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Comment by halJordan | Hacker News Reader

The problem is that a high school education represents literally years of knowledge a person has accumulated. People not having that knowledge means they will not be able to participate.

It's not about whether they will be smart enough to learn; it's about the fact that they will have to be taught. There's no foundation to build on, there's no axiomatic knowledge we can rely on.

People who haven't graduated high school are inferior. They're not less human, but they are incontrovertibly less able.

Denying that might feel good, but society didn't mandate 10 years of public education for shits and giggles.

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I think you may be overestimating the amount of education many high school graduates have as a practical matter. Similarly, I know people that never finished high school that achieved more in computer science disciplines than most people that post here ever will. Most things of value you have to teach yourself, no matter how much schooling you have, and that has far more bearing on outcomes than people like to acknowledge.

For people that didn’t graduate high school, being a moron typically was not a causal factor. Knowing how to write and do basic algebra is sufficient to bootstrap yourself to anywhere you want to go, and many people get an adequate foundation in that before they ever get to high school, never mind graduate.

Lots of people fail to graduate because of a single failing grade in a single class senior year. Or they get suspended/expelled in their last months. Those people certainly didn't miss out on years of education.

Then there are folks like me. I dropped out of kindergarten. I didn't do any structured schooling until I was 16 when I passed a GED and ACT test then went to college for Computer Science and Physics. My GPA in college was 3.89 and I've been a highly competent software engineer for ~20 years. Nothing that I missed from high school has held me back in any significant way.

> People who haven't graduated high school are inferior. They're not less human, but they are incontrovertibly less able.

I didn't graduate from high school. I ran business groups, founded startups, exited, accumulated patents, and am usually considered articulate and capable.

Yes, the distribution of people who didn't graduate from high school are different from those who did. But you can measure the things you actually care about. High school education (or other educational attainment) is just one signal of a person's capability.

> The problem is that a high school education represents literally years of knowledge a person has accumulated.

The vast majority of states require that you be at least 17, and often 18, before you can choose to stop with said education. Everyone the military is willing to accept on other fronts has the literal years spent in school that you speak of. If there is a gap, it's only on the order of a few months, if that.

Right. My best friend in high school dropped out, and later joined the army after getting a GED. I dropped out as well but got a diploma from an alternative school for adults and joined.

Everyone I know who did not complete high School got within a year or two. Paradoxically, it was the smartest people I know who dropped out. None of our reasons were academic. A combination of social and financial

Everything covered in high school was retaught within 1 year at my university to bring everyone up to a common baseline level. They have students from all over the world.

It really isn't years worth of useful knowledge, the military is capable of giving recruits the knowledge they need much more quickly, especially given the much more disciplined/controlled environment involved.

Doubt. If someone can't even read, or even have a solid concept of abstraction with numbers, I doubt you can came up to even the lowest bar of college. There is an unspoken filter to even get the chance to take that one year catch up.

In a year you can teach kids who are a little behind enough to get them up to the min high school will teach them, but certainly not the most that high school will teach them if they want it.

Of course this overlooks what the minimum bar for a college is. At my college the lowest math they offered that wasn't considered remedial was calculus. That's a far cry from many community colleges where the lowest is alegebra. You definitely should have learned alegebra in high school and not knowing it definitely extends your timeline on certain disciplines.

“The problem is that a high school education represents literally years of knowledge a person has accumulated. People not having that knowledge means they will not be able to participate.”

The problem is, if you aren’t there on graduation day, you don’t get that proof of paper saying you know what you know. So before you go and put people down without context in their lives, you should be aware that there are dozens of reasons why someone who aced high school - didn’t get a diploma.

> The problem is, if you aren’t there on graduation day, you don’t get that proof of paper saying you know what you know.

A flat tyre, or the flu, on graduation day doesn’t mean the last X years of your life have been wasted and you don’t get a diploma…

A failing grade or too low attendance score, for a single required class does though. Granted it's possible to return and complete the credit but lots of people, for lots of different reasons, never do it.

Moving to a new state a couple months before graduation and the old school drags their feet on transfer papers will certainly make one miss graduating and not get a diploma. Illness is another. If you miss out on last quarter because of an illness you were hospitalized for. Don’t be so obtuse. Obviously if you sleep in and miss graduation day, you can still stop by the office and get your diploma.

Unless you're passing honors and AP classes in HS, the knowledge gained by simply graduating does not give a strong signal about superiority / inferiority for military purposes.

Granted the Army will have to work harder on average to train these people, but some learn better outside of the traditional classroom.

> There's no foundation to build on, there's no axiomatic knowledge we can rely on.

Did you serve in the military? I'm wondering what axiomatic knowledge taught in 12th or 11th grade, exactly, that you think military training depends on.

Participate in what?

Axiomatic knowledge? Perhaps in maths and science. The rest is different in various countries, so surely cannot form some universal knowledge base.

And in maths/science, a typical high school or even non-technical medium-end college graduate has ~zero skills or knowledge, so that cannot be a factor either.

> People who haven't graduated high school are inferior.

So they’re inferior because they didn’t receive some paper? What if they dropped out of last class?

> Deny that might feel good, but society didn't mandate 10 years of public education for shits and giggles.

k12 was created by industrialists who wanted obedient workers and well behaved citizens who won’t cause crime and instability in the ruling class’ assets.

School prepares workers, not the actual people changing the world.

Most high school grads will know more about how the mitochondria is the power of the cell, more so than know about taxes and personal finance. That’s by design.

> “People who haven't graduated high school are inferior. They're not less human, but they are incontrovertibly less able.”

I didn’t graduate from high school, and I completely disagree with you.

I learned more math as a teenager than most people ever do, learned two languages to fluency in my 20s, both in very different language families from my native one, and got into a nice software career in my 30s, first in Beijing and then in SF.

Why exactly am I “inferior”? Just because I didn’t choose to pursue the piece of paper that your world view dictates?

>The problem is that a high school education represents literally years of knowledge a person has accumulated.

A high school diploma only signifies the individual was approved by the indoctrination of public education, unless you're the handful that had private or homeschooling which still doesn't mean much academically (see below).

Incidentally, in the US we have what's called the GED[1]. The GED can be taken at any time without any requirement for prior education, and passing the GED is equivalent to graduating high school.

So no, a high school education in the US does not represent "literally years of knowledge".[2]

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Educational_Developmen...

[2]: I'm a GED graduate, and I can tell you its contents are roughly equivalent to elementary schooling in most other countries. I can also tell you that is what a high school diploma represents in the US, academic wise, because they are the same. If you can calculate 1+1=2 and speak basic English, you are an American high school graduate.

Homeschooling is full of indoctrination. If anything, indoctrination is stronger, because it is much easier to isolate kid from anything outside of a small bubble.

I don't disagree, but I do think it's important to note that any two high school experiences can differ drastically. For someone who is barely making it through high school academically, their high school diploma may represent a basic level of math and other subjects. For someone else who is in advanced or AP classes, their high school diploma is going to be substantially more advanced than what the GED is. The GED is a fairly basic measurement. I don't think I would consider it high school equivalent, although when there is a requirement for a high school diploma, it is absolutely true that a GED will nearly always suffice, so from that perspective they are equivalent.

Edit: also worth noting, is that I know of people who have graduated high school who probably could not pass a GED. It is definitely possible in the right school to coast your way to graduation, even if you would not meet the normal expectations. So in those cases, a GED would be superior to a diploma. All of this I think indicates that high school diploma is becoming somewhat meaningless

When I dropped out all of my teachers said "you know, some of the smartest and successful people dropped out" etc. The fact that "education" is compulsory isn't really a good indicator, depending on what kind of abilities we're talking about. Years of "knowledge" "accumulated" sounds a little unmalleable. A ship in a harbor is safe, but that's not what ships are for. On the other hand, standardization, setting a low enough or average enough common denominator, socialization, behavior modification, etc are all features of the education system which do provide some utility. I'll be the first to say an org or team of outliers isn't generally going to be effective.

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