Smart Kids Should Skip High School
sonyaellenmann.com
sonyaellenmann.com
Really it should just be a national, fully open, stack. No expensive text books (there's a nice racket) / etc.
Not just high school, but all of it. If we need to have 'learning centers' where parents can warehouse their kids while going to work, lets just fund that with those results in mind, and have additional tutors (maybe other students for extra credit, based off of the realistic improvement rate in the grades of those tutored) for those who aren't advancing quickly enough.
Of course, full boarding that the kids can opt in to (for predictable meals and escape from abusive situations) could also help.
I skipped ~50% of days in grades 8-10, but somehow passed. I spent those days coding and learning on my own time.
As school got progressively less challenging, I dropped out in grade 11 and decided to stop wasting my time.
Finally, I could pursue my passion in software full-time. That additional time and freedom was instrumental in achieving my dreams. It was almost certainly much more valuable than more wasted years of high school. By the age of 19 I was already earning a very significant sum of money and had years of solid experience.
But who knows? Maybe I missed out on some important friendships or valuable connections. Perhaps my lack of a high school diploma will be an insurmountable barrier in the future.
Although I believe it was the right decision for me (who knows), I don't think it's the right decision for the vast majority of people. You must have discipline and passion. You must be your own boss and have a plan. You should enjoy learning on your own. Treat time as a precious resource.
I am fortunate that my chosen field, software development, generally does not require a diploma or degree. Exceptions exist, but I'm not interested in those jobs. Any other field and my decision could have been disastrous.
Sadly, most of that is not taught at junior/middle school. Getting out of the labor force factory that 'education' is in most countries, may not be the best idea even for the majority of 'smart kids', as you say.
On the other hand, engaging in passion driven projects that also involve self directed study is the way to go. Parents should encourage the latter while being less fussy about grades. Grades don't matter anyway 10 years later when the child will be hired or try to make a business, but a few passion driven projects could go a long way towards later success.
As for, "I could have spent three years writing and reading and working on interesting projects, instead of enduring the sociocultural hell of high school," I nearly giggled when I read that. Maybe Sonya was among the special 1% of kids who would actually have done that, but realistically, if I had skipped high school, I would have spent my days playing video games and getting into trouble, not "reading and working on interesting projects".
I would have spent most of the time playing video games, as I in fact did during college, but I wouldn't have done any getting into trouble. This would have been largely unproductive, much like attending high school was.
http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ746290.pdf
"A 20-year longitudinal study has traced the academic, social, and emotional development of 60 young Australians with IQs of 160 and above... The considerable majority of young people who have been radically accelerated [skipped 3+ grades], or who accelerated by 2 years, report high degrees of life satisfaction, have taken research degrees at leading universities, have professional careers, and report facilitative social and love relationships. Young people of equal abilities who accelerated by only 1 year or who have not been permitted acceleration have tended to enter less academically rigorous college courses, report lower levels of life satisfaction, and in many cases, experience significant difficulties with socialization. Several did not graduate from college or high school."
"Christopher Otway"'s story is described in the link. "While in Grade 1, Chris was accelerated to work with fifth-grade students for math and sixth-grade students for English. The following year he did math with seventh-grade students ... at the end of his second-grade year Chris made a full grade skip to fourth grade but took math with the eighth grade. By age 12, he was theoretically enrolled in 9th grade but took five subjects (physics, chemistry, English, math, and economics) with 11th-grade students 5 years older than he." Eventually, "He entered university at 16 years 2 months, graduating with Bachelor of Science (First-Class Honours) in computer science and mathematics at age 20. Chris won a scholarship to a major British university and graduated with a Ph.D. in pure math at age 24. Since then, based in London, he works for a worldwide consultancy assisting other companies with financial strategies."
As for "Ian Baker": starting with preschool, "only after his parents had gently informed the teacher that he had just finished reading Charlotte's Web was he permitted to forego reading readiness exercises". In grade 1 and 2, his teacher worked with him to give him stimulating material, ranging up to grade 8 math, and he was in a pull-out program with other gifted children; however, in grade 3, a new principal canceled the pull-out program, and Ian's teacher permitted him to work on a grade 7 math textbook "with no guidance or assistance, and no other children to work with", and Ian lost interest. Ian was bored and miserable in grades 3-4. He switched schools, and partway through grade 5, was given a high-school math teacher mentor, who took him through math up to grade 9. In grade 6, he took 10th grade math, and the following year skipped into grade 8, taking 11th grade math and CS and 10th grade science. In grade 10, he began taking university math. Ian enrolled in university at 17, did a bachelor's degree in "computing systems engineering", graduated at 20, and was in his fourth year of a Ph.D in digital hardware design at 24.
According to the author of the study, "Ian Baker's mathematical ability is certainly on a par with that of Christopher Otway and may well equal that of Adrian Seng [Terence Tao's pseudonym]. Unlike Adrian and Chris, however, his astonishing potential has largely been ignored by the education system ... It is unfortunate that he had to suffer through four years of appalling educational mismanagement." The author also says, "Adrian is the only child of the 15 who believes that he has been permitted to work, at school, at the level of which he is capable."
What was Adrian's educational program? At age 3.5, he tried entering preschool, but couldn't cope with a full school day at that age and left. At age 5 (by which time he had done all of elementary school math in home study), he entered school again. His parents worked with the principal to design a flexible program, in which he was able to progress through two grade levels per year. At age 6.5, he was attending grades 3, 4, 6, and 7 in different subjects. At age 7.5 he attended high school for part of the day, doing grade 11 math; the rest of the day was spent in grades 5 and 6 at the elementary school. At 8 he was doing math, physics, English, and social studies at high school (variously at grade levels 8, 11, and 12). At 8.5, "having informally sat and passed university entrance mathematics", he started taking university math, first in independent study and then guided by a professor; at age 8.75, he stopped attending any elementary school classes, and spent 3/4 of the day at high school, doing sciences in grades 10, 11, and 12, and humanities and "general studies" in grade 8, and 1/4 at university. By age 12 "his studies at university included fourth-year algebra, second-year physics, and second-year computer science". "By age 14, he had passed university entrance examinations in mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, and English, and completed university courses in areas such as mathematical physics, quantum mechanics, discrete mathematics, linear and abstract algebra, Lebesgue integration, electromagnetic theory, optics, and several areas of computing science."
(source: "Exceptionally Gifted Children", 2nd edition, by Miraca Gross)
It is, shall we say, interesting to imagine what might have been, if all the kids in the study had been afforded such a program.
People are smart. But people need to figure out what they can be geniuses at. If we remove opportunity in this way, we absolutely must find an alternative to telling people what they dont know they dont know about.
I learned quite a bit. Both the US history and European history teachers were very good, the calculus and differential equations courses were an excellent base for college physics and applied math, the computer class marked the start of my transition from an avid hobby programmer to a software developer, and drafting changed the way I understand a building.
As it happens, I'm still interested in history, math, science, programming, and building design, so perhaps I remember those best because I found them interesting. You were interested in getting high and competing with your friends, so perhaps that's why you remember that part best?
Perhaps we had similar experiences but we contextualize them differently. Do you think the classes you mentioned were worth everything else? Do you not think you could have had similar experiences to those classes if you had done something other than high school?
I can, without doubt, say that I would have had a different life if my high school had been organized along the lines of a German Gymnasium school than the liberal arts tradition of the US. So of course I would have had yet a different life if I had "something other than high school".
BTW, I do not like your seemingly self-centered view. Public education doesn't exist only for my own "worth", but also for the benefit of society. Street signs, warnings, and public notices are more effective if (nearly) everyone is literate. One thread in pubic education is to develop an informed citizen. Another thread is to train workers at the public expense. A third is to keep cheap child labor from the workforce. A fourth is to indoctrinate children that the common good is a worthy goal. ;)
Nor do I think your question is a useful one, for policy or decision making purposes. "Could" is a question of a non-zero probability. Benjamin Franklin had no formal higher level education, and look what he managed. So sure, I "could" have been like Franklin and managed on my own. But the retrospective logic to answer "could" doesn't help answer the relevant policy question "would", or for the decision making at the time "should I take these classes, or CLEP out and enter college early?"
For me, it's pretty simple. I wanted to be a math professor. (I changed my mind when I was about 20.) Either I stay in high school, where I can take college-level courses for free, either as dual-enrolled or through AP test credits, and take classes that guarantee me in-state scholarship, or I get a job, ... or I enter the debt hole.
Sure, there are more options than that. My parents, close relatives, and neighbors have never been to college. We had no contacts in any of the careers that interested me. I knew no programmers other than hobbyists like myself. I didn't know any other options. Even now, knowing more, I don't know what I would have done if I decided to skip high school.
In that context, I can also imagine (without any basis in fact) that you had more options available to you. Perhaps your parents had money, or you had better connections to jobs that interested you, or didn't think that $40,000+ in school debt would be a problem.
But now we're far away from your original point, which is that you "don't remember learning much of anything" and therefore agree that "smart kids should skip high school." I disagree - I do remember leaning a lot of things. Since you say you went to a much better school than mine, you must have learned things as well, even if you've since forgotten it. You've now said that you haven't forgotten it, and attended classes. I don't know how you can say that you didn't learn anything from class. You say you didn't study, which means you have to have learned things from being in class and doing homework.
"In fact, I can remember a lot about elementary school, the work I did, what I studied and so on. I remember virtually nothing about high school. It’s almost an absolute blank in my memory apart from the emotional tone, which was quite negative." — Noam Chomsky (https://chomsky.info/reader01/)
I remember nothing about my government or human health class, very little about my sociology class, I try to forget everything about my senior year English class, and I took Spanish only because there was a state scholarship where part of the requirement was to take three years of a foreign language, instead of the state-mandated two years.
I surely learned things in these classes. I've likely forgotten them because the contents didn't interest me enough. If I regard the brain as RAM, there was no refresh so the memories faded.
Just like I remember very little now about most of my college classes. I took numerical analysis, thermodynamics, theater, psychology, database organization, and more, but I've forgotten them. Even my analysis course, where I remember I adored doing epsilon-delta proofs, has faded into all but emotional tones. I've also forgotten how to do PDEs, but knowing that technique saved my butt a few years later when I took the qualifying exam for physics.
While I vividly remember my theory of automata course, my discrete math course, and a few others which are still so key to what I do every day.
It seems I remember best the things I like, and the things which I still use. I can totally understand that someone who liked high school because of friends and getting high might only remember that part. That doesn't have to mean there was no learning, nor even that the learning wasn't useful. Only that it's no longer recallable.
- The things you learn in elementary school are very fundamental and you probably use them often.
- High school branches off from the fundamentals; I got straight A's in geometry, algebra, and calculus, yet I remember very little of them. I do remember everything I ever learned in my two CS classes (I am a programmer now).
- The important thing about high school is not what you learn, but that it becomes possible for you to learn what you want/like to learn and do.
I have no regrets about that. It's as demanding as you want. About 2/3 of kids there get an associates' to transfer to another school after two years; those that stay all four do a B.A. thesis. Some folks who transferred reported being bored at their new schools, but I don't have much of a sample. :) I'd probably have had a slightly shinier-looking résumé if I'd gone on through high school, but there's more to life than that. For me the résumé thing is moot (the Rock actually helped; I got work through a teacher referring me to an alum), and plenty of classmates have done well in tech or law, become doctors, gone into research (including in hard sciences), etc. It produces a good number of high achievers for its small size and high acceptance rate, probably because kids interested in rushing into college are a sort of funny pool already. Occasionally bureaucracy requires some grad to take a GED exam because they left high school, but that's straightforward.
For high-school me, the focus on the liberal arts and the beliefs of folks there really contrasted with how I looked at the world at the time. Same would be true for a lot of folks here I figure. The tension from being exposed to something different was productive for me. Sounds icky I bet, but what you need to learn is not always the stuff you come in wanting to learn.
Anyhow, the site is https://simons-rock.edu/. Hope this is useful to folks.
Full disclosure: I applied when in high school, remember getting the full tour and sample class, etc, but was rejected, imo because I pretty clearly didn't hit it off with the interviewer. It seemed like a very nice place though, if you can get in.
Our oldest is seven, and shows a ton of potential. Instead of trying to sit her down every day and "teach", we literally just gave her a pile of books and told her to have fun. Two or three days a week she tends to sit down while her younger sister is napping for the sole purpose of learning. That's usually math, but it could be anything. She's starting to take on small projects of her own design as well, which is exciting.
For example: we were out walking on a popular trail last week, and she emptied her water bottle. She decided it would be a good idea to sell water and snacks on the trail. Without input at all from us, when we got home she started listing out all the things shed need to set up a mobile food cart of sorts, with cold drinks and snacks. Then she shared it with me and we worked together to polish the idea a bit - I suggested she use a wagon instead of a stroller, and limit herself to bottles of water and prepackaged trail mix.
She will probably see that particular project through to completion, break about even on it, and move on to something else. She did that in the past with a lemonade stand at our apartment complex.
As for her progress, her math skills are significantly ahead of her peers. Her reading ability is something I think needs improvement, but we test her twice a year and they show that she's at parity with her public-schooled peers. She's picked up reading very quickly in the past 2-3 months though, and I'm very interested to see how she places this time around.
So, yeah, skipping high school doesn't sound all that crazy to me. What the author calls "smart kids" - which are in reality intelligent kids with the advantages of a good familial support system - can make much better use of their time than sitting in a classroom waiting for the bell to ring.
I ended up making a living from the things I was doing outside of school, and wish I had been able to pursue those things more, and with less guilt and shame.
I'm still unlearning a lot of the bad habits and dealing with the anxiety I developed when trying to deal with school. Sigh. It's not a huge deal, there are worse problems in the world, but it upsets me to know that there must be others like me going through this year after year.
There are entire high school programs of vocational, technical, and career education for those whose idea of a "next step" is different from an academically oriented career that most colleges teach.
There are also people who graduate from high school because their goal is to enter the military, either as a career or for specialized training, and the military requires a high school degree.
Also, by the same logic, college does not provide motivation either.
My routine was to get up and walk to school, attend homeroom to show I was actually there then just take off to go downtown to said hacker/drug dealer's warehouse. There was always a ton of people there it was a defacto hackspace and party house. I learned more hanging around those people for a few months than I did all of high school. When my parents gave me an ultimatum I decided to go squat with a bunch of street punks and just hang around the hackerspace all day.
I probably would've been satisfied going to some kind of engineering or compsci program after school if it had existed at the time. I liked hanging out with my friends in high school and was glad I still went to be social but it would've been great if school was only a few hours, and the rest of the day I could have pursued my interests in electrical engineering at a non institutionalized type environment. Hanging with my friends was fun in school between and after classes but everything else about it felt like prison. Somebody you don't elect hands you arbitrary rules to follow and you just end up feeling trapped. I'm sure plenty of other kids don't mind high school for a few hours a day but would much rather spend the bulk of their time learning something else they're actually interested in. I have no idea how this can be accomplished but a full day slogging through half a chapter in a textbook on a subject you have zero passion about isn't it.
Some kids should skip some part of some high schools. Smart is orthogonal to the issue. "Skip" is a sliding scale. Early admission to college, home schooling, and starting in a trade are all on it. So is just getting the fuck out of a bad situation.
The people who should skip are those for whom the "these are the sizes we carry" [no high school is actually one-size fits all] doesn't carry a healthy size. The likelihood that a part that should be skipped is inversely proportional to it's length: senior year is more broadly appropriate than 9th grade.
Negotiate and/or move school and/or spent partial time in other institutions so that you can use at least some of your time to be exploring advanced topics that also give you real world credentials and projects for a portfolio while staving off boredom.
On a broader level, I would very much like to disagree with people who say that you should take your time through college. Take your time through college... if you can afford it. Don't forget that you're paying a good ten to twenty thousand a year for the privilege of taking your time.
Going back to high school was great for my social life, but it was horrible for my education. Having already taken a good chunk of a math major, I had to take high school math and science courses because those were the rules. I took a ton of AP courses but still had a poor GPA. In the case of AP chemistry, I got more college credit for passing the exam but an F for the course due to the heavy weighting of homework. Over the next couple of years I lost all respect for formal schooling and became a pretty bad student. On the other hand, I played sports and made some great friends who I still know even now.
In all honesty I can't say if the social costs of staying and finishing a degree at such a young age would have been worse or not. My current thinking is maybe it's okay to skip high school, but don't go back if you do.
There is something to be said for Smart kids being at school both receive and PROVIDE benefit to/from the other students.
But I guess, who cares about dumb kids, who had less opportunity than the smart ones? They'll get a better draw next life!
A smart kid isn't going to magically become a free tutor for other kids at school. Let teachers focus on educating. Don't shift that responsibility to teenagers who could be advancing significantly in other environments.
Why are their classmates entitled to an education at their expense, and what do the "smart kids" get in return?
It's completely irrelevant to this conversation.
I don't follow the logic.
Not the learning.
I, for one, very much doubt that "available evidence".
A few random stories, all true:
A client of mine is global <role_deleted_to_protect_anonymity> director of a multi-billion dollar Scandinavian corporation largely because a school friend knew a few board members.
A friend obtained deep access to a person, considered to be among the five most powerful people in his country, due to his school network.
Another friend was contacted by a school friend and helped him to land a job in an elite investment bank despite the lack of any relevant experience.
http://chapmankids.net/blog/why-not-skip-high-school-a-serie...
Skipping high school may not be bad idea, even for the not-extremely-gifted.
"so I took California’s GED test in June, 2012. It was dead easy."
If that's your basis for calling yourself smart then I'm not impressed. I took the GED high as a kite and got a perfect math score (know what's similar about both our statements? we both sound like jerks). The GED isn't a smartness metric, it's a soap bubble test so white people don't get stuck as fry chefs for their whole lives. It's _supposed_ to be easy as long as you understand the questions. Welcome to the upper class nimwit.
"People worry about Google and the instant availability of knowledge making people dumber, because we don’t have to memorize much anymore — Socrates felt the same anxiety when writing and reading were invented."
Your events are off by a few _millenia_.
"contrary to what teachers and school board members might want you to think, getting into college is easy if you’re intelligent and work hard to do interesting things"
False. Just false. I mean, I'm assuming you want to go to a top tier college, not community college. Top tier colleges are for expanding the upper tiers of the gentry class, while community colleges allow entry into the gentry class. To move to the upper tiers of the gentry, you need to have shown that you respect the institution of the gentry, ie. going to high school. Exceptions maybe exist for prodigies or minorities who built a clock once (because that's soooo amazing, who here _didn't_ build shit like that as a kid), but in general skipping high school to learn sewing and greenhaus building is an acceptable path to an Amish lifestyle, not differential equations and the Ivy League.
I thought it was generally acknowledged at this point that school isn't about education? School is about socialization, connections, and a prodding to at least have some depth of knowledge about a general corpus that it's accepted people should know about. No one actually expects you to be able to find x in real life, but everyone is familiar with the concept of finding x. I am an _astrophysicist_ and I use, at maximum, 5% of shit found in my physics texts through the year. _School is not about the shit in the books, that is not the point of school_, you're like an atheist telling a Catholic that Jesus was an asshole because evolution -- it's a valid point but it has nothing to do with the conjecture. School is an indoctrination procedure so we don't schism even further into our already highly segregated class based society, saying that it's a waste of time because class and homework are stupid is a correct statement, but misses the entire point.
Even anarchists believe in school.
The main point is that for elites, their schools are so that their girls can bring a nice boy home and not some trash from main street while their boys can find a wife that actually stands a chance at domesticating them.
It's really just that most geeks are so focused on their projects that they forget that there are more important things, like their family. Hence why we constantly hear incredibly talented but socially awkward people call for the repeal of school. Because social things don't mean anything to them. They generally become tools of the elite class.
I generally agree with the idea of creating environments where people can meet their future family because finding a quality spouse is extremely difficult without expensive and fool-proof filters in place. Connecting it with education is inevitable because children and young adults are nearly useless in a modern economy. We can't make it excellent education because there is a lot of economic and social pressure for truly talented individuals to abandon academia in favor of the market. My main complaint is that the elites are no longer virtuous so they do not deserve to exist anymore.
I'm finding often when I'm learning new skills I realize I had some of this education in school at some point. I think that's the entire point of early schooling, to learn real skills as an adult, of any random subject, really fast.
so, uh, i guess, i agree with this article even though this applies on where you're from. there are no "smart kids", though, because, imo, everyone is smart.
Everything I attained during and after high school was DESPITE school, not because of it. I taught myself how to program like many here, 3d graphics, sound, music, writing, etc. I wrote a book that got me a full tuition scholarship (despite having no official extracurricular activities) in my spare time. High school was so useless, I went a whole semester doing homework only one time and getting all A's and the occasional B+.
And this is at one of the best public schools in New Jersey. Seriously, what a joke. What a waste of time. What torture to be put in there with all the rest of the kids, most of them unlikable idiots. And worst of all, what lost potential during those days. How much more could I have done had I not been forced into this elaborate babysitting scheme we call high school? How many books would I have written? What software would I have developed? What animations would I have created? If only I hadn't been so tired from the daily bullshit of high school ...
Statements like this article's really depend on what someone's end goal is. If you are striving for some kind of above average monetary success ... earlier, there's nothing about this that guarantees it. If you aren't, then you need a different end goal to make this useful.