4 ms·

>> 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 th

>> 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.
  - handrous 5y ago
    Damn, you're me except I did finish high school. In hindsight I very much wish I'd gotten my GED at 15 or 16 and snagged an associate's degree by age 18. Turns out non-elite college gen-ed classes are easier and have way lower time requirements than the high school I went to (which was just, like, a totally normal high school, nothing special), so it'd have been a breeze. I had no clue about that, and just (reasonably, I think?) assumed it was even harder than what I was already doing. Could have put more time in at my tech job, which was hugely valuable to my future, too.
    - tailspin2019 5y ago
      Although I say I wouldn’t have changed anything, I think it’s really tough to go back and reevaluate choices like this - you can never really know what alternative paths lay ahead, better or worse. I think we tell ourselves stories about how we got from A to B (like mine above) but in reality it’s never quite as simple. It’s always easier to rationalise and construct what feels like a meaningful narrative in retrospect. For all you know, the choices you made, even if they now feel slightly uniformed in retrospect may still have been 100% right for you! I suppose reflecting on my previous comment, the flip side of the situation is that I was incredibly lucky to go to a pretty good school (even though I didn’t always like it much) and the single biggest benefit I got was the utterly amazing life-long friends I made there, who are still great friends today. Those friends have had 1000% more positive impact on me than my schooling did, but I wouldn’t have met them without school.
  - jkhdigital 5y ago
    Hit close to home! At age 15 I was literally being paid 3x minimum wage by my friend’s dad to build an e-commerce site for his photography business. But my slavemaster (school, of course) took priority and I never had time to finish the project. Ended up failing out of college (undiagnosed ADHD as well) and enlisted in the navy as an escape hatch. The “real” experience of military life straightened out all my dysfunctional behavior, and makes me wonder how things might have been if I hadn’t been so depressed and hopeless and bored for so many years of my adolescence.
hackinthebochs 5y ago
Nothing about high school is relevant to the real world. At no other point in your life are you in forced proximity with random people within your age cohort, who have no responsibilities outside of school work and maximizing their social status. This is an unnatural environment and nothing about it is necessary to becoming a functioning adult. The benefits that high school does bring to social development is not exclusive to high school. But it brings so many detrimental experiences as to be a net negative in many cases.
- Avicebron 5y ago
  I'd be interested in what you describe as detrimental experiences and why they potentially weren't net positive in ways that you might not immediately recognize
  - qsort 5y ago
    Anything can 'potentially be net positive in ways you might not immediately recognize'. There is literally no event that description does not apply to. In many cases the 'negative experiences' are daily abuse. I myself had a horrible and painful time in high school, but listening to people of various backgrounds I concluded it's pretty much hit or miss. I can't generalize from my negative experience, but you can't generalize from your positive one either.
  - tonyarkles 5y ago
    Getting slammed into lockers, having people steal your notebooks, having half your friends spontaneously turn on you... I'm reading into your comment a little bit and projecting my own thoughts of "these things might have been character-building." That might be true, but for some they could also end up causing PTSD/similar things, difficultly trusting people, severe low-self-confidence, etc.
  - hackinthebochs 5y ago
    Specifically the forced proximity with people who may bully you, or encourage damaging or anti-social behavior, as well as the environment where social status, and the avenues available to gain it as a high school student, is the end-all of your existence. How many bad habits are learned in high school, from catty behavior, to acting out for attention, to being physically dominant, to spending money on flashy gear, to gain status? How many environments outside of high school do these behaviors result in meaningful, lasting status gains? Not many, at least none that can be considered healthy environments. If the goal of high school is to prepare kids for adulthood, they don't do a good job of it. Granted, not every school is like this and not everyone has these experiences. But putting teens in a social pressure-cooker among their age cohort will result in some very unnatural local optimums for behavior.
rossnordby 5y ago
Removing high school doesn't necessarily deprive a child of formative experiences, it just changes them. It's possible for the change to be bad (e.g. parents in a cult pulling their kids out of school to move to The Compound), but I'd wager that if you took a kid who felt like high school was a terrible experience and gave them other constructive options and the resources to pursue them, it'd almost always be a net win. The value of the 'high school experience' is contextual, not everyone will experience the same balance of good and bad. For some people, the bad is so overwhelming that it goes beyond the point of constructive and well into destructive. Those situations aren't hard to detect.
afiori 5y ago
people have many different experiences of school, a nice discussion on the topic can be found here https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-the-cult-of-smart https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-the-cult-o...
hellbannedguy 5y ago
Americans who go to public schools get enough of the "bad bits" in grade through middle school to prepare us for life. I used to get knots in my stomach on the first day of school. I just knew there would be an after school fight, and I would be involved even though I tried to remain invisible. I should have gone to a community college instead of high school, but didn't even know it was an option at the time. (I wasen't a big kid, but taught by my Irish father to never back down from a male on male confrontations. That might explain some of my problems with bullies? By the time I hit high school, I was so beyond fighting, and any form of bullying--to any of my classmates. I really didn't like high school, with the exception of a few girlfriends. Everything I should have learned in high school, I made up for at a community college in a semester. I remember sitting in a chem class with 35 year old nursing students, and I was in heaven. I loved college so much, I didn't want it to end.)
elboru 5y ago
I constantly hear about how hellish is high school in the US. Do other countries experience the same? I enjoyed the high school equivalent of my country, met some of my best friends there. My peers don’t seem to ever mention bad experiences during that period. Is it really as bad as in the movies? Stereotypical bullies, popular guys vs nerds and all that?
- hammyhavoc 5y ago
  I left my school at sixteen in the UK. Five years of barely sleeping, dreading the next day, crying for fifteen minutes before going in and experiencing endless torment and violence including being knocked unconscious on several occasions, having my glasses shattered on multiple occasions, bullying by members of staff, and on one occasion having someone punch the bridge of my glasses quite literally inside of my nose, and yes, there's still a scar to this day, and yes, it knocked me out cold. To say that I was genuinely suicidal at several points is putting it lightly, and that's without going into the problems outside of school. "Fag" or "faggot" is a word I never want to hear again in my life. I wanted to transfer. I wanted to be home schooled. I wanted to do absolutely anything but be there. I had a plan though: start my own business whilst I was still at school so that I would have goals at sixteen, and it wouldn't be like I was bumming about doing nothing when I left. So I did that. Fast-forward to me now twenty-eight and I'm very happy, working on my own terms with my own biz. Life is good. Partner of six years, wonderful family. Never went to university. Did it build character? Yes. Would I go through it again? I can only say that I'm glad I will never have to. However, it gave me insight to knowing what schools of the time were willing to overlook and tolerate, and will definitely inform my style of parenting when it comes to problems at school.
- BoxOfRain 5y ago
  Not the US but The Inbetweeners very accurately summed up my experience of a British comprehensive school. It was like that but the buildings weren’t as nice.
- yodsanklai 5y ago
  French high school was perfectly fine for me. At least from a social point of view. By the time they reach high school, kids are little more mature and respectful. Probably not the best time of my life but not too bad either. However, it was a lot of wasted time sitting in classrooms daydreaming. This time could have been spent much more productively. But we don't have any better.
c1ccccc1 5y ago
I don't know, that seems kind of trite. Lots of kids have really bad experiences in high school, including being physically attacked: Slammed into lockers, rocks thrown at them, that kind of thing. I don't think that does them any good. Plus, high school makes a few kids miserable enough that they are willing to commit suicide. What doesn't kill you makes you stronger only if it doesn't actually kill you. Anyway, we do have some empirical evidence of what happens when people skip high school, since many kids are homeschooled. My general impression of people who have been homeschooled is that they are just as much balanced adults as anyone else. That shouldn't be too surprising. Homeschooled kids still socialize with their friends, still struggle to understand concepts, still get into trouble on occasion.

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.
- handrous 5y ago
  Damn, you're me except I did finish high school. In hindsight I very much wish I'd gotten my GED at 15 or 16 and snagged an associate's degree by age 18. Turns out non-elite college gen-ed classes are easier and have way lower time requirements than the high school I went to (which was just, like, a totally normal high school, nothing special), so it'd have been a breeze. I had no clue about that, and just (reasonably, I think?) assumed it was even harder than what I was already doing. Could have put more time in at my tech job, which was hugely valuable to my future, too.
  - tailspin2019 5y ago
    Although I say I wouldn’t have changed anything, I think it’s really tough to go back and reevaluate choices like this - you can never really know what alternative paths lay ahead, better or worse. I think we tell ourselves stories about how we got from A to B (like mine above) but in reality it’s never quite as simple. It’s always easier to rationalise and construct what feels like a meaningful narrative in retrospect. For all you know, the choices you made, even if they now feel slightly uniformed in retrospect may still have been 100% right for you! I suppose reflecting on my previous comment, the flip side of the situation is that I was incredibly lucky to go to a pretty good school (even though I didn’t always like it much) and the single biggest benefit I got was the utterly amazing life-long friends I made there, who are still great friends today. Those friends have had 1000% more positive impact on me than my schooling did, but I wouldn’t have met them without school.
- jkhdigital 5y ago
  Hit close to home! At age 15 I was literally being paid 3x minimum wage by my friend’s dad to build an e-commerce site for his photography business. But my slavemaster (school, of course) took priority and I never had time to finish the project. Ended up failing out of college (undiagnosed ADHD as well) and enlisted in the navy as an escape hatch. The “real” experience of military life straightened out all my dysfunctional behavior, and makes me wonder how things might have been if I hadn’t been so depressed and hopeless and bored for so many years of my adolescence.

hackinthebochs 5y ago

Nothing about high school is relevant to the real world. At no other point in your life are you in forced proximity with random people within your age cohort, who have no responsibilities outside of school work and maximizing their social status. This is an unnatural environment and nothing about it is necessary to becoming a functioning adult. The benefits that high school does bring to social development is not exclusive to high school. But it brings so many detrimental experiences as to be a net negative in many cases.

Avicebron 5y ago
I'd be interested in what you describe as detrimental experiences and why they potentially weren't net positive in ways that you might not immediately recognize
- qsort 5y ago
  Anything can 'potentially be net positive in ways you might not immediately recognize'. There is literally no event that description does not apply to. In many cases the 'negative experiences' are daily abuse. I myself had a horrible and painful time in high school, but listening to people of various backgrounds I concluded it's pretty much hit or miss. I can't generalize from my negative experience, but you can't generalize from your positive one either.
- tonyarkles 5y ago
  Getting slammed into lockers, having people steal your notebooks, having half your friends spontaneously turn on you... I'm reading into your comment a little bit and projecting my own thoughts of "these things might have been character-building." That might be true, but for some they could also end up causing PTSD/similar things, difficultly trusting people, severe low-self-confidence, etc.
- hackinthebochs 5y ago
  Specifically the forced proximity with people who may bully you, or encourage damaging or anti-social behavior, as well as the environment where social status, and the avenues available to gain it as a high school student, is the end-all of your existence. How many bad habits are learned in high school, from catty behavior, to acting out for attention, to being physically dominant, to spending money on flashy gear, to gain status? How many environments outside of high school do these behaviors result in meaningful, lasting status gains? Not many, at least none that can be considered healthy environments. If the goal of high school is to prepare kids for adulthood, they don't do a good job of it. Granted, not every school is like this and not everyone has these experiences. But putting teens in a social pressure-cooker among their age cohort will result in some very unnatural local optimums for behavior.

rossnordby 5y ago

Removing high school doesn't necessarily deprive a child of formative experiences, it just changes them. It's possible for the change to be bad (e.g. parents in a cult pulling their kids out of school to move to The Compound), but I'd wager that if you took a kid who felt like high school was a terrible experience and gave them other constructive options and the resources to pursue them, it'd almost always be a net win. The value of the 'high school experience' is contextual, not everyone will experience the same balance of good and bad. For some people, the bad is so overwhelming that it goes beyond the point of constructive and well into destructive. Those situations aren't hard to detect.

afiori 5y ago

people have many different experiences of school, a nice discussion on the topic can be found here https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-the-cult-of-smart https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-the-cult-o...

hellbannedguy 5y ago

Americans who go to public schools get enough of the "bad bits" in grade through middle school to prepare us for life. I used to get knots in my stomach on the first day of school. I just knew there would be an after school fight, and I would be involved even though I tried to remain invisible. I should have gone to a community college instead of high school, but didn't even know it was an option at the time. (I wasen't a big kid, but taught by my Irish father to never back down from a male on male confrontations. That might explain some of my problems with bullies? By the time I hit high school, I was so beyond fighting, and any form of bullying--to any of my classmates. I really didn't like high school, with the exception of a few girlfriends. Everything I should have learned in high school, I made up for at a community college in a semester. I remember sitting in a chem class with 35 year old nursing students, and I was in heaven. I loved college so much, I didn't want it to end.)

elboru 5y ago

I constantly hear about how hellish is high school in the US. Do other countries experience the same? I enjoyed the high school equivalent of my country, met some of my best friends there. My peers don’t seem to ever mention bad experiences during that period. Is it really as bad as in the movies? Stereotypical bullies, popular guys vs nerds and all that?

hammyhavoc 5y ago
I left my school at sixteen in the UK. Five years of barely sleeping, dreading the next day, crying for fifteen minutes before going in and experiencing endless torment and violence including being knocked unconscious on several occasions, having my glasses shattered on multiple occasions, bullying by members of staff, and on one occasion having someone punch the bridge of my glasses quite literally inside of my nose, and yes, there's still a scar to this day, and yes, it knocked me out cold. To say that I was genuinely suicidal at several points is putting it lightly, and that's without going into the problems outside of school. "Fag" or "faggot" is a word I never want to hear again in my life. I wanted to transfer. I wanted to be home schooled. I wanted to do absolutely anything but be there. I had a plan though: start my own business whilst I was still at school so that I would have goals at sixteen, and it wouldn't be like I was bumming about doing nothing when I left. So I did that. Fast-forward to me now twenty-eight and I'm very happy, working on my own terms with my own biz. Life is good. Partner of six years, wonderful family. Never went to university. Did it build character? Yes. Would I go through it again? I can only say that I'm glad I will never have to. However, it gave me insight to knowing what schools of the time were willing to overlook and tolerate, and will definitely inform my style of parenting when it comes to problems at school.
BoxOfRain 5y ago
Not the US but The Inbetweeners very accurately summed up my experience of a British comprehensive school. It was like that but the buildings weren’t as nice.
yodsanklai 5y ago
French high school was perfectly fine for me. At least from a social point of view. By the time they reach high school, kids are little more mature and respectful. Probably not the best time of my life but not too bad either. However, it was a lot of wasted time sitting in classrooms daydreaming. This time could have been spent much more productively. But we don't have any better.

c1ccccc1 5y ago

I don't know, that seems kind of trite. Lots of kids have really bad experiences in high school, including being physically attacked: Slammed into lockers, rocks thrown at them, that kind of thing. I don't think that does them any good. Plus, high school makes a few kids miserable enough that they are willing to commit suicide. What doesn't kill you makes you stronger only if it doesn't actually kill you. Anyway, we do have some empirical evidence of what happens when people skip high school, since many kids are homeschooled. My general impression of people who have been homeschooled is that they are just as much balanced adults as anyone else. That shouldn't be too surprising. Homeschooled kids still socialize with their friends, still struggle to understand concepts, still get into trouble on occasion.