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Comment by lr4444lr | Hacker News Reader

Terrible advice.

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.

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What you're describing is wonderful in theory. In practice I'd be really interested in seeing the objective reality of these results.

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.

Yeah -- my experience is kids who have unconventional experiences do better socially than the ones who go through conventional school.

Putting academics aside, high school is not optimized for socialization.

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.

I dropped out in 10th grade to pursue freelance programming and don't regret it one bit.

> 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.

I would need to be convinced that high school uniquely prepares one for the subtleties of adult interpersonal interactions. Until I see a strong argument one way or the other, I'm just as apt to believe that high school actively gives a false sense of the subtleties of adult interpersonal interactions. And as far me as an adult now, if I notice almost any similarity between an interpersonal interaction now and interpersonal interactions in high school, that's a huge red flag that this is probably not a mature and healthy interaction to take part in.

It's also kind of interesting that high school is basically the last time most people have to interact with anything like a random cross section of their peers. Maybe in big cities the public schools are more stratified by class and race, but in the small town I was from, basically everyone went to the same school. (Maybe some people were homeschooled, but I don't know how big a thing that was then.)

After high school, schools and workplaces tend to select for similar sorts of people.

> Maybe in big cities the public schools are more stratified by class and race, but in the small town I was from, basically everyone went to the same school.

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.

In college something wonderful happens: for the first time of your life you can sit in a classroom where everyone made the decision to attend*. Nobody is forced by law, or their legal guardians to be there.

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.

This hagiography of high school life is a frank denial of reality. I cannot find a single thing I agree with about it, and interacting with immature and violent people of the same age had very, very little benefit to me or most of the people in my high school.

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.

Would you prevent the next Einstein from flourishing simply because you believe he or she should endure a random socialization process?

I’m not sure most people will end up as good internet essay writers too..

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