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

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.