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Comment by MattGaiser | Hacker News Reader

A couple of years ago I got an honourable mention in an essay competition on school shootings and in it I discussed how schools are the one place in most people's lives that they have no power to escape. [0]

You can quit a crappy job. You can transfer to a different university. You can ghost your friends. In nearly every social system after high school, there is some measure of self selection. But you have no power to extract yourself from that environment unless your parents are willing to send you to private school or move.

I am not sure there is a need to abolish high school, but rather just provide additional resolutions for those for whom it is a very poor fit and better clamp down on those who want to harm others in the ecosystem. Schools handle edge cases very poorly and they do an even worse job of managing those who wish to do harm.

[0] http://www.psychological-observations.com/918-jmh-internatio...

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I imagine this varies significantly from place to place but when I was in high school you could pretty easily switch to other public high schools in the area and there were several charter schools and alternative schools available for students not well served by the public schools. Since this was a fairly rural area in a fairly average state, I have always thought that this type of school choice was fairly common but I could be wrong.

I don't believe that is common, especially in more urban areas where there is only one public school option. Often there are huge waitlists to change public schools, if they have any availability at all.

I've lived in the 'burbs of two major cities and both let you apply to attend a school outside your "boundary." One will approve your request automatically as long as there is space at the school. The other requires a darn good reason to let you switch, and "vicious bullying" was apparently not a good enough reason for my friend to be approved.

It probably depends a lot on funding and student classification. I know that I had access to a lot of options as a student coded "gifted" but if I went public, then there would be a need for a special exemption (as the property taxes were registered to the Catholic board), but one of my cousins was stuck in a crappy school as there was nothing special about him.

I had a choice of over 20 high schools in my area, some within 5 minutes from my home, some 45 minutes. This upper limit was imposed by my parents, who weren't comfortable having me travelling for longer at that age. I had a shortlist of four, and was able to pre-attend classes at three of them. I ended up choosing one at 35 minutes from my home. I think the classmate with the highest commute time had to travel a little over an hour.

Most years, I think our class had one or two additions that did their previous year (or the same year) at a different school, and I remember two or three classmates changing to another school. I'm not sure how universal your observation is, but then again, I've never lived in the US.

I am Canadian and at least how it seemed to work here is that you have a designated school and then special provisions could make you eligible for a different school, like taking APs or being coded gifted, or having a learning disability might get you somewhere else. If you didn't have something like that, anecdotally people were stuck.

> But you have no power to extract yourself from that environment unless your parents are willing to send you to private school or move.

Most states in the US allow students to drop out of high school without parental consent at the age of 16.

It's also not uncommon for parents to home school their children through high school.

The alternatives exist. People do choose the alternatives. They're just not as glamorous as they sound once you consider the consequences. I recall the home schooled kids I knew to be deeply unhappy about being separated from the structure and social circles that the rest of us enjoyed.

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