Consider dropping out of school.

Great. Now name me some successful recent high-school dropouts.

School for me was a complete waste of time. There might have been some value to witnessing the barbarity and brokenness of it all but a dozen hours, not a dozen years, would have sufficed. It was a popularity contest that I failed every day and it got in the way of studying more interesting things.

If there was really nothing in the curriculum for you to learn (was mathematics really that easy for you?) maybe you should have focused on the popularity-contest side of things, since developing social skills is hugely useful for real life.

One of the girls is on the verge of being put on medication because she’s so unhappy. The drugs will make her ok with her malnourished, growth-stunting, environment. They’ll make her ok with jumping through inane hoop after hoop.

If you're being put on medication because you can't cope with high school, it's not a problem with high school. It's a problem with you, or maybe a problem with your doctor, but high school generally isn't that difficult an environment. You show up every day, you hang out with your friends, you go to classes, learn some stuff, you do some stupid crap that you're told to do, and you figure out a way to avoid doing some other stupid crap that you're told to do.

I was lucky to have parental support, and top-class school administration, but working out this sort of arrangement seems less extreme and more practical than dropping out.

Within a few weeks, he had a ton of extra work with a top researcher, and ended up with coauthor status on a lot of papers. And this was an undergraduate. All it took was him showing interest and offering time. He even got paid.

As a lecturer, you are always looking out for students who show the slightest interest, and will open many doors if the student is capable. And if someone from highschool came and offered to help out, I'd certainly do my best to let them!

High school caters to a very broad audience with it's general curriculum and IMO is one of the worst ways to teach kids. I can say without a doubt that I find applications for about 15 - 20% of everything I learned in highschool past grade 10 in my life, but I'd already been programming outside of school since I was 12 or 13. Most things will simply not apply to most students, but the system needs to cater to all of the possibilities. The only reason I graduated high school was with the hope that university would allow me to actually study things I was interested in, but that's simply not the case to meet the degree requirements. In the end, I dropped out of university and got a great paying job in a startup and have done a good deal of contracting work as well; I don't feel my future career prospects are at all hampered by my lack of education.

I agree that most high school students would not live their lives to their fullest potential if they dropped out, but for those that will, this is applicable. I am definitely an edge case, but I feel that is who he is address here, and I wish someone would have told me to drop out of high school and get an earlier start.

They told me how boring high-school was, how narrow-minded their families were.

That sounds like what 2 out of 3 teens would say. How much more typical can you get? Maybe these two teens are brilliant, I don't know. If so, they should simply accelerate and go to college earlier. But, drop out? I'm simply stunned that someone could seriously tell teens this.

I can't speak for everyone, or even a specific type of person, but for me highschool was a huge distraction. I would learn more on my own, doing my own research. I've always found that your interests for specific subjects develop at different times for different people.

Our public education system (in Canada, at least) is among the best, but it faces many challenges. One being funding. Funding effects how quickly education is dispersed among students. The world isn't perfect, but we're sending students out into jobs with archaic information from 5-10 year-old textbooks.

If you have common sense about you, a Google search combined with thoughtful fact validation rivals your public highschool's education platform. I know I'm going to see some unhappy comments about that statement, again, my experience only.

If anything has changed since my High School days it's that schools have gotten worse. They're more authoritarian and paranoid (cameras and patrols abound in the hallways), are even worse at teaching teenagers anything (look at their abysmal performance. This is a well known problem), and want even more money.

You can try blaming the kids for the problems like hugh3 does, but the fact of the matter is that there are so many people doing poorly in and feeling poorly about school that it can hardly be rationalized away as the individual's fault. The problem is the system, i.e. the schools themselves.

http://www.newsweek.com/blogs/nurture-shock/2009/11/05/why-t...

"Allen has concluded that our urge to protect teenagers from real life – because we don’t think they’re ready yet – has tragically backfired. By insulating them from adult-like work, adult social relationships, and adult consequences, we have only delayed their development. We have made it harder for them to grow up. Maybe even made it impossible to grow up on time. Basically, we long ago decided that teens ought to be in school, not in the labor force. Education was their future. But the structure of schools is endlessly repetitive. “From a Martian’s perspective, high schools look virtually the same as sixth grade,” said Allen. “There’s no recognition, in the structure of school, that these are very different people with different capabilities.” Strapped to desks for 13+ years, school becomes both incredibly montonous, artificial, and cookie-cutter. As Allen writes, “We place kids in schools together with hundreds, sometimes thousands, of other kids typically from similar economic and cultural backgrounds. We group them all within a year or so of one another in age. We equip them with similar gadgets, expose them to the same TV shows, lessons, and sports. We ask them all to take almost the exact same courses and do the exact same work and be graded relative to one another. We give them only a handful of ways in which they can meaningfully demonstrate their competencies. And then we’re surprised they have some difficulty establishing a sense of their own individuality.”

He appears to have grown out of his depression, though he's not clear on exactly how he turned things around. It's possible that a change of scenery would do the girls good, but we shouldn't assume that their psychological issues are entirely the result of their environment. When someone is suffering from depression, they are sick. If they move to some sort of alternate schooling arrangement, it should be under the supervision of a trained professional.

- Elon Musk

I hear nordic and asian countries have very strong education systems. Fwiw, even my little high school had a neat robotics extra-curricular class w/ Lego Mindstorms.

http://www.cantrip.org/gatto.html

John Taylor Gatto, New York State Teacher of the Year, 1991

"The third lesson I teach you is to surrender your will to a predestined chain of command. Rights may be granted or withheld, by authority, without appeal. As a schoolteacher I intervene in many personal decisions, issuing a Pass for those I deem legitimate, or initiating a disciplinary confrontation for behavior that threatens my control. My judgments come thick and fast, because individuality is trying constantly to assert itself in my classroom. Individuality is a curse to all systems of classification, a contradiction of class theory.

Here are some common ways it shows up: children sneak away for a private moment in the toilet on the pretext of moving their bowels; they trick me out of a private instant in the hallway on the grounds that they need water. Sometimes free will appears right in front of me in children angry, depressed or exhilarated by things outside my ken. Rights in such things cannot exist for schoolteachers; only privileges, which can be withdrawn, exist.

The fourth lesson I teach is that only I determine what curriculum you will study. (Rather, I enforce decisions transmitted by the people who pay me). This power lets me separate good kids from bad kids instantly. Good kids do the tasks I appoint with a minimum of conflict and a decent show of enthusiasm. Of the millions of things of value to learn, I decide what few we have time for. The choices are mine. Curiosity has no important place in my work, only conformity.

Bad kids fight against this, of course, trying openly or covertly to make decisions for themselves about what they will learn. How can we allow that and survive as schoolteachers? Fortunately there are procedures to break the will of those who resist.

This is another way I teach the lesson of dependency. Good people wait for a teacher to tell them what to do. This is the most important lesson of all, that we must wait for other people, better trained than ourselves, to make the meanings of our lives. It is no exaggeration to say that our entire economy depends upon this lesson being learned. Think of what would fall apart if kids weren’t trained in the dependency lesson: The social-service businesses could hardly survive, including the fast-growing counseling industry; commercial entertainment of all sorts, along with television, would wither if people remembered how to make their own fun; the food services, restaurants and prepared-food warehouses would shrink if people returned to making their own meals rather than depending on strangers to cook for them. Much of modern law, medicine, and engineering would go too — the clothing business as well — unless a guaranteed supply of helpless people poured out of our schools each year. We’ve built a way of life that depends on people doing what they are told because they don’t know any other way. For God’s sake, let’s not rock that boat!"

Dropping out of high school voluntarily is a short-term rush with potential long-term adverse side effects.