Smart kids should skip high school (2015)
sonyaellenmann.com
sonyaellenmann.com
I turned out fine - but in retrospect I had a lot of growing up yet to do, and I think I would have made better use of my college experience if I had been able to do that growing up before college as opposed to during freshman and sophomore year, where you make a lot of decisions that will influence your life for a while. I missed many opportunities at MIT because I didn't really understand how the academic and professional world worked and what would be important to focus on for my career - let alone more personal matters. Looking back now I wish I had actually taken a year off before college, as opposed to skipping a grade in a hurry to get there, and I encourage every high school student and parent I know to think in these terms.
This will of course be very situational. Yes, if you are in a bad high school with bad teachers and bad students, you might be better off skipping it in favor of some alternative. But in general, a lot of growing up is just getting experience and doing things, and high school is how you get a lot of that experience before you go to college and have to do bigger and more consequential things. Don't be (or don't let your kids be) in a hurry to get ahead of that curve.
100% agreed. I took a year out to work in software before University. Despite being completely disregarded by employers, it changed my perspective on independence, time management, and the risk of not making the most of opportunities. It's one of the best life decisions that I've made.
Also with today's plethora of online education available there's unlimited amount of options for exploration. In fact going deep application domain wise before college can be a great way to motivate deeper study of theory once in college. Imagine being a high schooler today mucking around with tensor flow apis. Once you get to college all those black magic random functions (i.e. predict(), fit()) you were calling in the Google tutorials will all of sudden make sense.
However, if you can have a much more fun life if you have a deep understanding of things like signal processing, image processing, differential equations, control systems, dynamics, etc.
Those let you do things like building medical imaging systems, autonomous robots, or deep learning systems. They're much more intellectually fulfilling than just coding, which loses its charm after a bit. You're also not competing against low-cost coders, which isn't a problem in the current market, but economies are cyclical. When the next recession comes, having more specialized skills is more helpful.
These do require mentorship, guidance, and some form of study.
As much as coming into university straight out of high school is often a bad idea, so is skipping it altogether.
The key problem is these aren't skills you can pick up incrementally. They take years of focused study. For example, you can't learn control systems without diff. eq. which in turn requires calculus. There's little immediate reward to learning calculus and diff eq, and little way to know what's important without expert guidance.
Notable examples include taking a year off to hike the AT or PCT. Volunteering in peace corps or americorps. Working in a different country, or working in a resort/tourism community.
Later in life taking such actions will put a major dent in your career ambitions and finances, but early in life it’a much easier to avoid the question “what were you doing between X and Y”
From a U.K. perspective one issue is that many student things generally assume everyone will be over 18 and therefore able to enter places that serve alcohol and only admit people over that age. Even if you don’t want to drink you may still be barred from participating. But this might not be such a big deal in the U.S.
If you’re only interested in your studies and you excel at them then maybe things don’t matter so much but I think for most people, university is mot so much about learning the subject you are reading as it is about being socialised into the middle class, and this is harder to do if you come in with one hand tied behind your back.
I'm going to guess that many (probably not most, but many) of us here come from a tradition where education is paramount and deviating from that without a clear plan is like deadly frightening to the parents et al.
Sometimes it is because they co-signed 6 figures of student loans.
Definitely true for me as I was reading this thread, so thank you for making this a bit more relatable in my mind (and those of others, I'm sure).
I'm in my mid-40's now, but I swear to you I have never felt older in my life then that time nearly 20 years ago; After a completely awkward TGI Friday's dinner, I'm in my hotel room in Miami. Instead of being out visiting friends which I had planned weeks earlier, at the last minute the boss decides we should go over the powerpoint a one-hundred and SIXTH time.
The first day of grad school was DELICIOUS after that.
In general I think freshmen / sophomores don’t take enough advantages & don’t understand the professional implications of their time in college.
I did have a plan for how to spend that time in a way that was meaningful, but COVID trashed it and I was left with nothing.
You and every other single human on the planet ;-)
The repeat year was the best thing that could have happened to me. I was finally with my age-peer group, was appropriately socially aware, and just had a better scholastic experience across the board for the rest of my early education. I completely agree that much of early education is simple life experience, and it does the academically-gifted students no favors to push speed at the expense of everything else.
The people I have met who went back to school later in life (e.g., some years of military service first) had it together in a lot of ways that aren't likely for an 18 year old.
* Managing adversity
* Deeply engaging with issues they care about
Now I understand the search for self-identity is important, and college _can_ be a place to develop that. There are other ways to develop that don't involve paying $$$ as you try to balance personal emotional and intellectual development.
I think the education received for money spent isn't as high at 18 as it would be a few years later.
College is wonderful for some, maybe even a lot of the posters here.
But honest question, for people who have done college and graduate school: how do the first 2 years of college & graduate school compare in terms of focus, intellectual reward, depth personal relationships? I'm not saying it's 100% better later in life (graduate school), but ... I would be very interested to hear peoples' takes on this.
I think everyone is immature/makes poor decisions/could have chosen better paths their first couple of years in college regardless of age of matriculation. The first time you live with little supervision, have to start thinking about a career, etc. is going to be rough regardless of whether you are 17 or 20 because it is all such a new experience
Yes, I was young for college but it’s not like college students as a whole are these mature individuals. Was probably for the best overall.
Honestly, MIT is probably a better place than most for individuals who are maybe a bit atypical relative to other places.
Over time, MIT's acceptance of diversity, intellectual and otherwise, has waned. Right now, it's the top university brand in the world. That's a tightrope political game to play, and MIT optimizes to it very well. It's been a slow process for many decades, but it's really accelerated recently.
I'm not sure what the better schools are now. I've heard good things about Georgia Tech.
We do need nerd camps and nerd schools still. The old MIT was awesome.
I skipped eighth grade, and I feel the same way.
I could have spent three years writing and reading and working on interesting projects, instead of enduring the sociocultural hell of high school.
That - right there- is exactly why this person and most others need to be in high school, so that you can learn how to deal with your peers once you're all past puberty and starting to sort yourselves by definitive skills, talents, and motivations while you still have enough pre-adult protections and guardians to let you make mistakes. Because learning the subtleties of adult interpersonal interactions is crucially important for success in work, romance, civic life, and adult friendships. Running away from all of that just because you are not mentally stimulated enough in math or art class is a pale excuse for not facing your social emotional deficits as a budding adult. Academic enrichment is MUCH easier to tack on than proper socialization from school.
My perspective is that a lot of the "subtle adult interpersonal interactions" people supposedly acquire through average public high school are actually damaging or traumatizing at worst, as kids have any sense of individuality and creativity wrung out of them, meanwhile many adults continue to behave like high schoolers for the rest of their life because of how catastrophic it has been to their personal development.
For many students, it's 5-7 hours a day of explicitly not socializing at all, with brief periods of maybe talking to your friends scattered around, mostly at lunch. Plus homework to stop you from socializing as much as you might like after school.
What socialization students do get from school tends to be extremely filtered by age and other factors like academic track. The median student isn't interacting with a diverse range of people- they're almost all within 1 year of age and often share the majority of their background. When you stack compulsory attendance and restrictions on top, it becomes an extremely warped microcosm that can easily breed horrible behavior. Unfortunately, when it gets bad, schools rarely have the ability to deal with it, and students have exceedingly little autonomy. For most students going through that, the 'lessons' learned will rarely carry over because adults simply aren't operating under the same rules or context, and one does not need practice in suffering.
This isn't the system you'd build if your goal was to spit out a well-socialized human.
It'd be far better to set aside a good chunk of hours a week for intentional socialization, preferably across a wide range of activities. Playing with your friends, helping tutor younger kids, apprenticing with adults in meaningful work, trying to work on self-driven projects with peers... all of these are hugely better socialization opportunities than what high school is for US students.
> Running away from all of that just because you are not mentally stimulated enough in math or art class is a pale excuse for not facing your social emotional deficits as a budding adult.
I was being tormented by other students and no one cared. Same thing in middle school. I eventually figured just not going was the best option.
I'm not autistic. Never had any issues with authority or disciplinary actions. I just couldn't fit in at school.
After high school, schools and workplaces tend to select for similar sorts of people.
There are also private and magnet schools. You can end up spending most of your time in classes where the majority of students have a shot at Ivies.
I think the major problem with pre-college schooling, in retrospective, is being locked up in an environment with disruptive individuals that care very little about learning and who aren't motivated one bit. I recall sometimes half of a lecture would be spent on managing these individuals, with everyone else not learning one bit.
In theory you were supposed to be exposed to wide range of people and learn to socialize with this wide spectrum of humans. That, at least, was the humanist vision of High School. In practice, if you are among the smart, motivated kids at a large school you end up mostly interacting with the other kids taking AP classes. If you are at a smaller school, there's no such thing. You are stuck with everyone including those who don't care.
* I know it's not 100% true, and there are college students that are there for a plethora of reasons. But it's a tiny percentage.
I learned a lot more from the "Academic enriched" people in CEGEP than I did from the budding sociopaths and jailbirds in my high school.
edit: there are obviously ways to get this socialization without being in a traditional, horrible, highschool environment. I do not know if I would homeschool my kids or not!
Think about it: if smart kids benefit from a more personalized, stimulating, and nurturing approach to education, then this is even more true for the kids who are less intelligent. Why do we assume that the kids who are academically behind are well served by an apathetic, inflexible, impersonal system?
For example, consider very small classes taught by highly trained, highly motivated, highly paid teachers - but instead of having this be the solution for an elite cohort of "smart" kids, let this be the solution for all kids.
We don't assume that, society just isn't willing to pay for more expensive more personalized education for the masses.
Disagree. Kids who are smarter can take better advantage of improved education. I think diminishing returns would quickly kick in for most kids.
Is this really the case or do you just not remember specific things you learned or even abstract concepts around learning itself that are hard to quantify?
I'd endorse that claim, for the most part. I definitely learned all kinds of things that are not useful nor interesting, and then promptly discarded them. Maybe 2 or 3 isolated things in university passed the above criteria for me, and those were only possible because of the greater freedom offered in universities over K-12.
The times where I actually learned things, including abstract metalearning, were always when I was trying to do difficult things independently from school. School was just taking time away from that. It's important to keep in mind that the alternative to the current education system isn't 'child sits in a box devoid of all sensory input'- there are tons of possibilities.
I personally spent most high school classes either sleeping or playing on my laptop, and often literally learning about what we had been seeing in class when reading the exam's title. Often doing things like completing the math exams based on recollections from middle school. And yet got by, year after year, as well as anyone else.
I then spent over a decade having a hard time figuring out how to actually take and keep any kind of notes, study and how to learn things that didn’t just "come to me" on their own.
Quite a weird experience.
Looking back, I can only wish it had been different. But that’s pointless.
Repeat that exercise with other areas of knowledge.
I went to a Montessori school for a year in middle school, and I remember being in a class with 5th graders doing math at the 9th grade level. I also remember a few kids in 5th grade doing math at a 4th grade level. The key was that the teachers could teach their subject at all of those levels.
I feel like some of this could be implemented in a less structured educational system. Being able to move at varying different paces while still socializing with peers of the same age is a good combination. I would add a little more structure than Montessori schools though, to make sure that students are moving at least at a baseline pace. It also takes some scheduling work to make sure that teachers aren't teaching an hour lesson to one student at a time.
That's on the student; in college, where you can pick your classes and course of study, it's on the student completely. But regardless, I was told: 'Don't blame the professor or the class or the book or the weather; it's your job to learn.' Good preparation for professional life too.
For example there was a course that almost entirely covered collaborative development and some regex, when I already had enough regex knowledge and was actively working as a software engineer, doing collaborative development all day every day.
There are definitely some areas where you have to make an effort to learn- and I do. But so far in my computer science degree (I'm taking third-year courses right now), all I've really learned is C++, but that's really not much considering I taught most of it to myself before my first term since I tested out of the entry-level courses.
I grew up in the outskirts of LA where there is a mix of farmland and people willing to drive a long way into LA. My family moved there because of the military and i had previously been in a "good" school, but this area was more than 50% the children of farm workers and they had really been screwed by fate. Most didn't speak English and the school system was constantly struggling to get them to learn enough English so they could understand the other subjects.
Anyway, by junior high, I had worked out a deal with my school that I could take some classes at the local community college and not take them at junior high. So rather than take Algebra I or whatever I would take a math class at the college. Well... by the end of 8th grade I had taken the first two calculus semesters.
When transferring to college I should have gone to one of two particularly bad high schools and it make things worse, the high schools were not going to allow me to take any college classes. I would start in high school at algebra II.
So I dropped out. At the time in California, you were able to select a community college as your high school. This is sadly no longer the case. I took all the classes I needed to fill in my general education requirements and took STEM classes I would need to transfer to a CSU or UC school. I didn't take things too seriously. I took whatever classes looked interesting including SCUBA, TV production and some music classes. I finished with everything needed to transfer at 16 and transferred to Calpoly. I finished with my BS in Chemistry at 19. Took a year off because I didn't know what I wanted to do. Worked at a winery as an analytical chemist which was loads of fun. After a year there, I decided I needed a PhD if I wanted to do research and did that at Caltech.
Personally, I believe this worked out fine for me. The people at the community college especially in STEM classes were great. I had and made friends along the way. Going to high school would have been a step down and a step back for me, but I don't think skipping high school is for everyone.
Edit: so it would appear that neither of us actually read the article before commenting…
Seriously, that's brilliant. Was there some local school apparatchik that made sure that your course picks were reasonable?
It's the sort of system that works only so long as not too many people use it. If a junior college was 1/2 high school aged students, it would become, well, high school (to the cost of the other students).
But too many people doing it would just turn it into High School 2.0 or worse if it turned into another competition among the smart high school kids.
I mean, at this point why not just take the GED or CHSPE and go straight to community college?
I have an 11 year old and a 13 year old and it seems to me school is a) about becoming a standardised social human cog and b) the school passing off whatever is the current vague social fashion (resilience, leadership, whatever) as useful learning. Meanwhile the teachers spend a huge amount of effort to avoid teaching anything that might actually be useful. I don’t blame them - They suffered the same terrible education and are unqualified to teach anything except what they were taught so the cycle is self-reinforcing.
Any actual learning seems incidental or is left the kids to find out for themselves through online programs (eg for maths/spelling) or personal research.
I think school as we know it is becoming a dead end for genuinely useful learning, and for the masses it is essentially just something to keep young people busy so they don’t roam the streets and cause trouble.
Sadly the first step in solving a problem is recognising it exists in the first place, but the question of why we continue with such a broken educational model doesn’t seem to trouble anyone - if the other parents are anything to go by anyway. They seem to lap up the schools’ endless marketing push designed to ensure nobody questions anything.
Find a better school that will push your children. They do exist.
Possibly the only predicting factor I was able to discern is that highly disciplined, self motivated parents tend to have highly disciplined, self motivated kids. People in professions that select for those traits will have "successful" kids.
One thing I noticed is that I had vastly more spare time as a kid -- enough that I was able to play music while also teaching myself electronics and programming. On the other hand my school paid very little attention to writing, and I think my kids got a lot better preparation in both writing and critical thinking.
What would happen if world-lead expert personal tuition was available to everyone? (Obviously impractical, but let's pretend, as a thought experiment.)
To what extent are we standing our own feet as a species by prioritising hierarchy and economic discrimination over free access to the best possible education for everyone?
Especially for those who want it and can benefit from it?
Governments can be inefficient, but part of the reason for the inefficiency is that they have to provide the same service to everyone and that's hard. They can't cherry-pick their customers.
There may be new educational funding models we should be looking at. Maybe a lot of educational YouTube videos should be directly funded by government grants, and ad-free video hosting provided by government infrastructure if they want it.
If they can handle this, then they could take college level classes and get high school credit and college credit at the same time.
I went to an alternative high school that met on a community college campus and had 50% of the requirements for HS graduation for junior and senior year served by taking college courses. I was only able to get about half a year of college credit this way, but I was able to get half a year head start on college. In hindsight, I would have liked to start that process a year earlier and skipped as much HS as I could. I don't think that path is for everyone, but if you're capable and motivated I recommend exploring alternative pathways for reducing the traditional HS experience in favor of more profitable uses of time & talent.
I thought I was skipping high school, but in reality I was actually skipping college. It is really bad.
This creates a lot of wasted time for people who do know what they want to do. The first year of my CS education was learning stuff I already knew from High School. I was sitting next to people who had never taken CS before, and this was their first introduction. I think it actually should be required to enter with a major in mind, and have completed coursework done towards it in high school. Not every high school could teach specialized courses, but there is a lot of low-hanging fruit that would be pretty easy. Ex. Physics for engineering, Linear Algebra for CS majors, Bio & Chemistry, etc. High schools can teach these things pretty consistently, we shouldn't need to take such basic classes in college.
High school should cover more advanced material, and college should cover less breadth-wise and start off more advanced. I shouldn't be taking calculus or basic writing in college as a CS major.
My personal take is that high school tries to be a one size fits all model, which actually just makes it a waste of time for everyone. It would be a big improvement if we could let people branch out a lot more starting around age 14 or so. Then perhaps it would make sense, if you knew you wanted to do computer science, you could go to a CS oriented high school and in two years do all the pre-requisite work for a CS bachelors degree and head off to college, or something like that.
Mainly though, I think this doesn’t happen because most people need the high school to be in their neighborhood or close by. Kids can’t drive until they’re 16, And even then they are terrible drivers and probably shouldn’t be driving until they’re 18 or 21. But this is America and if you can’t drive you really can’t be an adult, so there’s no way that you can go to the specialty school 45 minutes away. And I don’t think very many parents want to send their young teenage children away to boarding school.
And having a local high school is very important as well, It's definitely not practical to send kids on an hour commute.
The system the UK has with grammar schools is pretty interesting, by separating kids around age 11, basically it's a more advanced public school. Although that system gets some hate as well. I think it separates kids a little too young, before they can really understand what's going on.
I don't think this would work well on a larger scale. deciding your college major is one of those big life decisions. it's hard enough for most people to make a good choice by the end of their sophomore year, let alone at age sixteen in highschool.
with writing in particular, there is a reason most schools require some sort of freshman writing seminar, and it isn't because high schools don't prioritize writing. in my experience at least, high schools spend a lot of time on writing skills, but still fail to matriculate many students who can meet expectations for college-level writing.
Now, 6 years out of high school, I attend a community college part-time to work on a bachelors degree. Funny how I completely discounted higher education just a few years ago.
It's an important part of life and becoming an adult in so many ways and skipping it deprives the child of the opportunity for the good and bad experiences that humans need to experience to become balanced adults.
Life has bad bits for everyone. Chopping out high school preemptively is not only not a solution but is actively detrimental.
I wouldn't say "nothing." Going to school 5 days a week mimics a workweek, even if the timing is off. Being with random people of your age group in close proximity is a little extreme, but it has some similarities to working in an office with a random assortment of personalities. Having tasks assigned to you that you then have to complete isn't exactly how workplaces function, but having a baseline ability to complete work that isn't your favorite is a valuable skill.
Now, all of these things are taken to the extreme in high school and that should be adjusted. However, saying that none of high school is relevant is a stretch.
I suppose this might be true in middle-class, suburban areas; but where I grew up, and I imagine in similar places elsewhere, there were plenty of working teenagers who held responsibility for their family's well-being. They worked in the family corner store/restaurant/shop/farm during the weekends and evenings. Others provided primary care for family members; their younger siblings or infirm adults.
Maybe this is a shortcoming of our modern world outside of school, rather than a shortcoming of schools. I rather think it's a point in public school's favor that students attend the same classes, do the same work, and are judged according to the same standards as their peers regardless if their parents are well-off, middle-class, or poor. (That's the ideal, anyways. There are always exceptions.)
Having exposure to a wide swath of humanity at a young age is, I think, quite valuable. It's easier to hate people you've never met.
How many bad habits are learned in high school, from catty behavior, to acting out for attention, to being physically dominant, to spending money on flashy gear, to gain status? How many environments outside of high school do these behaviors result in meaningful, lasting status gains? Not many, at least none that can be considered healthy environments. If the goal of high school is to prepare kids for adulthood, they don't do a good job of it.
Granted, not every school is like this and not everyone has these experiences. But putting teens in a social pressure-cooker among their age cohort will result in some very unnatural local optimums for behavior.
...
How is that different than an office?
I'm reading into your comment a little bit and projecting my own thoughts of "these things might have been character-building." That might be true, but for some they could also end up causing PTSD/similar things, difficultly trusting people, severe low-self-confidence, etc.
In many cases the 'negative experiences' are daily abuse.
I myself had a horrible and painful time in high school, but listening to people of various backgrounds I concluded it's pretty much hit or miss. I can't generalize from my negative experience, but you can't generalize from your positive one either.
From about 6th or 7th grade through graduation, school is a weird environment all its own.
Some might say it is similar to being in prison though…
At least for part of high school that’s what it felt like at times for me. The biggest issue being the forced labour - sorry, I mean “homework” - of which the burden was substantial and the benefits not at all clear.
At the time I remember being very depressed that even when I was at home and away from the school that I often didn’t enjoy, instead of indulging in my hobbies (which, coincidentally, is how I learnt practically all of the specialised skills that I used to kick off my techology career) I was forced to complete endless hours of dull and unsurprising homework. I understand the benefits in moderation but the sheer amount assigned to me was actively detrimental to the point of robbing me of a big chunk of my free time as a teenager.
I desperately wanted to continue teaching myself programming (this was in the early 90’s) but instead I had to complete some mindless essay about sedimentary fucking rocks.
Not to mention that I had undiagnosed ADHD so the homework took me forever and created considerable stress.
Having said that, it was so bad (and felt so pointless) that even though I was academically pretty strong and had wanted to go to University from quite a young age, I instead quit school at 16, immediately got a job in a business consultancy (using my self-taught programming/design skills) and was running small software projects for huge multi-national businesses within a year. By the time most of my peer group graduated University, I had about 5 years of a software development career under my belt and had already started my first business.
In retrospect I don’t think I would have done anything different, apart from putting about 500% less effort into the sedimentary rock essays.
I think we tell ourselves stories about how we got from A to B (like mine above) but in reality it’s never quite as simple. It’s always easier to rationalise and construct what feels like a meaningful narrative in retrospect.
For all you know, the choices you made, even if they now feel slightly uniformed in retrospect may still have been 100% right for you!
I suppose reflecting on my previous comment, the flip side of the situation is that I was incredibly lucky to go to a pretty good school (even though I didn’t always like it much) and the single biggest benefit I got was the utterly amazing life-long friends I made there, who are still great friends today. Those friends have had 1000% more positive impact on me than my schooling did, but I wouldn’t have met them without school.
Interesting. I've often thought that this would have really helped iron out some of my character flaws early on too. At least in the military you are willingly signing up for an experience that you know will be hard, but likely also rewarding and character shaping.
Everyone I know who has been in the military seems to have developed a more resilient and disciplined approach to life which has served them very well later on. Although clearly it's not universally good for everyone who takes this path.
It's possible for the change to be bad (e.g. parents in a cult pulling their kids out of school to move to The Compound), but I'd wager that if you took a kid who felt like high school was a terrible experience and gave them other constructive options and the resources to pursue them, it'd almost always be a net win.
The value of the 'high school experience' is contextual, not everyone will experience the same balance of good and bad. For some people, the bad is so overwhelming that it goes beyond the point of constructive and well into destructive. Those situations aren't hard to detect.
However, it was a lot of wasted time sitting in classrooms daydreaming. This time could have been spent much more productively. But we don't have any better.
I used to get knots in my stomach on the first day of school. I just knew there would be an after school fight, and I would be involved even though I tried to remain invisible.
I should have gone to a community college instead of high school, but didn't even know it was an option at the time.
(I wasen't a big kid, but taught by my Irish father to never back down from a male on male confrontations. That might explain some of my problems with bullies? By the time I hit high school, I was so beyond fighting, and any form of bullying--to any of my classmates. I really didn't like high school, with the exception of a few girlfriends. Everything I should have learned in high school, I made up for at a community college in a semester. I remember sitting in a chem class with 35 year old nursing students, and I was in heaven. I loved college so much, I didn't want it to end.)
Anyway, we do have some empirical evidence of what happens when people skip high school, since many kids are homeschooled. My general impression of people who have been homeschooled is that they are just as much balanced adults as anyone else. That shouldn't be too surprising. Homeschooled kids still socialize with their friends, still struggle to understand concepts, still get into trouble on occasion.
a nice discussion on the topic can be found here https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-the-cult-o...
Premature optimization is the root of all evil ...
"Some" smart kids should skip "some" high school ... maybe.
But more importantly, a ton of hand-waving here about how unnecessary high school was as a crucible of learning and self-improvement - hint: passing the GED is not the same as high school.
Also pretty optimistic (again, from experience) to expect a smart, lazy kid (the target audience for high school skipping) to "macro-plan" a 4 year "unschooling" experiment for their ages 14-18.
Smart Kids Should Skip High School - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11509374 - April 2016 (65 comments)
Having said that, I actually do agree the value of high school is little. Given my pretext above though, here's the problem. I don't know how one would enter college without high school. High school is very much college prep. It sucks both in terms of classes and social life. Most people I know didn't like high school. Perhaps that speaks to who I am and who my friends are (i.e. none of us were popular kids in high school). The author here suggests GED is equivalent to finishing high school which I'm sure it technically is, but college admissions care about high school GPA and SAT scores. I didn't even go to Ivy League or anything but I did go to a University of California which is good in the grand scheme of things but not the top; and I can't imagine getting into one of these without good high school GPA and SAT. Ivy League admission is probably a whole other level of ball game. Maybe then the next argument point is how we fix college admissions, because I don't think getting rid of college entirely and doing bootcamps only is the way to go.
And that's still I think the most important function of a proper education system. Not only do you acquire basic knowledge, but you learn how to function within an institution, work within groups, face adverse situations, follow instructions, timelines, interact with authority, and so on, you learn the basics of democracy even, how to function within a small political community of sorts.
The majority of people will continue to go on and benefit from this. Whether they work at a large corporation, administration, the military, the legal sector, a medical profession, academia. Most careers are highly structured. People saying that their school experience is nothing like 'real life' in my experience work in highly idiosyncratic professions that only employ a minority of individuals.
And as a side note, my parents couldn't teach me anything past 8th grade. the entire notion of leaving the school system is essentially preserved for people whose parents are affluent or fairly educated.
While I can agree with him high school is a lot of tedium and busy work, I'm skeptical sitting around at home doing whatever you want will result in a more enriching use of time
There will be the natural tendency to avoid learning about things you don't like, which can result in a biased worldview. There is the natural tendency to procrastinate. There is the need to interact with people with different perspectives who will challenge your ideas. I don't see this will be an environment that helps budding minds flourish.
I might have been more inclined to agree with him pre-pandemic, but the experience has taught me I (and probably most other people too) actually suck at using time well when there is no structure
This reminds me a bit of Scott Alexander's extreme bias against school, due to all of the extreme bullying he faced.
It might make more sense to say kids who are having a truly awful experience in high school should skip high school, rather than just "smart kids should skip high school." I think I was a pretty smart person, perfect SAT score even, and I certainly could have learned everything I learned in high school must faster with less wasted time if I studied on my own, but I don't think the experience was worthless. It's the last time I had real, truly close friends. It was the last time I competed hard in real sports leagues. Theoretically, I could have tried to find other ways to do those things, but there's some benefit to just being around the same people all the time and doing things together if you don't hate each other and make each other's lives awful.
I don't know what else I would have done. I may have been academically ready for college a lot earlier, but I wasn't socially ready. I wasn't socially ready even at 18 and probably should have waited even longer. You can't just actually go to work even if you're able to because of child labor laws.
People tried so hard to get me to care at all about high school but no one could possibly convince me that the rote, mundane textbook crap was going to be worth spending my life on. Indeed, there is no time I look back and think "I wish I paid attention in that class". I got to enjoy my teenage years delving into fascinating, rewarding stuff, and developed tons of awesome skills in the process, too.
A while ago I saw a quote that if you cut social services it will end up in the emergency room. The same goes for the High Schools. They HAVE to run them like prisons in order to even hope to deal with the number of issues they see.
If you have any alternative, avoid sending your kid to a High School unless you can vet that it's not a hellhole. I haven't had to fight a person, say no to hard drugs, avoid pickpockets, or withstand constant verbal and physical assault since leaving High School.
To all those who had a wonderful High School experience I am truly happy for you. However, I think for many kids, they could get more beneficial social experiences literally anywhere else. Ones that don't scar or taint you.
The particular High School I went to was in a town that had just lost it's military base and had turned into a bedroom community for halfway houses. (Places where criminals leaving prison would stay on parole.) This mixed a large number of different gangs together into a single area leading to tons of terrible things. This all trickled down to the kids in the area.
Fights involving 10 or more kids were common. Walking home you had to avoid certain times and places where after school fighting would take place. Parks and culverts were DMZs at certain times. Resource officers used pepper spray in crowded hallways where a fight had broken out. Whenever we had a school assembly it was pretty common for a riot to break out.
This was the "Good" High School in town. There were two others that were quite a bit worse. Problems with weapons, fires, and such.
College, on the other hand, was an abject waste of four years.
In terms of my success as a human who is part of society I don't think anything has been as helpful as the social skills that I learned in high school. I don't think it's the only way to learn these skills, but I certainly feel like my social-learning velocity was by far the highest in high school.
Ultimately how other people perceive me influences my quality of life more than any other thing. I don't think as a "smart kid" skipping high school would have helped me, I think it would have hurt me a lot. I feel like my life opened up immensely when I accepted that being smart and correct and having a deep understanding of the problem at hand matters so much less than being able to get along with people.
(The author's disclaimer means my point doesn't apply to the linked article.)
It may be the case that the author's high school experience wasn't worth the time, but that's a retroactive observation. It's probably true that for some people high school is a net good and for some it isn't. But unless you have an effective way to distinguish one from the other before they go to high school, it's hard to draw actionable advice from that fact.
Imo, there is way too much no child left behind. But that's referring to the UK education system where you can't proceed without ticking all the boxes at each step. (To be clear I don't blame the teachers, most of that nonsense comes from council level interventions and management)
The national system does a very good job of completely failing those at the top and bottom of the grading system the worst.
I've come to think of it more in terms of "School helps people navigate a world in which you are generally expected to go to school."
Some people will get a great deal of value from it, and really need it, whatever "it" is -- it could be what's in the books or it could be what's in the people around you.
Some people may not need it much at all.
Furthermore, of course what makes this especially complex is the variance in "schools."
If you are someone who grokked addition in your first week of kindergarten, you could have learned all the way up to 4th grade math in a single year. If you were reading at age 3, you didn’t need 7 more years of study to read at a 4th grade level…
Smartness really helps when all school is trying to alleviate is ignorance.
Extreme poverty is more avoidable now that we have the ACA and preexisting conditions can't be used to destroy multiple generations of a family's life.
If you are a software engineer it's fine.
Yes there are downsides, I know them all. I can talk about this for days.
High-school (and puberty) should simply be made to not be a terrible experience for everyone. Good luck with that without a dramatic cultural shift.
Better advice would be: think critically about what you are getting from high school. Use it as a tool to get what you need or skip it if you think you have better use of your time and money.
Good reason to not skip high school are further developing social skills and especially if you have no better use of your time.
It's not available everywhere I believe, but if it's available, there's another option compared to AP classes or regular classes (or other magnet/governor schools).
I also learned that I was a weird kid who didn't know how to socialize... and so I had good time to do that while being forced to meet with a fairly large group of people for an extended period of time. College did not do this. College provided opportunities for this, but it was easier to be a recluse.
What America needs is more good high schools, not to give up on the concept itself. If anyone doesn't need high school, it's kids who don't have any interest in learning there. I had an easy time academically in high school. Mostly A's with no studying, and over a dozen AP classes passed, including a few that I just tested out of with some self study. But I still learned a great deal. I do wish it moved faster, but in the scheme of things it was a great experience.
Tiny % either way.
145 is the top three tenths of 1 percent, not the top tenth. The average high school size in the US is 854 students [1]. In an average school, you would expect there to be 2.5 students with 145+ IQ. The largest school in each state is about 5-10x the average size school for that state. Let's call a large school 3x average, then. In a large school, you would expect to find 7.5 students with 145+ IQ, or roughly 2 per graduating year.
"About 8" and "Maybe 1" are almost an order of magnitude apart.
1: 2011 Dept of Ed statistics https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2011/pesschools09/tables/table_05.as...
But we agree on the bottom line: 145 is not rare. You might know someone of this IQ.