Comment by rexf | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rexf | Hacker News Reader

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Where is this sentiment favoring dropping out of our education system coming from? HN and related community has had several discussions about dropping out of college (and now high school). Peter Thiel offered to pay college students to drop out.

Despite our (likely inferior to other countries) educational system, high school and college graduation directly benefits children. By graduating high school, a student will have a minimum level of knowledge (basic literacy, arithmetic) applicable in society. A higher national high school graduation % is better than a lower %.

Advocating students to drop out of high school for community college or trade school is not scalable. Today, ambitious students take AP/Honors/Community College or learn trade crafts after school hours. Blanket favoring kids dropping out of high school is irresponsible as it hurts their future.

I'm currently a high school student taking five AP classes, and I can tell you that most of my AP classes just teach what people need to know on the AP test. I'd much rather take an Honors class than an AP class, but at my school Honors classes aren't offered when APs are. I learned most of what I know now before I even went to high school - I'm a victim of this educational system stratifying by age, and I can tell you that it didn't work for me.

The other thing that I see is that most of the people in my AP classes are diagnosed with ADHD and are put on Ritalin... to keep them paying attention in some lackluster classes. Ken Robinson's first TED talk says it a lot better than I can, but I do favor vocational tech and stratifying by ability, although I can see that that will open a whole new can of worms, such as parents pushing for their children to be top-tier.

Why don't you just study for the AP exams yourself? I self-studied for 4 AP exams (along with other course work) in the last year of high school, and I did pretty well. The AP exams are actually a joke due to the number of unqualified students who take them and the bell-curve system.

I took the AP computer science exam without any prep and got a 5. The issue is that classes aren't offered at the Honors level if there's an AP class that could replace it, and for the classes I'm taking (AP Stats, Psych, Physics, Calc, English, and accelerated Anatomy) it's not worth it to take the accelerated version (Anatomy isn't offered above accelerated, and ironically enough is my favorite class; there's actually more physiology than anatomy, and the memorization isn't that bad).

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