because it's the norm. America has half the population of all of Europe and a similar amount of landmass. It's a big enough country that if you go looking, you're going to find pockets of weird culture. The mistake is to assume that when journalists highlight the worst of these, that it's actually representative of the norm. Judging the US by these stories would be similar to me judging your European education by some of the wild anecdotes my Romanian coworker relayed about his high school experience there. I suspect his experience has nothing to do with yours, naturally. However, when people read horror stories about bad US schools, they assume it applies to every single high school in the entire country for some reason.
PragmaticPulp 5y ago
For what it’s worth, I had a great high school experience in the United States. Everyone I know in person also had a good high school experience. Teachers were very invested in student experiences and encouraged a lot of exploration and alternative activities like you experienced. We also had plenty of advanced AP classes that could be used as college credit and I even took some advanced classes at the local state university as part of my high school curriculum. We also had a lot of fun and the social environment was generally good. There were troublemakers and pockets of drama, of course, but it wasn’t the central theme of anyone’s experience. For some reason, the HN and Reddit bubbles seem to collect a lot of people who loathed high school education. Even in adulthood and traveling around the country I’ve never encountered as many negative stories about high school as I read on HN. Take what you read here with a grain of salt. There appears to be some significant selection bias going on in the stories.
- the-dude 5y ago
  Thanks for your input!
agentwiggles 5y ago
In high school chemistry, I was given the option to either take the final exam, or do a project involving experimentation. I built a potato gun and tested different fuels. It wasn't very scientifically rigorous (hard to measure how much fuel went into the firing chamber, distance measurements were sloppy, and we didn't take the weight of individual potato projectiles into account). But it was incredibly fun, and the report I produced earned me an A. That was probably the best "scientific" experience I had in all my years of schooling including college. Having to think about all the different variables really helped me grok the scientific process. We thought up ways that we could start to control things like fuel load and projectile weight and just generally had a blast.

TimPC 5y ago

My high school experience was fairly valuable in certain areas and a waste of time in others. The improvements to my writing and critical thinking were invaluable. Most of the specific knowledge ended up less so. I had a number of great teachers. My school had an enriched program that allowed teachers to get an elite class that they could teach towards and had the added benefit of vastly reducing behaviour problems and bullying in those classes. I think US schools are unusually dystopian compared to the worldwide experience. At least that’s the impression I get from hearing stories.

JackFr 5y ago
> At least that’s the impression I get from hearing stories. You're getting the wrong impression. The vast majority of people have a high school experience which is wholly unremarkable in the telling which you don't hear about. Those with horrific experiences -- they've got a story to tell.
- TimPC 5y ago
  Good to know. I’ll try and keep that in mind.
- kayodelycaon 5y ago
  I'm one of the people with stories to tell and this is exactly correct. You only hear about deviations from the norm. Most of the people I know (outside of my bipolar support group) don't have much to say about their childhood.
Izkata 5y ago
My (US) experience is pretty much the same as yours, though my main valuable topic was math (and math teachers as well, plus one teacher who only taught electives about life after school - resumes/job interviews and stuff like that). It seems to be highly variable and depend on the individual schools.
- TimPC 5y ago
  I learnt a lot in Math and did well but didn’t feel there was anything in the curriculum I couldn’t have learned independently. English had a lot of subjectivity and soft-skills that required some external calibration for me.

pupdogg 5y ago

I concur. I can also say with confidence that both High School and College were a complete waste of time and money! I learned more on HN via discussions and informative links than going through a cookie-cutter curriculum in college. I also attribute my little success in business to my mentor and not college.

dec0dedab0de 5y ago

For me the value in high school was more about making friends than anything else. As far as the actual curriculum there was some value getting a taste of things I would never have really looked at otherwise. Accounting, wood working, and gourmet cooking have come in handy in my normal life. Oddly enough, nothing that I learned in computer classes has helped me.

b0afc375b5 5y ago
Exactly, it is to my firm uneducated belief that school is 80% socializing and 20% education. Where people really learn is at home, doing homework.
- dvdkon 5y ago
  Well, in that case I didn't learn much in high school, I avoided homework like the plague.
- decasteve 5y ago
  I struggle with the "socialization" argument for school. It's an institutional environment systemically stratified by age. How in any way does this model community life outside of school? Compared to homeschooling in a class of one, school is a more social environment. Learning with only those your own age, taught almost exclusively by women between 25-50 (65 at most, but rarely)--is that not an odd way to structure a human environment? In my anecdotal experience, put a school age kid with a young toddler, or a senior over the age of 70, and an empathy switch gets turned on. This kind of socialization is undervalued.

howaboutnope 5y ago

> If you quietly accept and go along no matter what your feelings are, ultimately you internalize what you're saying, because it's too hard to believe one thing and say another. I can see it very strikingly in my own background. Go to any elite university and you are usually speaking to very disciplined people, people who have been selected for obedience. And that makes sense. If you've resisted the temptation to tell the teacher, "You're an asshole," which maybe he or she is, and if you don't say, "That's idiotic," when you get a stupid assignment, you will gradually pass through the required filters. You will end up at a good college and eventually with a good job. -- Noam Chomsky

brodouevencode 5y ago
Off topic, but slowly realizing Noam is just a contrarian. Happen to agree with him on this one though.
- TimTheTinker 5y ago
  People who courageously speak what they believe to be true despite the personal costs involved are essential to the preservation and advancement society - where would we be today without them?
- howaboutnope 5y ago
  That's hardly doing him justice.. https://www.salon.com/2012/06/17/when_chomsky_wept/ https://www.salon.com/2012/06/17/when_chomsky_wept/ Call it a fluff piece, sure, there certainly isn't even an attempt of criticism in it, but it still matches all I ever witnessed from him.

_jal 5y ago

High school taught me a lot about what to avoid, and how to game bullshit systems. It taught me that, while I had no idea what I wanted, I did not want the life I was seeing kids around me trapped in to. So I learned to give gatekeepers what they wanted and got out of that crappy little sinkhole. Didn't learn much of anything academic, though.

magicalhippo 5y ago

I really struggled with the primary language class, Norwegian in my case. Especially the historical parts were a motivational black hole. I get that one should learn some basics, like that we had some famous writers like Ibsen, but I feel it should be sufficient for most people to know roughly which century he lived, not the exact years of his birth and death. If you want to become a historian you'll have plenty of time to memorize those details later. I also realized later that we spent very little time at practical writing. I mean sure we wrote stories and such, but very little of it were practically oriented. Yet that's what most people end up needing. Like, writing a report, or heck a letter/email regarding a specific topic. We also didn't spend much time on understanding and interpreting text. We had some poems we had to interpret, but I think we should have had more of it. And not just poems and such but also more technical texts. Again a very useful skill compared to knowing that Camilla Collett was the sister of Henrik Wergeland, and when exactly they lived. This became clear when I had to write reports, participated in discussions in newsgroups and emails etc, and later assignments at uni. Anyway, rant over.

JTbane 5y ago

Honestly agree, the only things of value I learned were algebra, grammar and maybe literature?

dkarl 5y ago

> Well there’s a test coming up and you’ll have to memorize that and several other factoids. More than half of the assignments were pointless trivia that aren’t applicable to any modern career path. I think you're processing your memories through an adult lens and forgetting that if you judge them by adult standards, teenagers are shallow, horrible people. Of course we shouldn't judge teenagers by adult standards, because it isn't fair (children of all ages are pretty shitty people by adult standards) but we have to keep in mind that our memories of high school are memories that were formed by teenagers. I have heard so many times adults saying to me "if only my teachers had taught me X, I would have been so shocked and engaged" where X is something that their long-suffering teachers did, in fact, teach year after year to generations of bored and indifferent students. In the United States, classic examples are US imperial rule of the Philippines, the Sedition Acts, the Tuskeegee experiments, and the slaughter, subjugation, and displacement of Native Americans, all subjects that were covered in my high school history class to the complete indifference of just about everybody. I can't imagine the feelings of a teacher with an adult understanding of these things having to cope year after year with the dismissive reactions of teenagers. They can stand in front of a class as long as they want trying to explain how our involvement in the Philippines and our actions against democratically elected rulers in other countries complicate our image of ourselves as champions of freedom and self-determination, or how even a nation whose patriotic myths are cloaked in rhetoric about freedom has repeatedly struggled to reconcile patriotism with freedom of speech, but to a teenager it's going to be "ugggghhhhh stop talking about stuff we don't care about and just tell us what dumb factoid we have to remember for the test." Why do you still remember that the ship was called the Mayflower? Well, for whatever reason that fact is pretty vivid to people of all ages and easy to remember, and so it is used as a reference point and an easy answer on tests. What your teachers really wanted you to remember was that the Pilgrims were deeply, devoutly religious even by the standards of their own time, and thought they had a covenant with God and a duty to create a society that would be a model for every other in the world (holy shit, how wild is that?) and this extremely early thread was woven into the myth of American exceptionalism that is part of the political rhetoric of every single presidential and congressional election to this day, with its significance still contested. But that's not what a teenager is going to take out of high school history class. What they're going to remember is 1) they didn't want to be there, and 2) it was stupid. Again, not to be harsh on teenagers. It's normal for them to be that way, and it's not fair to judge them by adult standards. And maybe this is a strong argument for abolishing high school as we know it. If kids hate it and resent it, and they forget all of the good stuff and only remember the useless stuff anyway, then why bother with it? If people find things like the Tuskeegee experiment and the Triangle Shirtwaist fire utterly stupid and meaningless in their teens and revelatory in their twenties, why do we dedicate so much time and effort to teaching them in their teens? Maybe we can do better.