14 ms·

Smart kids should skip high school (2015)

128 points by exolymph 5y ago

sulam 5y ago
I realize this advice may be appropriate for some people, but speaking personally as a parent who is both lucky enough and financially fortunate enough to send both of my girls to a private school, I think it's misguided for them. The school they go through is K-12, diverse, and the high school portion of it is pretty amazing. I'm personal friends with several of the teachers and I can say with all honesty that the classes they teach are easily the equal of the most interesting college courses I took at a very well regarded university. Obviously I haven't sampled every single class, and I'm sure there are some duds, but I've sampled enough to feel like I have a pretty good feel for it. It would be a huge mistake for my kids to forego the opportunity to learn more about the world with those teachers.
- TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
  What would happen if that kind of education was available to everyone? What would happen if world-lead expert personal tuition was available to everyone? (Obviously impractical, but let's pretend, as a thought experiment.) To what extent are we standing our own feet as a species by prioritising hierarchy and economic discrimination over free access to the best possible education for everyone? Especially for those who want it and can benefit from it?
  - sulam 5y ago
    Teaching ability isn't evenly distributed, and teaching doesn't seem to scale up to even the city scale, much less national or global. I'd love for everyone to be able to take Environmental Science from Mr V, but he's only one teacher.
  - jkhdigital 5y ago
    A start would be to (mostly) privatize primary education. Every revolution in mass production and delivery of goods and services that used to be the exclusive province of the rich was generated by free enterprise.
    - verve_rat 5y ago
      Not everything is improved by adding a profit motive. Privately run prisons are not exactly renowned for reducing recidivism.
    - elihu 5y ago
      That might work if you can figure out a way to fund private schools proportionally to the quality of the education they provide, but I'm skeptical there's any straightforward way to do that. Also, the portion of money that goes to shareholders is money that isn't spent on education. Governments can be inefficient, but part of the reason for the inefficiency is that they have to provide the same service to everyone and that's hard. They can't cherry-pick their customers. There may be new educational funding models we should be looking at. Maybe a lot of educational YouTube videos should be directly funded by government grants, and ad-free video hosting provided by government infrastructure if they want it.
      - leetcrew 5y ago
        private schools are generally set up as nonprofits. "shareholders" are not really a concern, though sometimes you end up with unreasonably high admin salaries.
    - kazen44 5y ago
      except that education is not only a service, but also a place to learn social skills. Also, i highly doubt your claim, considering that many inventions where made by public universities funded by states around the world, or even state controlled economies with no free market.
      - jkhdigital 5y ago
        Invention != mass production and commercialization
- memco 5y ago
  > the classes they teach are easily the equal of the most interesting college courses I took at a very well regarded university If they can handle this, then they could take college level classes and get high school credit and college credit at the same time. I went to an alternative high school that met on a community college campus and had 50% of the requirements for HS graduation for junior and senior year served by taking college courses. I was only able to get about half a year of college credit this way, but I was able to get half a year head start on college. In hindsight, I would have liked to start that process a year earlier and skipped as much HS as I could. I don't think that path is for everyone, but if you're capable and motivated I recommend exploring alternative pathways for reducing the traditional HS experience in favor of more profitable uses of time & talent.
  - sulam 5y ago
    I don't think college credits are the point, really. The general rule of thumb for people coming out of this school is that they feel like their first or possibly even second year of college is significantly less challenging than their last two years of high school. But as a result they can do extra-curriculars, do independent studies, smell the flowers a bit, etc. That doesn't seem like a bad thing in my view.
  - benibela 5y ago
    I took college courses during high school. I had enough credits to finish my bachelor degree within a year after finishing school I thought I was skipping high school, but in reality I was actually skipping college. It is really bad.
Avicebron 5y ago
My friend did this in hs (well, he "dropped out sophomore year") to go to college, he got his degree in math and is doing quite well. But I will say there is something to be said for having a traditional social experience of hs which i thoroughly enjoyed
peter_l_downs 5y ago
Fun way to make this argument is to use College/University instead of highschool and then, if people more or less agree on that, also suggest Highschool. You can keep moving down the stack. At some point, people start to be concerned about socialization, which is a very fair concern. I did not learn anything in highschool (or college) but I made friends that I have to this day and learned how to be a human in a world of other humans. Hard to untangle things after the fact but I went straight into the working world after highschool and I am really, really glad that I ended up eventually going to college solely because of the people I met there and the ways they challenged me to grow and become a better person. edit: there are obviously ways to get this socialization without being in a traditional, horrible, highschool environment. I do not know if I would homeschool my kids or not!
- barbazoo 5y ago
  > I did not learn anything in highschool (or college) Is this really the case or do you just not remember specific things you learned or even abstract concepts around learning itself that are hard to quantify?
  - peter_l_downs 5y ago
    I don't know, how would I?
    - Jtsummers 5y ago
      Do you know math? Did you rediscover it, learn it from materials or individuals outside of school, or learn it in school? Repeat that exercise with other areas of knowledge.
    - SECProto 5y ago
      If you don't know whether you learned anything, you shouldn't state definitively "I did not learn anything in highschool (or college)"
  - ElFitz 5y ago
    Not the parent, but I really couldn’t say. I personally spent most high school classes either sleeping or playing on my laptop, and often literally learning about what we had been seeing in class when reading the exam's title. Often doing things like completing the math exams based on recollections from middle school. And yet got by, year after year, as well as anyone else. I then spent over a decade having a hard time figuring out how to actually take and keep any kind of notes, study and how to learn things that didn’t just "come to me" on their own. Quite a weird experience. Looking back, I can only wish it had been different. But that’s pointless.
andrewstuart 5y ago
>> enduring the sociocultural hell of high school It's an important part of life and becoming an adult in so many ways and skipping it deprives the child of the opportunity for the good and bad experiences that humans need to experience to become balanced adults. Life has bad bits for everyone. Chopping out high school preemptively is not only not a solution but is actively detrimental.
- codingwageslave 5y ago
  Being chained to a desk memorizing facts isn’t an important part of life
- handrous 5y ago
  Adult work & social life has practically nothing in common with high school. Neither does college. The only times any of that looks even a little like high school is when something's gone very wrong. From about 6th or 7th grade through graduation, school is a weird environment all its own.
  - convolvatron 5y ago
    worse - when 'adult' situations go sideways, you can often take a sideways look - and damn if they aren't all acting like they are still in high school.
  - thegypsyking 5y ago
    Jail is 100% like high school, from the experiences of the people I know who spent time in the can at least.
  - tailspin2019 5y ago
    > Adult work & social life has practically nothing in common with high school. Some might say it is similar to being in prison though… At least for part of high school that’s what it felt like at times for me. The biggest issue being the forced labour - sorry, I mean “homework” - of which the burden was substantial and the benefits not at all clear. At the time I remember being very depressed that even when I was at home and away from the school that I often didn’t enjoy, instead of indulging in my hobbies (which, coincidentally, is how I learnt practically all of the specialised skills that I used to kick off my techology career) I was forced to complete endless hours of dull and unsurprising homework. I understand the benefits in moderation but the sheer amount assigned to me was actively detrimental to the point of robbing me of a big chunk of my free time as a teenager. I desperately wanted to continue teaching myself programming (this was in the early 90’s) but instead I had to complete some mindless essay about sedimentary fucking rocks. Not to mention that I had undiagnosed ADHD so the homework took me forever and created considerable stress. Having said that, it was so bad (and felt so pointless) that even though I was academically pretty strong and had wanted to go to University from quite a young age, I instead quit school at 16, immediately got a job in a business consultancy (using my self-taught programming/design skills) and was running small software projects for huge multi-national businesses within a year. By the time most of my peer group graduated University, I had about 5 years of a software development career under my belt and had already started my first business. In retrospect I don’t think I would have done anything different, apart from putting about 500% less effort into the sedimentary rock essays.
eynsham 5y ago
I found school academically useful for two reasons. First, I am very lazy, but I also don’t want to look it, so I actually took notes, did problem sheets, &c.—and in lessons, since I had nothing better to do, I paid attention and talked about the material. This assumes of course that the school is able to impart something useful, which may not be the case.
- Ekaros 5y ago
  The structure really helped me. So I did quite well, could have done better, but that really wouldn't have mattered in the end. The less structured University went less well. But lot of it was also good teachers in good school.
invokestatic 5y ago
Towards the end of high school, I started a fairly profitable startup, and went on to do that for a few more years after in lieu of college. At the time, I really struggled with my parents desire to keep me in school and my own desire to drop out and get a GED. They won out. And actually, I’m glad they did. Even though my grades were very poor and I never did homework, I really do think I came out of high school better than I would have been with only a GED. Now, 6 years out of high school, I attend a community college part-time to work on a bachelors degree. Funny how I completely discounted higher education just a few years ago.
- renewiltord 5y ago
  Fascinating story. How did the startup go?
  - invokestatic 5y ago
    My partner and I grew apart and we shut it down in 2018. Funded everything since then.
huachimingo 5y ago
Instead of skipping, why not show them advanced material? Like bachilleratos or 1st Uni semester...
- asdff 5y ago
  A lot of public schools these days let students take these sort of classes at a local community college and these credits can even transfer into your undergrad. Probably not available in more rural parts that don't have these colleges though.
- sodality2 5y ago
  The International Baccalaureate high school program is international and offers exactly that, my experience with it has been incredible so far and I know that it's helped me prepare for college in uncountable ways. Our capstone essay is 4000 words on a class of our choice, so whatever the student is passionate about, they can write their essay on. This is a perfect solution to students who may be intelligent but unmotivated outside of their interest area. For example, mine is about peer-to-peer networking; I spend most of my nights doing research for the paper and it certainly is preparing me for college. It's not available everywhere I believe, but if it's available, there's another option compared to AP classes or regular classes (or other magnet/governor schools).
darthvoldemort 5y ago
I read somewhere that kids with IQ 140 waste about half their time in school. Kids with IQ of 170 waste all their time at school. It's no wonder that kids with IQ 145 or greater are mostly home schooled, because there's no real school that can handle them and the issues that come with those kids. Skipping high school definitely sounds like a better path, especially given the social problems with being with kids so much older than you.
- endisneigh 5y ago
  Source?
  - darthvoldemort 5y ago
    I didn't know but I simply googled it. It's from Leta Hollingworth, a researcher on gifted children from the mid-20th century, her book "Children Above 180 IQ".
- maximus-decimus 5y ago
  What percentage of people have a 145 IQ? That sounds really high.
  - darthvoldemort 5y ago
    Every 15 IQ points from 100 is one standard deviation away, where 100 is the average. So 145 is 3 standard deviations away from average or 99.7%.
    - lkbm 5y ago
      I think it's 99.7% within three standard deviations (e.g., in either direction) so presumably half as many are three standard deviations above the mean—99.85% (top 0.15%). Tiny % either way.
  - jeffbee 5y ago
    145 is ~ the top tenth of 1 percent. In a large high school there might be one such person.
chrisaycock 5y ago
It sounds like the author just went to a lousy high school. I was fortunate enough to go to a private school (my tuition was waived because my mother was a teacher there) where I took a ton of APs in small classes. Compare that to the large gen-ed courses at college where the pace was glacial and the tests were multiple choice.
- brighton36 5y ago
  What percentage of students go to lousy high schools...
brighton36 5y ago
I dropped out of high school in the late nineties, and went straight to work at a dot com. My life (best I can tell) was never impacted negatively, and I far surpassed my friends in most measures (certainly financially) as a result. My only regret is having not dropped out sooner.
jeffbee 5y ago
If you can't figure out how to benefit from high school then sure, it's a big waste of time. It is also a unique setting in American life. In no other setting is such a broad range of activities, athletics, and arts available to a person. You aren't very likely to find opportunities to participate in competitive sports and athletics, amateur bands and orchestras after high school. I, personally, just ignored the academic parts of it after I'd piled up enough AP tests and whatnot for admission to selective colleges. Hell, in my senior year I barely had any real classes at all. I filled up my schedule with three different music subjects, newspaper/yearbook/photography, sports, and pointless electives like drafting, which was, by the way, a lot of fun. High school is also, how to put this politely, a rather unique atmosphere of sexual experimentation. Skipping that and attending a college where everyone is much older than you is not going to replace that. College, on the other hand, was an abject waste of four years.
akoluthic 5y ago
If you have a plan and motivation, go for it. Assuming you need to make money, you can either be self employed, in a partnership, or employed by someone else. The first requires you be a good business person, which is not a common innate trait but can be learned to some extent. The second is often a great option if you have equally motivated partners with complementary strengths. The third usually requires some sort of signalling to get employers to hire you. Having a degree is part of that signalling. This is, of course, completely ignoring that some professions require a degree, like being a doctor, which is rewarding work. As a teenager, you often have no idea what you will find meaningful and rewarding later in life, making this type of decision quite risky.
avalys 5y ago
I skipped 7th grade. I was also young for my grade as it was, with a summer birthday that meant I was in the youngest cohort just past the cutoff. This had absolutely zero effect on me in high school and I got great grades and did some notable stuff and got into MIT. But the result was that I entered MIT nearly two years younger than most of my peers. I turned out fine - but in retrospect I had a lot of growing up yet to do, and I think I would have made better use of my college experience if I had been able to do that growing up before college as opposed to during freshman and sophomore year, where you make a lot of decisions that will influence your life for a while. I missed many opportunities at MIT because I didn't really understand how the academic and professional world worked and what would be important to focus on for my career - let alone more personal matters. Looking back now I wish I had actually taken a year off before college, as opposed to skipping a grade in a hurry to get there, and I encourage every high school student and parent I know to think in these terms. This will of course be very situational. Yes, if you are in a bad high school with bad teachers and bad students, you might be better off skipping it in favor of some alternative. But in general, a lot of growing up is just getting experience and doing things, and high school is how you get a lot of that experience before you go to college and have to do bigger and more consequential things. Don't be (or don't let your kids be) in a hurry to get ahead of that curve.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- CrimpCity 5y ago
  So if you could go back in time would you take a gap year? In general I think freshmen / sophomores don’t take enough advantages & don’t understand the professional implications of their time in college.
  - avalys 5y ago
    Yes - actually I had just finished editing my post to say that. For me at least I think it would have made a major difference. You are absolutely correct - I still sometimes kick myself over stupid decisions I made as a freshman and sophomore.
Upvoter33 5y ago
I knew a few kids who went to college very early. To say that it messed up their life is an understatement. Schools should figure out how to teach smart kids useful stuff while they get to learn how to be social with kids their own age.
- eynsham 5y ago
  Lots of people start doing olympiads (often there are relatively big correspondence programmes and similar to train people before selecting teams for the international ones). I was never intelligent enough to do well in them, alas.
nonameiguess 5y ago
This woman dropped out of high school and illegally became an underage prostitute because she was struggling with depression. I don't mean to minimize her experience or suggest there is anything intrinsically wrong with that, but I don't think you can just project whatever terrible school experiences led her to that and think everyone has that bad of an experience in high school. This reminds me a bit of Scott Alexander's extreme bias against school, due to all of the extreme bullying he faced. It might make more sense to say kids who are having a truly awful experience in high school should skip high school, rather than just "smart kids should skip high school." I think I was a pretty smart person, perfect SAT score even, and I certainly could have learned everything I learned in high school must faster with less wasted time if I studied on my own, but I don't think the experience was worthless. It's the last time I had real, truly close friends. It was the last time I competed hard in real sports leagues. Theoretically, I could have tried to find other ways to do those things, but there's some benefit to just being around the same people all the time and doing things together if you don't hate each other and make each other's lives awful. I don't know what else I would have done. I may have been academically ready for college a lot earlier, but I wasn't socially ready. I wasn't socially ready even at 18 and probably should have waited even longer. You can't just actually go to work even if you're able to because of child labor laws.
- Koshkin 5y ago
  I am having a hard time coming to terms with your thought that there is nothing intrinsically wrong with illegally becoming an underage prostitute.
ChicagoBoy11 5y ago
I skipped 5th grade and I can't for the life of me really pinpoint what possible negative impact it has had on my life. And, even if you suggest that there really wasn't any positive, either, just as a sheer function of entering the labor force one year earlier, the lifetime income impact is quite significant. I certainly don't want to dismiss that I had one less year of fun elementary school times with friends, but it's fairly clear to me that the way we've organized schooling isn't really rooted in anything that really promotes the success of an individual, but more what is socially most efficient/easiest.
rejectedandsad 5y ago
I generally think advice from .001% fringe elites is less than useless, it’s actively harmful. People like you are completely detached from reality and most of you have nothing but active disdain for people of lesser intelligence like me - hell, you probably would support euthanizing people with IQs like mine.
- thegypsyking 5y ago
  Congrats, you’re the cringiest person on the entire website. You should really go to a psychiatrist or something based on your post history.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - dang 5y ago
    You can't attack another user like this, no matter how bad their posts are or you feel they are. Posting like this is a bannable offence on HN. I'm not going to ban you because we haven't warned you before, but please read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules from now on.
- darthvoldemort 5y ago
  Friend, I remember your posts from the past several months. I honestly think you need to go through some therapy. You have been through a lot of bad experiences because of your parents and because of unrealistic expectations put on you. It's not your fault. But being angry like this is really toxic for yourself. Life should be happier than this for you. Please find a way to talk to a therapist because you need to release your anger, get past your trauma, and find happiness.
  - rejectedandsad 5y ago
    My parents don’t understand why I believe this actually, they’re pretty smart and went to selective institutions. I, on the other hand, am an example of generational decline with nothing to live for because people like GP think state schoolers that didn’t skip multiple grades are subhuman.
subsubzero 5y ago
My Wife left high school after sophomore year, she didn't like the bullying etc. and got into "middle college" a program with college level classes at the local community college taught by professors. She got into NYU and a few others once she graduated so there is a path outside of high school for some. I do feel like there is a valuable lesson to be learned from high school besides education and that is socialization. Going straight to college after middle school seems unrealistic for 99% of folks anyway so what will be filled with that 4 years before college starts?
munificent 5y ago
I'm naturally suspicious of anyone's "shoulds" about education unless they base them on research in sociology, psychology, and/or pedagogy. Otherwise, they are usually based on the person's own personal history and our interpretation of our history is always suspect and biased. (The author's disclaimer means my point doesn't apply to the linked article.) It may be the case that the author's high school experience wasn't worth the time, but that's a retroactive observation. It's probably true that for some people high school is a net good and for some it isn't. But unless you have an effective way to distinguish one from the other before they go to high school, it's hard to draw actionable advice from that fact.
dang 5y ago
Discussed at the time: Smart Kids Should Skip High School - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11509374 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11509374 - April 2016 (65 comments)
- exolymph 5y ago
  Ha, I didn't even remember, I thought this was first time round!
jrm4 5y ago
Broadly, I think the mistake is thinking that "what is taught in school" is somehow objectively good or necessary. I've come to think of it more in terms of "School helps people navigate a world in which you are generally expected to go to school." Some people will get a great deal of value from it, and really need it, whatever "it" is -- it could be what's in the books or it could be what's in the people around you. Some people may not need it much at all. Furthermore, of course what makes this especially complex is the variance in "schools."
errantspark 5y ago
I'm a highschool dropout, but I did a decent job of attending most of the way through anyway cause all my friends weren't fuckups. I have a hard time imagining what sort of person I'd be if I didn't have that growth with a cohort of friends. In terms of my success as a human who is part of society I don't think anything has been as helpful as the social skills that I learned in high school. I don't think it's the only way to learn these skills, but I certainly feel like my social-learning velocity was by far the highest in high school. Ultimately how other people perceive me influences my quality of life more than any other thing. I don't think as a "smart kid" skipping high school would have helped me, I think it would have hurt me a lot. I feel like my life opened up immensely when I accepted that being smart and correct and having a deep understanding of the problem at hand matters so much less than being able to get along with people.
quantumsequoia 5y ago
In order to make a convincing argument, the author needs to elaborate more on how the time should be spent instead While I can agree with him high school is a lot of tedium and busy work, I'm skeptical sitting around at home doing whatever you want will result in a more enriching use of time There will be the natural tendency to avoid learning about things you don't like, which can result in a biased worldview. There is the natural tendency to procrastinate. There is the need to interact with people with different perspectives who will challenge your ideas. I don't see this will be an environment that helps budding minds flourish. I might have been more inclined to agree with him pre-pandemic, but the experience has taught me I (and probably most other people too) actually suck at using time well when there is no structure
- ghaff 5y ago
  Effectively the argument would seem to be for homeschooling, probably in a minimally structured way.
Ekaros 5y ago
I think high school education was very good for me. Then again we had proper educational system here. Much more so than university, which I think had much less effect.
cosmotic 5y ago
At the very least, please be aware of AP classes that you can get college credit for instead of having to essentially retake the same courses later.
kthejoker2 5y ago
Disclaimer: I'm smart (ask my mom!), skipped a grade, went to college at 16, F*ed around and found out, made it out alive on the other side, would not recommend. Premature optimization is the root of all evil ... "Some" smart kids should skip "some" high school ... maybe. But more importantly, a ton of hand-waving here about how unnecessary high school was as a crucible of learning and self-improvement - hint: passing the GED is not the same as high school. Also pretty optimistic (again, from experience) to expect a smart, lazy kid (the target audience for high school skipping) to "macro-plan" a 4 year "unschooling" experiment for their ages 14-18.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
amatecha 5y ago
As someone who slept through a very large percentage of classes (and failed 5/8 classes one year), and who has been gainfully employed since "completing" high school, I completely agree. I learned far more, and far more relevant/valuable stuff, by pursuing my interests at home via the internet and computers. I was far more interested in the seemingly-infinite world of technology, music and software than really anything that was being "taught" at school. Turns out my interminable pursuit of my interests was validated with lucrative career opportunities -- much to the surprise of naysayers who thought I was "going down the wrong path". :) People tried so hard to get me to care at all about high school but no one could possibly convince me that the rote, mundane textbook crap was going to be worth spending my life on. Indeed, there is no time I look back and think "I wish I paid attention in that class". I got to enjoy my teenage years delving into fascinating, rewarding stuff, and developed tons of awesome skills in the process, too.
Barrin92 5y ago
Very strange to read this from my German perspective. School is compulsory here, and it has its historical roots in a the Prussian education system which didn't just convey knowledge but socialized kids and young adults, essentially making them citizens. And that's still I think the most important function of a proper education system. Not only do you acquire basic knowledge, but you learn how to function within an institution, work within groups, face adverse situations, follow instructions, timelines, interact with authority, and so on, you learn the basics of democracy even, how to function within a small political community of sorts. The majority of people will continue to go on and benefit from this. Whether they work at a large corporation, administration, the military, the legal sector, a medical profession, academia. Most careers are highly structured. People saying that their school experience is nothing like 'real life' in my experience work in highly idiosyncratic professions that only employ a minority of individuals. And as a side note, my parents couldn't teach me anything past 8th grade. the entire notion of leaving the school system is essentially preserved for people whose parents are affluent or fairly educated.
mmmBacon 5y ago
A very bright friend of mine dropped out of high-school, got his GED and moved onto college while we were all still going to high-school. At the time he dropped out, 1989, I felt it was a terrible thing but looking back on it; it was really quite brilliant. The unfortunate part is that the GED limited his choice of college but it didn't seem to hold him back that much after 2 years of community college.
godot 5y ago
First of all, let me say (tangentially) that I disagree with the notion of skipping college/university, a view that is so popular on HN and other tech circles nowadays. College was one of the best times of my life; I feel like I learned a lot of actual useful knowledge (computer science major), and I made long lasting friendships; 20 years later some of my best friends now still are people I met in college (including my significant other). It wasn't even like I was a popular person in school or anything. I was just an ordinary person. Having said that, I actually do agree the value of high school is little. Given my pretext above though, here's the problem. I don't know how one would enter college without high school. High school is very much college prep. It sucks both in terms of classes and social life. Most people I know didn't like high school. Perhaps that speaks to who I am and who my friends are (i.e. none of us were popular kids in high school). The author here suggests GED is equivalent to finishing high school which I'm sure it technically is, but college admissions care about high school GPA and SAT scores. I didn't even go to Ivy League or anything but I did go to a University of California which is good in the grand scheme of things but not the top; and I can't imagine getting into one of these without good high school GPA and SAT. Ivy League admission is probably a whole other level of ball game. Maybe then the next argument point is how we fix college admissions, because I don't think getting rid of college entirely and doing bootcamps only is the way to go.
jhart99 5y ago
I did this. Let me tell you my experience. I grew up in the outskirts of LA where there is a mix of farmland and people willing to drive a long way into LA. My family moved there because of the military and i had previously been in a "good" school, but this area was more than 50% the children of farm workers and they had really been screwed by fate. Most didn't speak English and the school system was constantly struggling to get them to learn enough English so they could understand the other subjects. Anyway, by junior high, I had worked out a deal with my school that I could take some classes at the local community college and not take them at junior high. So rather than take Algebra I or whatever I would take a math class at the college. Well... by the end of 8th grade I had taken the first two calculus semesters. When transferring to college I should have gone to one of two particularly bad high schools and it make things worse, the high schools were not going to allow me to take any college classes. I would start in high school at algebra II. So I dropped out. At the time in California, you were able to select a community college as your high school. This is sadly no longer the case. I took all the classes I needed to fill in my general education requirements and took STEM classes I would need to transfer to a CSU or UC school. I didn't take things too seriously. I took whatever classes looked interesting including SCUBA, TV production and some music classes. I finished with everything needed to transfer at 16 and transferred to Calpoly. I finished with my BS in Chemistry at 19. Took a year off because I didn't know what I wanted to do. Worked at a winery as an analytical chemist which was loads of fun. After a year there, I decided I needed a PhD if I wanted to do research and did that at Caltech. Personally, I believe this worked out fine for me. The people at the community college especially in STEM classes were great. I had and made friends along the way. Going to high school would have been a step down and a step back for me, but I don't think skipping high school is for everyone.
- commandlinefan 5y ago
  Did essentially the same thing - started community college during 8th grade, got enough credits to transfer, and opted out of high school entirely. I always wonder if it really was a good decision overall, though - I wonder if maybe I had gone the “traditional” route if I might have gone to a better four-year school and had a higher GPA. All in all, I’ve done OK, but I always wonder. Edit: so it would appear that neither of us actually read the article before commenting…
wolverine876 5y ago
If you are a high schooler, and you read this article and now you think should skip high school (and college), you should definitely go to high school and college.
fungiblecog 5y ago
My kids go to what are considered “very good” schools. I have an 11 year old and a 13 year old and it seems to me school is a) about becoming a standardised social human cog and b) the school passing off whatever is the current vague social fashion (resilience, leadership, whatever) as useful learning. Meanwhile the teachers spend a huge amount of effort to avoid teaching anything that might actually be useful. I don’t blame them - They suffered the same terrible education and are unqualified to teach anything except what they were taught so the cycle is self-reinforcing. Any actual learning seems incidental or is left the kids to find out for themselves through online programs (eg for maths/spelling) or personal research. I think school as we know it is becoming a dead end for genuinely useful learning, and for the masses it is essentially just something to keep young people busy so they don’t roam the streets and cause trouble. Sadly the first step in solving a problem is recognising it exists in the first place, but the question of why we continue with such a broken educational model doesn’t seem to trouble anyone - if the other parents are anything to go by anyway. They seem to lap up the schools’ endless marketing push designed to ensure nobody questions anything.
- kenjackson 5y ago
  You may want to find actually good schools. My son goes to a "very good" school and I'm always amazed at how much they fit in each day. Could he do more if he focused and studied by himself? Maybe. But I've also seen through home-schooling that left to his own devices he'll just write Roblox games (which are educational -- but they probably shouldn't be the only thing you do). Find a better school that will push your children. They do exist.
- analog31 5y ago
  My kids attended a "very good" school. It was a crap shoot. There was a large population of kids who were children of professors and doctors. Some kids did very well, others fell through the cracks. There's only so much you can control through selection of a school, and other factors, and then it's a crap shoot. Possibly the only predicting factor I was able to discern is that highly disciplined, self motivated parents tend to have highly disciplined, self motivated kids. People in professions that select for those traits will have "successful" kids. One thing I noticed is that I had vastly more spare time as a kid -- enough that I was able to play music while also teaching myself electronics and programming. On the other hand my school paid very little attention to writing, and I think my kids got a lot better preparation in both writing and critical thinking.
rob_c 5y ago
Having skipped a year of school at 15, yes skipping several years of school could help. (I was then stuck for another year twiddling my thumbs as I couldn't skip 2 years in the UK but had already mastered the material) Imo, there is way too much no child left behind. But that's referring to the UK education system where you can't proceed without ticking all the boxes at each step. (To be clear I don't blame the teachers, most of that nonsense comes from council level interventions and management) The national system does a very good job of completely failing those at the top and bottom of the grading system the worst.
grillvogel 5y ago
smart kids should go to high school and take AP classes and participate in high school activities like Academic Decathlon with like minded peers
kart23 5y ago
I think college and high school should be better optimized for each other. In high school, it's perfectly fine if you don't have a specialization. You don't even really have to decide your major until the 2nd year of college. This creates a lot of wasted time for people who do know what they want to do. The first year of my CS education was learning stuff I already knew from High School. I was sitting next to people who had never taken CS before, and this was their first introduction. I think it actually should be required to enter with a major in mind, and have completed coursework done towards it in high school. Not every high school could teach specialized courses, but there is a lot of low-hanging fruit that would be pretty easy. Ex. Physics for engineering, Linear Algebra for CS majors, Bio & Chemistry, etc. High schools can teach these things pretty consistently, we shouldn't need to take such basic classes in college. High school should cover more advanced material, and college should cover less breadth-wise and start off more advanced. I shouldn't be taking calculus or basic writing in college as a CS major.
- burlesona 5y ago
  Many people would argue the opposite, the high school is already far too focused on college preparation and a lot of people are just not interested in college. A generation or two ago there were a lot of trade classes in high school, and it was possible to come out of high school with a “specialization” in some thing like pipe fitting or welding they were walking right into a local industrial career. Now that’s all gone for the sake of college prep, and kids who would be great pipe fitters end up as burger flippers. I once has a conversation with the (then) Mayor of Texas City, Texas who lamented this exact change and said the city had a big program to recruit and visa sponsor pipe fitters out of Vietnam to sustain the local industries because the local schools no longer taught the needed skills. These were apparently great middle class jobs with high wages and benefits (although I’m taking him at his word, I don’t know if it’s true). My personal take is that high school tries to be a one size fits all model, which actually just makes it a waste of time for everyone. It would be a big improvement if we could let people branch out a lot more starting around age 14 or so. Then perhaps it would make sense, if you knew you wanted to do computer science, you could go to a CS oriented high school and in two years do all the pre-requisite work for a CS bachelors degree and head off to college, or something like that. Mainly though, I think this doesn’t happen because most people need the high school to be in their neighborhood or close by. Kids can’t drive until they’re 16, And even then they are terrible drivers and probably shouldn’t be driving until they’re 18 or 21. But this is America and if you can’t drive you really can’t be an adult, so there’s no way that you can go to the specialty school 45 minutes away. And I don’t think very many parents want to send their young teenage children away to boarding school.
lmilcin 5y ago
Pretty poor advice. Better advice would be: think critically about what you are getting from high school. Use it as a tool to get what you need or skip it if you think you have better use of your time and money. Good reason to not skip high school are further developing social skills and especially if you have no better use of your time.
lr4444lr 5y ago
Terrible advice. I could have spent three years writing and reading and working on interesting projects, instead of enduring the sociocultural hell of high school. That - right there- is exactly why this person and most others need to be in high school, so that you can learn how to deal with your peers once you're all past puberty and starting to sort yourselves by definitive skills, talents, and motivations while you still have enough pre-adult protections and guardians to let you make mistakes. Because learning the subtleties of adult interpersonal interactions is crucially important for success in work, romance, civic life, and adult friendships. Running away from all of that just because you are not mentally stimulated enough in math or art class is a pale excuse for not facing your social emotional deficits as a budding adult. Academic enrichment is MUCH easier to tack on than proper socialization from school.
- warent 5y ago
  What you're describing is wonderful in theory. In practice I'd be really interested in seeing the objective reality of these results. My perspective is that a lot of the "subtle adult interpersonal interactions" people supposedly acquire through average public high school are actually damaging or traumatizing at worst, as kids have any sense of individuality and creativity wrung out of them, meanwhile many adults continue to behave like high schoolers for the rest of their life because of how catastrophic it has been to their personal development.
  - woofie11 5y ago
    Yeah -- my experience is kids who have unconventional experiences do better socially than the ones who go through conventional school.
- tshaddox 5y ago
  I would need to be convinced that high school uniquely prepares one for the subtleties of adult interpersonal interactions. Until I see a strong argument one way or the other, I'm just as apt to believe that high school actively gives a false sense of the subtleties of adult interpersonal interactions. And as far me as an adult now, if I notice almost any similarity between an interpersonal interaction now and interpersonal interactions in high school, that's a huge red flag that this is probably not a mature and healthy interaction to take part in.
JTbane 5y ago
Honestly, most of primary education is a waste of time. If you are a young student and demonstrate good ability in the basics (Algebra, Geometry, sciences, etc) you should be allowed to get ahead. Additionally, public schooling is more of a glorified day-care than an actual place of learning these days.
t-3 5y ago
The author's description of high school makes me feel grateful for the teachers I had. I guess I got lucky with a public school that had teachers that cared and made an effort to teach rather than have us do rote memorization.
williamtrask 5y ago
Homeschooling is a great middle ground here if it’s available to you.
deleted 5y ago
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poopypoopington 5y ago
I'm so glad I went to high school, it was really tough but I don't think I, or the vast majority of 13, 14, 15, or 16 year olds would be mature enough to take full advantage of college. High school isn't just about learning trigonometry, it's about easing your way into learning what it means to be an adult. I don't think you can do this surrounded by peers who are 30-60% older than you at such a young age. Maybe I could have skipped high school, but I'm glad I didn't.
Koshkin 5y ago
But really smart kids: drop out of school ASAP, get together, and make their first $1M by the age of 18.
Ace357 5y ago
High school and college do nothing for someone with an IQ over 115. School can't help someone who doesn't want to learn. School can't help someone who does want to learn. Other than that, school is very helpful.
true_religion 5y ago
Smart kids would find it easier skipping 1st through 4th grade than high school. For those years, the curriculum is usually the same year per year, except with a little more explanation as time goes by. If you are someone who grokked addition in your first week of kindergarten, you could have learned all the way up to 4th grade math in a single year. If you were reading at age 3, you didn’t need 7 more years of study to read at a 4th grade level… Smartness really helps when all school is trying to alleviate is ignorance.
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spywaregorilla 5y ago
I benefited immensely from a good high school (american, public). It was the only thing I got close to a humanist curriculum. That was nice. I would not want to pay college prices to learn basic biology/chemistry/history/etc. The knowledge I learned there has been more useful to my career (data science) than what I picked up in undergrad or grad school (MIT), and that's not to downplay either of the latter two. I also learned that I was a weird kid who didn't know how to socialize... and so I had good time to do that while being forced to meet with a fairly large group of people for an extended period of time. College did not do this. College provided opportunities for this, but it was easier to be a recluse. What America needs is more good high schools, not to give up on the concept itself. If anyone doesn't need high school, it's kids who don't have any interest in learning there. I had an easy time academically in high school. Mostly A's with no studying, and over a dozen AP classes passed, including a few that I just tested out of with some self study. But I still learned a great deal. I do wish it moved faster, but in the scheme of things it was a great experience.
ohyes 5y ago
Counterpoint: If high school is a hellish experience then why are only the smart kids recommended to skip it? It would seem that the most mature would be best at navigating an experience like that. High-school (and puberty) should simply be made to not be a terrible experience for everyone. Good luck with that without a dramatic cultural shift.
foxyv 5y ago
Most High Schools are just daycare centers that keep kids out of trouble. Teachers honestly try their hardest, but they have an entire system stacked against them. Compulsory attendance, kids packed in like sardines, poor mental health, child abuse, poor nutrition, crime, drugs, fights, endless bullying. A while ago I saw a quote that if you cut social services it will end up in the emergency room. The same goes for the High Schools. They HAVE to run them like prisons in order to even hope to deal with the number of issues they see. If you have any alternative, avoid sending your kid to a High School unless you can vet that it's not a hellhole. I haven't had to fight a person, say no to hard drugs, avoid pickpockets, or withstand constant verbal and physical assault since leaving High School. To all those who had a wonderful High School experience I am truly happy for you. However, I think for many kids, they could get more beneficial social experiences literally anywhere else. Ones that don't scar or taint you.
- harryvederci 5y ago
  You didn't specify which country you're from. Kinda sad, but it sounds like a warzone and my brain jumped to the conclusion: must be the USA. (Not meant disrespectfully to you, by the way.)
  - foxyv 5y ago
    I'm from the USA, but the problem with High Schools is certainly not limited to the US. Also, you are right that it sounds like a warzone. The particular High School I went to was in a town that had just lost it's military base and had turned into a bedroom community for halfway houses. (Places where criminals leaving prison would stay on parole.) This mixed a large number of different gangs together into a single area leading to tons of terrible things. This all trickled down to the kids in the area. Fights involving 10 or more kids were common. Walking home you had to avoid certain times and places where after school fighting would take place. Parks and culverts were DMZs at certain times. Resource officers used pepper spray in crowded hallways where a fight had broken out. Whenever we had a school assembly it was pretty common for a riot to break out. This was the "Good" High School in town. There were two others that were quite a bit worse. Problems with weapons, fires, and such.
rodonn 5y ago
The economist Bryan Caplan recently wrote about the experience of his twins who recently entered college after doing homeschooling for middle and high school. There seems to be a lot of overlap in their experiences to this article https://www.econlib.org/our-homeschooling-odyssey/ https://www.econlib.org/our-homeschooling-odyssey/
fellowniusmonk 5y ago
I skipped high school because I started working full time to keep the roof over my families head at 15. Extreme poverty is more avoidable now that we have the ACA and preexisting conditions can't be used to destroy multiple generations of a family's life. If you are a software engineer it's fine. Yes there are downsides, I know them all. I can talk about this for days.
nsonha 5y ago
If there's such a thing like decentralized education, what would it be? And no homeschooling isn't the answer, not for parent with a typical 9-5 employment (who may enjoy their jobs).

128 points by exolymph 5y ago

I realize this advice may be appropriate for some people, but speaking personally as a parent who is both lucky enough and financially fortunate enough to send both of my girls to a private school, I think it's misguided for them. The school they go through is K-12, diverse, and the high school portion of it is pretty amazing. I'm personal friends with several of the teachers and I can say with all honesty that the classes they teach are easily the equal of the most interesting college courses I took at a very well regarded university. Obviously I haven't sampled every single class, and I'm sure there are some duds, but I've sampled enough to feel like I have a pretty good feel for it. It would be a huge mistake for my kids to forego the opportunity to learn more about the world with those teachers.

TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
What would happen if that kind of education was available to everyone? What would happen if world-lead expert personal tuition was available to everyone? (Obviously impractical, but let's pretend, as a thought experiment.) To what extent are we standing our own feet as a species by prioritising hierarchy and economic discrimination over free access to the best possible education for everyone? Especially for those who want it and can benefit from it?
- sulam 5y ago
  Teaching ability isn't evenly distributed, and teaching doesn't seem to scale up to even the city scale, much less national or global. I'd love for everyone to be able to take Environmental Science from Mr V, but he's only one teacher.
- jkhdigital 5y ago
  A start would be to (mostly) privatize primary education. Every revolution in mass production and delivery of goods and services that used to be the exclusive province of the rich was generated by free enterprise.
  - verve_rat 5y ago
    Not everything is improved by adding a profit motive. Privately run prisons are not exactly renowned for reducing recidivism.
  - elihu 5y ago
    That might work if you can figure out a way to fund private schools proportionally to the quality of the education they provide, but I'm skeptical there's any straightforward way to do that. Also, the portion of money that goes to shareholders is money that isn't spent on education. Governments can be inefficient, but part of the reason for the inefficiency is that they have to provide the same service to everyone and that's hard. They can't cherry-pick their customers. There may be new educational funding models we should be looking at. Maybe a lot of educational YouTube videos should be directly funded by government grants, and ad-free video hosting provided by government infrastructure if they want it.
    - leetcrew 5y ago
      private schools are generally set up as nonprofits. "shareholders" are not really a concern, though sometimes you end up with unreasonably high admin salaries.
  - kazen44 5y ago
    except that education is not only a service, but also a place to learn social skills. Also, i highly doubt your claim, considering that many inventions where made by public universities funded by states around the world, or even state controlled economies with no free market.
    - jkhdigital 5y ago
      Invention != mass production and commercialization
memco 5y ago
> the classes they teach are easily the equal of the most interesting college courses I took at a very well regarded university If they can handle this, then they could take college level classes and get high school credit and college credit at the same time. I went to an alternative high school that met on a community college campus and had 50% of the requirements for HS graduation for junior and senior year served by taking college courses. I was only able to get about half a year of college credit this way, but I was able to get half a year head start on college. In hindsight, I would have liked to start that process a year earlier and skipped as much HS as I could. I don't think that path is for everyone, but if you're capable and motivated I recommend exploring alternative pathways for reducing the traditional HS experience in favor of more profitable uses of time & talent.
- sulam 5y ago
  I don't think college credits are the point, really. The general rule of thumb for people coming out of this school is that they feel like their first or possibly even second year of college is significantly less challenging than their last two years of high school. But as a result they can do extra-curriculars, do independent studies, smell the flowers a bit, etc. That doesn't seem like a bad thing in my view.
- benibela 5y ago
  I took college courses during high school. I had enough credits to finish my bachelor degree within a year after finishing school I thought I was skipping high school, but in reality I was actually skipping college. It is really bad.

Avicebron 5y ago

My friend did this in hs (well, he "dropped out sophomore year") to go to college, he got his degree in math and is doing quite well. But I will say there is something to be said for having a traditional social experience of hs which i thoroughly enjoyed

peter_l_downs 5y ago

Fun way to make this argument is to use College/University instead of highschool and then, if people more or less agree on that, also suggest Highschool. You can keep moving down the stack. At some point, people start to be concerned about socialization, which is a very fair concern. I did not learn anything in highschool (or college) but I made friends that I have to this day and learned how to be a human in a world of other humans. Hard to untangle things after the fact but I went straight into the working world after highschool and I am really, really glad that I ended up eventually going to college solely because of the people I met there and the ways they challenged me to grow and become a better person. edit: there are obviously ways to get this socialization without being in a traditional, horrible, highschool environment. I do not know if I would homeschool my kids or not!

barbazoo 5y ago
> I did not learn anything in highschool (or college) Is this really the case or do you just not remember specific things you learned or even abstract concepts around learning itself that are hard to quantify?
- peter_l_downs 5y ago
  I don't know, how would I?
  - Jtsummers 5y ago
    Do you know math? Did you rediscover it, learn it from materials or individuals outside of school, or learn it in school? Repeat that exercise with other areas of knowledge.
  - SECProto 5y ago
    If you don't know whether you learned anything, you shouldn't state definitively "I did not learn anything in highschool (or college)"
- ElFitz 5y ago
  Not the parent, but I really couldn’t say. I personally spent most high school classes either sleeping or playing on my laptop, and often literally learning about what we had been seeing in class when reading the exam's title. Often doing things like completing the math exams based on recollections from middle school. And yet got by, year after year, as well as anyone else. I then spent over a decade having a hard time figuring out how to actually take and keep any kind of notes, study and how to learn things that didn’t just "come to me" on their own. Quite a weird experience. Looking back, I can only wish it had been different. But that’s pointless.

andrewstuart 5y ago

>> enduring the sociocultural hell of high school It's an important part of life and becoming an adult in so many ways and skipping it deprives the child of the opportunity for the good and bad experiences that humans need to experience to become balanced adults. Life has bad bits for everyone. Chopping out high school preemptively is not only not a solution but is actively detrimental.

codingwageslave 5y ago
Being chained to a desk memorizing facts isn’t an important part of life
handrous 5y ago
Adult work & social life has practically nothing in common with high school. Neither does college. The only times any of that looks even a little like high school is when something's gone very wrong. From about 6th or 7th grade through graduation, school is a weird environment all its own.
- convolvatron 5y ago
  worse - when 'adult' situations go sideways, you can often take a sideways look - and damn if they aren't all acting like they are still in high school.
- thegypsyking 5y ago
  Jail is 100% like high school, from the experiences of the people I know who spent time in the can at least.
- tailspin2019 5y ago
  > Adult work & social life has practically nothing in common with high school. Some might say it is similar to being in prison though… At least for part of high school that’s what it felt like at times for me. The biggest issue being the forced labour - sorry, I mean “homework” - of which the burden was substantial and the benefits not at all clear. At the time I remember being very depressed that even when I was at home and away from the school that I often didn’t enjoy, instead of indulging in my hobbies (which, coincidentally, is how I learnt practically all of the specialised skills that I used to kick off my techology career) I was forced to complete endless hours of dull and unsurprising homework. I understand the benefits in moderation but the sheer amount assigned to me was actively detrimental to the point of robbing me of a big chunk of my free time as a teenager. I desperately wanted to continue teaching myself programming (this was in the early 90’s) but instead I had to complete some mindless essay about sedimentary fucking rocks. Not to mention that I had undiagnosed ADHD so the homework took me forever and created considerable stress. Having said that, it was so bad (and felt so pointless) that even though I was academically pretty strong and had wanted to go to University from quite a young age, I instead quit school at 16, immediately got a job in a business consultancy (using my self-taught programming/design skills) and was running small software projects for huge multi-national businesses within a year. By the time most of my peer group graduated University, I had about 5 years of a software development career under my belt and had already started my first business. In retrospect I don’t think I would have done anything different, apart from putting about 500% less effort into the sedimentary rock essays.

eynsham 5y ago

I found school academically useful for two reasons. First, I am very lazy, but I also don’t want to look it, so I actually took notes, did problem sheets, &c.—and in lessons, since I had nothing better to do, I paid attention and talked about the material. This assumes of course that the school is able to impart something useful, which may not be the case.

Ekaros 5y ago
The structure really helped me. So I did quite well, could have done better, but that really wouldn't have mattered in the end. The less structured University went less well. But lot of it was also good teachers in good school.

invokestatic 5y ago

Towards the end of high school, I started a fairly profitable startup, and went on to do that for a few more years after in lieu of college. At the time, I really struggled with my parents desire to keep me in school and my own desire to drop out and get a GED. They won out. And actually, I’m glad they did. Even though my grades were very poor and I never did homework, I really do think I came out of high school better than I would have been with only a GED. Now, 6 years out of high school, I attend a community college part-time to work on a bachelors degree. Funny how I completely discounted higher education just a few years ago.

renewiltord 5y ago
Fascinating story. How did the startup go?
- invokestatic 5y ago
  My partner and I grew apart and we shut it down in 2018. Funded everything since then.

huachimingo 5y ago

Instead of skipping, why not show them advanced material? Like bachilleratos or 1st Uni semester...

asdff 5y ago
A lot of public schools these days let students take these sort of classes at a local community college and these credits can even transfer into your undergrad. Probably not available in more rural parts that don't have these colleges though.
sodality2 5y ago
The International Baccalaureate high school program is international and offers exactly that, my experience with it has been incredible so far and I know that it's helped me prepare for college in uncountable ways. Our capstone essay is 4000 words on a class of our choice, so whatever the student is passionate about, they can write their essay on. This is a perfect solution to students who may be intelligent but unmotivated outside of their interest area. For example, mine is about peer-to-peer networking; I spend most of my nights doing research for the paper and it certainly is preparing me for college. It's not available everywhere I believe, but if it's available, there's another option compared to AP classes or regular classes (or other magnet/governor schools).

darthvoldemort 5y ago

I read somewhere that kids with IQ 140 waste about half their time in school. Kids with IQ of 170 waste all their time at school. It's no wonder that kids with IQ 145 or greater are mostly home schooled, because there's no real school that can handle them and the issues that come with those kids. Skipping high school definitely sounds like a better path, especially given the social problems with being with kids so much older than you.

endisneigh 5y ago
Source?
- darthvoldemort 5y ago
  I didn't know but I simply googled it. It's from Leta Hollingworth, a researcher on gifted children from the mid-20th century, her book "Children Above 180 IQ".
maximus-decimus 5y ago
What percentage of people have a 145 IQ? That sounds really high.
- darthvoldemort 5y ago
  Every 15 IQ points from 100 is one standard deviation away, where 100 is the average. So 145 is 3 standard deviations away from average or 99.7%.
  - lkbm 5y ago
    I think it's 99.7% within three standard deviations (e.g., in either direction) so presumably half as many are three standard deviations above the mean—99.85% (top 0.15%). Tiny % either way.
- jeffbee 5y ago
  145 is ~ the top tenth of 1 percent. In a large high school there might be one such person.

chrisaycock 5y ago

It sounds like the author just went to a lousy high school. I was fortunate enough to go to a private school (my tuition was waived because my mother was a teacher there) where I took a ton of APs in small classes. Compare that to the large gen-ed courses at college where the pace was glacial and the tests were multiple choice.

brighton36 5y ago
What percentage of students go to lousy high schools...

brighton36 5y ago

I dropped out of high school in the late nineties, and went straight to work at a dot com. My life (best I can tell) was never impacted negatively, and I far surpassed my friends in most measures (certainly financially) as a result. My only regret is having not dropped out sooner.

jeffbee 5y ago

If you can't figure out how to benefit from high school then sure, it's a big waste of time. It is also a unique setting in American life. In no other setting is such a broad range of activities, athletics, and arts available to a person. You aren't very likely to find opportunities to participate in competitive sports and athletics, amateur bands and orchestras after high school. I, personally, just ignored the academic parts of it after I'd piled up enough AP tests and whatnot for admission to selective colleges. Hell, in my senior year I barely had any real classes at all. I filled up my schedule with three different music subjects, newspaper/yearbook/photography, sports, and pointless electives like drafting, which was, by the way, a lot of fun. High school is also, how to put this politely, a rather unique atmosphere of sexual experimentation. Skipping that and attending a college where everyone is much older than you is not going to replace that. College, on the other hand, was an abject waste of four years.

akoluthic 5y ago

If you have a plan and motivation, go for it. Assuming you need to make money, you can either be self employed, in a partnership, or employed by someone else. The first requires you be a good business person, which is not a common innate trait but can be learned to some extent. The second is often a great option if you have equally motivated partners with complementary strengths. The third usually requires some sort of signalling to get employers to hire you. Having a degree is part of that signalling. This is, of course, completely ignoring that some professions require a degree, like being a doctor, which is rewarding work. As a teenager, you often have no idea what you will find meaningful and rewarding later in life, making this type of decision quite risky.

avalys 5y ago

I skipped 7th grade. I was also young for my grade as it was, with a summer birthday that meant I was in the youngest cohort just past the cutoff. This had absolutely zero effect on me in high school and I got great grades and did some notable stuff and got into MIT. But the result was that I entered MIT nearly two years younger than most of my peers. I turned out fine - but in retrospect I had a lot of growing up yet to do, and I think I would have made better use of my college experience if I had been able to do that growing up before college as opposed to during freshman and sophomore year, where you make a lot of decisions that will influence your life for a while. I missed many opportunities at MIT because I didn't really understand how the academic and professional world worked and what would be important to focus on for my career - let alone more personal matters. Looking back now I wish I had actually taken a year off before college, as opposed to skipping a grade in a hurry to get there, and I encourage every high school student and parent I know to think in these terms. This will of course be very situational. Yes, if you are in a bad high school with bad teachers and bad students, you might be better off skipping it in favor of some alternative. But in general, a lot of growing up is just getting experience and doing things, and high school is how you get a lot of that experience before you go to college and have to do bigger and more consequential things. Don't be (or don't let your kids be) in a hurry to get ahead of that curve.

deleted 5y ago
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CrimpCity 5y ago
So if you could go back in time would you take a gap year? In general I think freshmen / sophomores don’t take enough advantages & don’t understand the professional implications of their time in college.
- avalys 5y ago
  Yes - actually I had just finished editing my post to say that. For me at least I think it would have made a major difference. You are absolutely correct - I still sometimes kick myself over stupid decisions I made as a freshman and sophomore.

Upvoter33 5y ago

I knew a few kids who went to college very early. To say that it messed up their life is an understatement. Schools should figure out how to teach smart kids useful stuff while they get to learn how to be social with kids their own age.

eynsham 5y ago
Lots of people start doing olympiads (often there are relatively big correspondence programmes and similar to train people before selecting teams for the international ones). I was never intelligent enough to do well in them, alas.

nonameiguess 5y ago

This woman dropped out of high school and illegally became an underage prostitute because she was struggling with depression. I don't mean to minimize her experience or suggest there is anything intrinsically wrong with that, but I don't think you can just project whatever terrible school experiences led her to that and think everyone has that bad of an experience in high school. This reminds me a bit of Scott Alexander's extreme bias against school, due to all of the extreme bullying he faced. It might make more sense to say kids who are having a truly awful experience in high school should skip high school, rather than just "smart kids should skip high school." I think I was a pretty smart person, perfect SAT score even, and I certainly could have learned everything I learned in high school must faster with less wasted time if I studied on my own, but I don't think the experience was worthless. It's the last time I had real, truly close friends. It was the last time I competed hard in real sports leagues. Theoretically, I could have tried to find other ways to do those things, but there's some benefit to just being around the same people all the time and doing things together if you don't hate each other and make each other's lives awful. I don't know what else I would have done. I may have been academically ready for college a lot earlier, but I wasn't socially ready. I wasn't socially ready even at 18 and probably should have waited even longer. You can't just actually go to work even if you're able to because of child labor laws.

Koshkin 5y ago
I am having a hard time coming to terms with your thought that there is nothing intrinsically wrong with illegally becoming an underage prostitute.

ChicagoBoy11 5y ago

I skipped 5th grade and I can't for the life of me really pinpoint what possible negative impact it has had on my life. And, even if you suggest that there really wasn't any positive, either, just as a sheer function of entering the labor force one year earlier, the lifetime income impact is quite significant. I certainly don't want to dismiss that I had one less year of fun elementary school times with friends, but it's fairly clear to me that the way we've organized schooling isn't really rooted in anything that really promotes the success of an individual, but more what is socially most efficient/easiest.

rejectedandsad 5y ago

I generally think advice from .001% fringe elites is less than useless, it’s actively harmful. People like you are completely detached from reality and most of you have nothing but active disdain for people of lesser intelligence like me - hell, you probably would support euthanizing people with IQs like mine.

thegypsyking 5y ago
Congrats, you’re the cringiest person on the entire website. You should really go to a psychiatrist or something based on your post history.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- dang 5y ago
  You can't attack another user like this, no matter how bad their posts are or you feel they are. Posting like this is a bannable offence on HN. I'm not going to ban you because we haven't warned you before, but please read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules from now on.
darthvoldemort 5y ago
Friend, I remember your posts from the past several months. I honestly think you need to go through some therapy. You have been through a lot of bad experiences because of your parents and because of unrealistic expectations put on you. It's not your fault. But being angry like this is really toxic for yourself. Life should be happier than this for you. Please find a way to talk to a therapist because you need to release your anger, get past your trauma, and find happiness.
- rejectedandsad 5y ago
  My parents don’t understand why I believe this actually, they’re pretty smart and went to selective institutions. I, on the other hand, am an example of generational decline with nothing to live for because people like GP think state schoolers that didn’t skip multiple grades are subhuman.

subsubzero 5y ago

My Wife left high school after sophomore year, she didn't like the bullying etc. and got into "middle college" a program with college level classes at the local community college taught by professors. She got into NYU and a few others once she graduated so there is a path outside of high school for some. I do feel like there is a valuable lesson to be learned from high school besides education and that is socialization. Going straight to college after middle school seems unrealistic for 99% of folks anyway so what will be filled with that 4 years before college starts?

munificent 5y ago

I'm naturally suspicious of anyone's "shoulds" about education unless they base them on research in sociology, psychology, and/or pedagogy. Otherwise, they are usually based on the person's own personal history and our interpretation of our history is always suspect and biased. (The author's disclaimer means my point doesn't apply to the linked article.) It may be the case that the author's high school experience wasn't worth the time, but that's a retroactive observation. It's probably true that for some people high school is a net good and for some it isn't. But unless you have an effective way to distinguish one from the other before they go to high school, it's hard to draw actionable advice from that fact.

dang 5y ago

Discussed at the time: Smart Kids Should Skip High School - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11509374 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11509374 - April 2016 (65 comments)

exolymph 5y ago
Ha, I didn't even remember, I thought this was first time round!

jrm4 5y ago

Broadly, I think the mistake is thinking that "what is taught in school" is somehow objectively good or necessary. I've come to think of it more in terms of "School helps people navigate a world in which you are generally expected to go to school." Some people will get a great deal of value from it, and really need it, whatever "it" is -- it could be what's in the books or it could be what's in the people around you. Some people may not need it much at all. Furthermore, of course what makes this especially complex is the variance in "schools."

errantspark 5y ago

I'm a highschool dropout, but I did a decent job of attending most of the way through anyway cause all my friends weren't fuckups. I have a hard time imagining what sort of person I'd be if I didn't have that growth with a cohort of friends. In terms of my success as a human who is part of society I don't think anything has been as helpful as the social skills that I learned in high school. I don't think it's the only way to learn these skills, but I certainly feel like my social-learning velocity was by far the highest in high school. Ultimately how other people perceive me influences my quality of life more than any other thing. I don't think as a "smart kid" skipping high school would have helped me, I think it would have hurt me a lot. I feel like my life opened up immensely when I accepted that being smart and correct and having a deep understanding of the problem at hand matters so much less than being able to get along with people.

quantumsequoia 5y ago

In order to make a convincing argument, the author needs to elaborate more on how the time should be spent instead While I can agree with him high school is a lot of tedium and busy work, I'm skeptical sitting around at home doing whatever you want will result in a more enriching use of time There will be the natural tendency to avoid learning about things you don't like, which can result in a biased worldview. There is the natural tendency to procrastinate. There is the need to interact with people with different perspectives who will challenge your ideas. I don't see this will be an environment that helps budding minds flourish. I might have been more inclined to agree with him pre-pandemic, but the experience has taught me I (and probably most other people too) actually suck at using time well when there is no structure

ghaff 5y ago
Effectively the argument would seem to be for homeschooling, probably in a minimally structured way.

Ekaros 5y ago

I think high school education was very good for me. Then again we had proper educational system here. Much more so than university, which I think had much less effect.

cosmotic 5y ago

At the very least, please be aware of AP classes that you can get college credit for instead of having to essentially retake the same courses later.

kthejoker2 5y ago

Disclaimer: I'm smart (ask my mom!), skipped a grade, went to college at 16, F*ed around and found out, made it out alive on the other side, would not recommend. Premature optimization is the root of all evil ... "Some" smart kids should skip "some" high school ... maybe. But more importantly, a ton of hand-waving here about how unnecessary high school was as a crucible of learning and self-improvement - hint: passing the GED is not the same as high school. Also pretty optimistic (again, from experience) to expect a smart, lazy kid (the target audience for high school skipping) to "macro-plan" a 4 year "unschooling" experiment for their ages 14-18.

deleted 5y ago

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amatecha 5y ago

As someone who slept through a very large percentage of classes (and failed 5/8 classes one year), and who has been gainfully employed since "completing" high school, I completely agree. I learned far more, and far more relevant/valuable stuff, by pursuing my interests at home via the internet and computers. I was far more interested in the seemingly-infinite world of technology, music and software than really anything that was being "taught" at school. Turns out my interminable pursuit of my interests was validated with lucrative career opportunities -- much to the surprise of naysayers who thought I was "going down the wrong path". :) People tried so hard to get me to care at all about high school but no one could possibly convince me that the rote, mundane textbook crap was going to be worth spending my life on. Indeed, there is no time I look back and think "I wish I paid attention in that class". I got to enjoy my teenage years delving into fascinating, rewarding stuff, and developed tons of awesome skills in the process, too.

Barrin92 5y ago

Very strange to read this from my German perspective. School is compulsory here, and it has its historical roots in a the Prussian education system which didn't just convey knowledge but socialized kids and young adults, essentially making them citizens. And that's still I think the most important function of a proper education system. Not only do you acquire basic knowledge, but you learn how to function within an institution, work within groups, face adverse situations, follow instructions, timelines, interact with authority, and so on, you learn the basics of democracy even, how to function within a small political community of sorts. The majority of people will continue to go on and benefit from this. Whether they work at a large corporation, administration, the military, the legal sector, a medical profession, academia. Most careers are highly structured. People saying that their school experience is nothing like 'real life' in my experience work in highly idiosyncratic professions that only employ a minority of individuals. And as a side note, my parents couldn't teach me anything past 8th grade. the entire notion of leaving the school system is essentially preserved for people whose parents are affluent or fairly educated.

mmmBacon 5y ago

A very bright friend of mine dropped out of high-school, got his GED and moved onto college while we were all still going to high-school. At the time he dropped out, 1989, I felt it was a terrible thing but looking back on it; it was really quite brilliant. The unfortunate part is that the GED limited his choice of college but it didn't seem to hold him back that much after 2 years of community college.

godot 5y ago

First of all, let me say (tangentially) that I disagree with the notion of skipping college/university, a view that is so popular on HN and other tech circles nowadays. College was one of the best times of my life; I feel like I learned a lot of actual useful knowledge (computer science major), and I made long lasting friendships; 20 years later some of my best friends now still are people I met in college (including my significant other). It wasn't even like I was a popular person in school or anything. I was just an ordinary person. Having said that, I actually do agree the value of high school is little. Given my pretext above though, here's the problem. I don't know how one would enter college without high school. High school is very much college prep. It sucks both in terms of classes and social life. Most people I know didn't like high school. Perhaps that speaks to who I am and who my friends are (i.e. none of us were popular kids in high school). The author here suggests GED is equivalent to finishing high school which I'm sure it technically is, but college admissions care about high school GPA and SAT scores. I didn't even go to Ivy League or anything but I did go to a University of California which is good in the grand scheme of things but not the top; and I can't imagine getting into one of these without good high school GPA and SAT. Ivy League admission is probably a whole other level of ball game. Maybe then the next argument point is how we fix college admissions, because I don't think getting rid of college entirely and doing bootcamps only is the way to go.

jhart99 5y ago

I did this. Let me tell you my experience. I grew up in the outskirts of LA where there is a mix of farmland and people willing to drive a long way into LA. My family moved there because of the military and i had previously been in a "good" school, but this area was more than 50% the children of farm workers and they had really been screwed by fate. Most didn't speak English and the school system was constantly struggling to get them to learn enough English so they could understand the other subjects. Anyway, by junior high, I had worked out a deal with my school that I could take some classes at the local community college and not take them at junior high. So rather than take Algebra I or whatever I would take a math class at the college. Well... by the end of 8th grade I had taken the first two calculus semesters. When transferring to college I should have gone to one of two particularly bad high schools and it make things worse, the high schools were not going to allow me to take any college classes. I would start in high school at algebra II. So I dropped out. At the time in California, you were able to select a community college as your high school. This is sadly no longer the case. I took all the classes I needed to fill in my general education requirements and took STEM classes I would need to transfer to a CSU or UC school. I didn't take things too seriously. I took whatever classes looked interesting including SCUBA, TV production and some music classes. I finished with everything needed to transfer at 16 and transferred to Calpoly. I finished with my BS in Chemistry at 19. Took a year off because I didn't know what I wanted to do. Worked at a winery as an analytical chemist which was loads of fun. After a year there, I decided I needed a PhD if I wanted to do research and did that at Caltech. Personally, I believe this worked out fine for me. The people at the community college especially in STEM classes were great. I had and made friends along the way. Going to high school would have been a step down and a step back for me, but I don't think skipping high school is for everyone.

commandlinefan 5y ago
Did essentially the same thing - started community college during 8th grade, got enough credits to transfer, and opted out of high school entirely. I always wonder if it really was a good decision overall, though - I wonder if maybe I had gone the “traditional” route if I might have gone to a better four-year school and had a higher GPA. All in all, I’ve done OK, but I always wonder. Edit: so it would appear that neither of us actually read the article before commenting…

wolverine876 5y ago

If you are a high schooler, and you read this article and now you think should skip high school (and college), you should definitely go to high school and college.

fungiblecog 5y ago

My kids go to what are considered “very good” schools. I have an 11 year old and a 13 year old and it seems to me school is a) about becoming a standardised social human cog and b) the school passing off whatever is the current vague social fashion (resilience, leadership, whatever) as useful learning. Meanwhile the teachers spend a huge amount of effort to avoid teaching anything that might actually be useful. I don’t blame them - They suffered the same terrible education and are unqualified to teach anything except what they were taught so the cycle is self-reinforcing. Any actual learning seems incidental or is left the kids to find out for themselves through online programs (eg for maths/spelling) or personal research. I think school as we know it is becoming a dead end for genuinely useful learning, and for the masses it is essentially just something to keep young people busy so they don’t roam the streets and cause trouble. Sadly the first step in solving a problem is recognising it exists in the first place, but the question of why we continue with such a broken educational model doesn’t seem to trouble anyone - if the other parents are anything to go by anyway. They seem to lap up the schools’ endless marketing push designed to ensure nobody questions anything.

kenjackson 5y ago
You may want to find actually good schools. My son goes to a "very good" school and I'm always amazed at how much they fit in each day. Could he do more if he focused and studied by himself? Maybe. But I've also seen through home-schooling that left to his own devices he'll just write Roblox games (which are educational -- but they probably shouldn't be the only thing you do). Find a better school that will push your children. They do exist.
analog31 5y ago
My kids attended a "very good" school. It was a crap shoot. There was a large population of kids who were children of professors and doctors. Some kids did very well, others fell through the cracks. There's only so much you can control through selection of a school, and other factors, and then it's a crap shoot. Possibly the only predicting factor I was able to discern is that highly disciplined, self motivated parents tend to have highly disciplined, self motivated kids. People in professions that select for those traits will have "successful" kids. One thing I noticed is that I had vastly more spare time as a kid -- enough that I was able to play music while also teaching myself electronics and programming. On the other hand my school paid very little attention to writing, and I think my kids got a lot better preparation in both writing and critical thinking.

rob_c 5y ago

Having skipped a year of school at 15, yes skipping several years of school could help. (I was then stuck for another year twiddling my thumbs as I couldn't skip 2 years in the UK but had already mastered the material) Imo, there is way too much no child left behind. But that's referring to the UK education system where you can't proceed without ticking all the boxes at each step. (To be clear I don't blame the teachers, most of that nonsense comes from council level interventions and management) The national system does a very good job of completely failing those at the top and bottom of the grading system the worst.

grillvogel 5y ago

smart kids should go to high school and take AP classes and participate in high school activities like Academic Decathlon with like minded peers

kart23 5y ago

I think college and high school should be better optimized for each other. In high school, it's perfectly fine if you don't have a specialization. You don't even really have to decide your major until the 2nd year of college. This creates a lot of wasted time for people who do know what they want to do. The first year of my CS education was learning stuff I already knew from High School. I was sitting next to people who had never taken CS before, and this was their first introduction. I think it actually should be required to enter with a major in mind, and have completed coursework done towards it in high school. Not every high school could teach specialized courses, but there is a lot of low-hanging fruit that would be pretty easy. Ex. Physics for engineering, Linear Algebra for CS majors, Bio & Chemistry, etc. High schools can teach these things pretty consistently, we shouldn't need to take such basic classes in college. High school should cover more advanced material, and college should cover less breadth-wise and start off more advanced. I shouldn't be taking calculus or basic writing in college as a CS major.

burlesona 5y ago
Many people would argue the opposite, the high school is already far too focused on college preparation and a lot of people are just not interested in college. A generation or two ago there were a lot of trade classes in high school, and it was possible to come out of high school with a “specialization” in some thing like pipe fitting or welding they were walking right into a local industrial career. Now that’s all gone for the sake of college prep, and kids who would be great pipe fitters end up as burger flippers. I once has a conversation with the (then) Mayor of Texas City, Texas who lamented this exact change and said the city had a big program to recruit and visa sponsor pipe fitters out of Vietnam to sustain the local industries because the local schools no longer taught the needed skills. These were apparently great middle class jobs with high wages and benefits (although I’m taking him at his word, I don’t know if it’s true). My personal take is that high school tries to be a one size fits all model, which actually just makes it a waste of time for everyone. It would be a big improvement if we could let people branch out a lot more starting around age 14 or so. Then perhaps it would make sense, if you knew you wanted to do computer science, you could go to a CS oriented high school and in two years do all the pre-requisite work for a CS bachelors degree and head off to college, or something like that. Mainly though, I think this doesn’t happen because most people need the high school to be in their neighborhood or close by. Kids can’t drive until they’re 16, And even then they are terrible drivers and probably shouldn’t be driving until they’re 18 or 21. But this is America and if you can’t drive you really can’t be an adult, so there’s no way that you can go to the specialty school 45 minutes away. And I don’t think very many parents want to send their young teenage children away to boarding school.

lmilcin 5y ago

Pretty poor advice. Better advice would be: think critically about what you are getting from high school. Use it as a tool to get what you need or skip it if you think you have better use of your time and money. Good reason to not skip high school are further developing social skills and especially if you have no better use of your time.

lr4444lr 5y ago

Terrible advice. I could have spent three years writing and reading and working on interesting projects, instead of enduring the sociocultural hell of high school. That - right there- is exactly why this person and most others need to be in high school, so that you can learn how to deal with your peers once you're all past puberty and starting to sort yourselves by definitive skills, talents, and motivations while you still have enough pre-adult protections and guardians to let you make mistakes. Because learning the subtleties of adult interpersonal interactions is crucially important for success in work, romance, civic life, and adult friendships. Running away from all of that just because you are not mentally stimulated enough in math or art class is a pale excuse for not facing your social emotional deficits as a budding adult. Academic enrichment is MUCH easier to tack on than proper socialization from school.

warent 5y ago
What you're describing is wonderful in theory. In practice I'd be really interested in seeing the objective reality of these results. My perspective is that a lot of the "subtle adult interpersonal interactions" people supposedly acquire through average public high school are actually damaging or traumatizing at worst, as kids have any sense of individuality and creativity wrung out of them, meanwhile many adults continue to behave like high schoolers for the rest of their life because of how catastrophic it has been to their personal development.
- woofie11 5y ago
  Yeah -- my experience is kids who have unconventional experiences do better socially than the ones who go through conventional school.
tshaddox 5y ago
I would need to be convinced that high school uniquely prepares one for the subtleties of adult interpersonal interactions. Until I see a strong argument one way or the other, I'm just as apt to believe that high school actively gives a false sense of the subtleties of adult interpersonal interactions. And as far me as an adult now, if I notice almost any similarity between an interpersonal interaction now and interpersonal interactions in high school, that's a huge red flag that this is probably not a mature and healthy interaction to take part in.

JTbane 5y ago

Honestly, most of primary education is a waste of time. If you are a young student and demonstrate good ability in the basics (Algebra, Geometry, sciences, etc) you should be allowed to get ahead. Additionally, public schooling is more of a glorified day-care than an actual place of learning these days.

t-3 5y ago

The author's description of high school makes me feel grateful for the teachers I had. I guess I got lucky with a public school that had teachers that cared and made an effort to teach rather than have us do rote memorization.

williamtrask 5y ago

Homeschooling is a great middle ground here if it’s available to you.

deleted 5y ago

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poopypoopington 5y ago

I'm so glad I went to high school, it was really tough but I don't think I, or the vast majority of 13, 14, 15, or 16 year olds would be mature enough to take full advantage of college. High school isn't just about learning trigonometry, it's about easing your way into learning what it means to be an adult. I don't think you can do this surrounded by peers who are 30-60% older than you at such a young age. Maybe I could have skipped high school, but I'm glad I didn't.

Koshkin 5y ago

But really smart kids: drop out of school ASAP, get together, and make their first $1M by the age of 18.

Ace357 5y ago

High school and college do nothing for someone with an IQ over 115. School can't help someone who doesn't want to learn. School can't help someone who does want to learn. Other than that, school is very helpful.

true_religion 5y ago

Smart kids would find it easier skipping 1st through 4th grade than high school. For those years, the curriculum is usually the same year per year, except with a little more explanation as time goes by. If you are someone who grokked addition in your first week of kindergarten, you could have learned all the way up to 4th grade math in a single year. If you were reading at age 3, you didn’t need 7 more years of study to read at a 4th grade level… Smartness really helps when all school is trying to alleviate is ignorance.

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spywaregorilla 5y ago

I benefited immensely from a good high school (american, public). It was the only thing I got close to a humanist curriculum. That was nice. I would not want to pay college prices to learn basic biology/chemistry/history/etc. The knowledge I learned there has been more useful to my career (data science) than what I picked up in undergrad or grad school (MIT), and that's not to downplay either of the latter two. I also learned that I was a weird kid who didn't know how to socialize... and so I had good time to do that while being forced to meet with a fairly large group of people for an extended period of time. College did not do this. College provided opportunities for this, but it was easier to be a recluse. What America needs is more good high schools, not to give up on the concept itself. If anyone doesn't need high school, it's kids who don't have any interest in learning there. I had an easy time academically in high school. Mostly A's with no studying, and over a dozen AP classes passed, including a few that I just tested out of with some self study. But I still learned a great deal. I do wish it moved faster, but in the scheme of things it was a great experience.

ohyes 5y ago

Counterpoint: If high school is a hellish experience then why are only the smart kids recommended to skip it? It would seem that the most mature would be best at navigating an experience like that. High-school (and puberty) should simply be made to not be a terrible experience for everyone. Good luck with that without a dramatic cultural shift.

foxyv 5y ago

Most High Schools are just daycare centers that keep kids out of trouble. Teachers honestly try their hardest, but they have an entire system stacked against them. Compulsory attendance, kids packed in like sardines, poor mental health, child abuse, poor nutrition, crime, drugs, fights, endless bullying. A while ago I saw a quote that if you cut social services it will end up in the emergency room. The same goes for the High Schools. They HAVE to run them like prisons in order to even hope to deal with the number of issues they see. If you have any alternative, avoid sending your kid to a High School unless you can vet that it's not a hellhole. I haven't had to fight a person, say no to hard drugs, avoid pickpockets, or withstand constant verbal and physical assault since leaving High School. To all those who had a wonderful High School experience I am truly happy for you. However, I think for many kids, they could get more beneficial social experiences literally anywhere else. Ones that don't scar or taint you.

harryvederci 5y ago
You didn't specify which country you're from. Kinda sad, but it sounds like a warzone and my brain jumped to the conclusion: must be the USA. (Not meant disrespectfully to you, by the way.)
- foxyv 5y ago
  I'm from the USA, but the problem with High Schools is certainly not limited to the US. Also, you are right that it sounds like a warzone. The particular High School I went to was in a town that had just lost it's military base and had turned into a bedroom community for halfway houses. (Places where criminals leaving prison would stay on parole.) This mixed a large number of different gangs together into a single area leading to tons of terrible things. This all trickled down to the kids in the area. Fights involving 10 or more kids were common. Walking home you had to avoid certain times and places where after school fighting would take place. Parks and culverts were DMZs at certain times. Resource officers used pepper spray in crowded hallways where a fight had broken out. Whenever we had a school assembly it was pretty common for a riot to break out. This was the "Good" High School in town. There were two others that were quite a bit worse. Problems with weapons, fires, and such.

rodonn 5y ago

The economist Bryan Caplan recently wrote about the experience of his twins who recently entered college after doing homeschooling for middle and high school. There seems to be a lot of overlap in their experiences to this article https://www.econlib.org/our-homeschooling-odyssey/ https://www.econlib.org/our-homeschooling-odyssey/

fellowniusmonk 5y ago

I skipped high school because I started working full time to keep the roof over my families head at 15. Extreme poverty is more avoidable now that we have the ACA and preexisting conditions can't be used to destroy multiple generations of a family's life. If you are a software engineer it's fine. Yes there are downsides, I know them all. I can talk about this for days.

nsonha 5y ago

If there's such a thing like decentralized education, what would it be? And no homeschooling isn't the answer, not for parent with a typical 9-5 employment (who may enjoy their jobs).