Self education may appeal to many of us here, but it applies to less than it appeals to.
That's missing the major point of the piece, IMHO. The OP isn't describing "self education", and (coming from a US perspective) is not even a typical drop out.
What's being described here is a vocational pattern of learning, where on-the-job experience is backed up with classroom instruction. That's not exactly what "drop out" or "self educated" imply in the US.
Except they also have the "back to work scheme" which means they don't even have to pay them to stack shelves in safeway (or Morrisons as it now is).
I accept your point that the word 'apprenticeship' has been made meaningless by our Present Leaders but there is some good stuff out there as well.
Clever apprentices would only go on to do this after doing there 4/5 years.
And ok my BTEC was a some what specialized one (mech eng with Thermofluids) but we looked down on the "apprentices" form the local Garages.
Though I suspect (borrowing John Cleses line) alowing "jumped up F%^&*ing Caterers" to devalue the term that fight is lost.
Actually, it is. The Ordinary National Certificate was replaced with the B/TEC National Diploma half a decade before I came into teaching in 1989. You must be a mature person!
And yes, the whole program takes 4 to 5 years. With another couple of full time years for degree top up.
Those programmes do still exist but I agree entirely with your point about the shelf-stacking and mickey mouse stuff the current administration are bringing in (as their political forefathers did in the 1980s).
And remember being dead jealous of the management school at Cranfield having 40!! color pc's donated by HP (this is pre IBM PC) - when we had 4 or 5 total.
I think a key ingredient is that you have to love to learn, that you would do it regardless of circumstance and that learning itself is your passion.
If that's the case you can safely drop out of education, but if the motivations are to some extent external then better stay put.
I agree with you in that I don't know we have the data to argue that apprenticeships are better, but I don't think we have data to argue that they're worse either, and I can't see how having it as an option is bad at all.
I think the whole point is that, statistically speaking, many many more people go through the system and succeed than otherwise. That's why it's the system.
(I'm not saying that's still true.)
I'm not saying I believe that, but I haven't seen it ruled out yet.
If your point is that more people start school than finish and somehow that weeds people out, you could also say the same thing about apprenticeships.
There is value in both, and the confirmation bias is apparent but it may not have been the intention of the author.
And what of the people who graduate, get a job, and blog about it?
I doubt Tobi ever had reading comprehension problems and I bet he was passionate about his hobby leading up to his track switch.
As for me, I'm a high school drop out and everybody told me "You'll end up stacking shelves at 7-11!" because that's what dropouts do. They made the same mistake you are accusing us of making, when we talk about our own pasts. I knew several outstanding HS and college dropouts among my online friends at the time and they inspired me to stop wasting my life. I'm so glad they did.
I am 15, and I am planning to drop out of school.
It is extremely frustrating trying to persuade my parents that dropping out of school doesn't mean I am giving up on life, and that I am not a failure.
I cannot function in this artificial society that exists in schools, and I learn much better by myself. Finishing school would be complete waste of my time, for a stupid piece of paper. During this day and age, it is extremely easy to attain knowledge for free without attending any institutions. Currently, I have several dozen textbooks on my kindle, and I am taking 3 classes at Coursera.
My parents are trying to compare me to all the stupid kids that usually drop out, and I cannot comprehend their close-mindedness and ignorance.
Because of their stupidity and effort to "help" me, I may even end up homeless by the end of this year.
The "stupid piece of paper" is used by employers as another way to confirm that a person has skills they need. It's about reducing risk. Some companies might not be willing to hire someone who doesn't a piece of a paper from a respectable university. And you might want to work for these companies. There are always exceptions, but you will have to be exceptional in their eyes.
I'm not saying you shouldn't drop out. I definitely have issues with the schools and understand that time can be wasted for some students. Have a plan for how you will achieve success and understand that all decisions have trade-offs: benefits and costs. And consider how your plan might fail and how you will handle it.
Until you _can_ comprehend them, you should not assume they are idiots.
This is spot-on. People take certain prejudices to their modelling high school dropouts. These are formed by the sheer repetition of observation. Dropping out is something Bad Students do. It's low status. Even an average student who drops out will have the story of their life coloured in terms of: 'he could have done _even_ better if he had stayed in school.'
So to get social approval for dropping out, you have to be exceptional. Such that their predictions of your future outside of mainstream education are so positive, that the 'low status drop out story' can't be made to stick to you. The balance of probabilities isn't enough to get social approval for your actions, the argument has to be overwhelming.
It's unfair, in a way, that there isn't a cultural idiom to support people who, for good reasons, don't want to learn through the high school track, but who aren't amazing individuals.
But in another sense, dropping out to learn faster is in itself to state that you are exceptional--that you have a iron-clad self-belief in your capacity for self-motivated learning. You shouldn't expect anyone to believe this about you; it's a trait that habitually we assign to people after they've been successful, not before. It's natural for people to model others as falling near the median, until they've demonstrated otherwise.
I''m less productive with fewer obligations. Most people are the same. You need to be _certain_ that you are naturally inclined towards setting useful goals and then following through. (I've wanted to write a novel for the past five years. All I have to show is a thin pile of abandoned drafts and margin-doodles.)
Soft skills matter. And removing one huge social component of your life without another to fill it has been, for me, a disaster. If you are 'neuro-typical', but still believe you will be more productive by removing 'wasted' social interaction from your life, you are wrong. If you are miserable, you can't sustain productivity. (And, not least, you might go crazy.) Even anti-social might sometimes be better than non-social.
This is HN, so I share a lot of beliefs about how lousy a state high school education can be. But culturally, we're not geared up as a society to support dropping out as a genuinely equal tract to education and employment. Be careful.
I am definitely picking the harder path, but I believe that in the end it is the right decision.
# of employers who asked why I didn't list any high school on my resume: 0. # of clients who asked where I went to school: 0. I may be exceptional now, but I wasn't always, and I still got good jobs.
I either put nothing about education at all on my resume, and explained that I left college because xyz, or jokingly put "The School of Hard Knocks" and that worked for me.
FWIW I have done everything from working for a local software dev co., to consulting for Pepsi, and I was employed as a consultant for Bear Stearns ("hired" by their staffing agency — it's a weird setup), with these (lack of) credentials. Never had a problem.
Priority one should be to be self-sufficient. It might be hard to get sufficient wages at that wage, and as a dropout, but this needs to happen.
If you end up in an unstructured environment, chances are you'll lose track of what you wanted to do. So - even if it's totally unrelated to what you want to do for the future - work like your life depends on it. It will give you a feeling of worth, and give you habits that will eventually make you the right man for the job that you want.
Learning is obviously not the point in any of this, so try to evaluate your situation without taking it into account. You're being asked to tolerate some awful people and jump through stupid hoops. Probably not for the last time.
I've been in this situation, whatever you choose will probably not matter as much as you think it will. This is much more dramatic and momentous to you now than it will be in ten years. You will get over your high school experience, whatever that is.
I've also, in an unrelated matter, been homeless. Try not to have to worry about where/when/how you're going to eat/sleep/bathe next. It's not the most fun or productive thing you could be doing. I do recommend being thankful that you live somewhere where this is remotely an option: being homeless in, e.g. Alaska would tend to be fatal. If you have any, go live with your relatives for a while. Just being in a different place can make a lot of difference.
The essential problem of your situation is that you're wanting to do something that statistically leads to worse outcomes, and with justifications that you can essentially only guess at. And it's not a terribly informed guess either; you're too young to have any kind of experience to bring to bear on this choice. Your parents aren't wrong, nor are they stupid.
They're also not right. You have as much information as anyone can about what you want to do, and what you're capable of doing. You'll probably fuck up a lot, and you'll probably recover from it. So relax. Try and have a sense of perspective about it all -- or a sense of humor. That will help with the fuckups, trust me.
Lastly, it's a terrible thing to try to raise a smart kid, I think I'd rather be in your shoes than your parents'. Go easy on them.
Anyway I wish you the best of luck in your self-learning. Here's hoping you'll be able to spend your time more productively than would have been possible otherwise!
Your parents just want what's best for you but because they probably haven't investigated it, they believe the hype and durm and strang about dropouts.
Since you're the one who wants to do something "weird," the burden of proof is on you. (That's the position to take whenever you want to persuade anybody of anything.)