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Comment by OneEyedRobot | Hacker News Reader

>At the time in California, you were able to select a community college as your high school.

Seriously, that's brilliant. Was there some local school apparatchik that made sure that your course picks were reasonable?

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By selecting the community college, I was just like any other student. I just had a regular counselor who made sure that I was picking at least 12 units that went toward my different GE categories or toward my intended major(originally EE, but switched to chemistry). Otherwise I was free to choose anything I wanted and did choose a lot of classes that didn't exactly fit with my plan, but were interesting to me.

I just think that's such a clever idea. It doesn't take a genius to go to JC when you're 15 years old and a lot of high school bullshit disappears.

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).

I totally understand that sentiment. I agree people don't need to be particularly smart to do it too. I started with math classes that would normally be considered remedial and it was amazing. It let me zoom through what would be normal high school level math in about a year.

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.

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