Single point of failure here, but... > keep learning, keep having fun, enjoy your teenage years Didn't learn squat from 5-10th grade. 11th and 12th I got into

Single point of failure here, but... > keep learning, keep having fun, enjoy your teenage years Didn't learn squat from 5-10th grade. 11th and 12th I got into AP curriculum with fantastic teachers. I still talk to them. But you need fantastic instructors, the kind who would have been professors if they were not so selfless to work in public education, to make that happen. It won't happen for 99% of children. I got incredibly lucky my last two years. But the inbetween? The monotony of public educators with tenure, in the years between when I had learned the "basics" (arithmetic, reading, national and global history) <aside, I do need to mention that home ec and cooking were amazing classes to have in 6th grade, and were an exception to a multi-year rule> was a void. I spent my days playing Neverwinter Nights and learning NWScript (and thus basic C) to build campaigns for a multiplayer persistent world I was constantly on. This was in the years before World of Warcraft, which consumed the later years, and with those an education in Lua and engine hacking. It is always incredibly harmful to assume schooling == learning. Even the social aspect is wrong - its an artificial setting. Bullying only exists as a pandemic when you are forced by law to be next to your bullies eight hours a day. The rest of us have the freedom to leave those people behind. You acquire no real world social experience in public education, just look at how out of whack everyone is their freshmen year when suddenly you are interacting with people voluntarily and can pick and chose your associations for the first time in your life. It was not fun. It was not enjoyable. It was a purgatory. And I now have a 12 year old brother whom I can see the exact same thing happening to. And it will happen to millions of children every year until someone puts their foot down with the authority to do so and say this machine we grind the creative spark and imagination out of the younger generation in needs to stop, because I was lucky, and most are not.