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.
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.
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.
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.
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How is that different than an office?
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.
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.
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.
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...