Let's Abolish High School
youthrights.net
youthrights.net
I'm currently a teenager. This is mostly false.
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On a serious note, interesting idea. It won't happen, since the US education system (and the public sector in general) is not open to, well, any kind of change.
But as the founder of 9 startups, high school wasn't a huge help for me in any ways other than somewhere to socialize. However, this is the special case. High school works decently enough for the rest of the 95%.
Dropping out is not an option. You 100% will have a much harder time with acceptance with most colleges (and asian parents.)
Toward what end? Babysitting teenagers? Forcing people to memorize information that they forget a day after the final exam?
For example, I notice one thing with many of the people I talk to, to this regard: high school is where the transition from "YEAH MAN, I'm going to be a pro athlete when I grow up dude" to "I thought physiology was pretty cool in bio class, so I'm going to go and do premed."
But of course, this doesn't work for a lot of people. It doesn't work with me, because I've personally already have found my passion (and it has been for three years.) It also didn't work for Richard Branson.
Everyone complains about high school. And there's definitely a lot of rote memorization. But for some people, they might not gain this important "oh, this is actually pretty cool" moment.
There are many options that we could explore if our political system allowed it. The one that makes the most sense to me is to provide two paths for students: one which leads to a university and one which is vocational. The university path could begin at 16 with the curriculum that would typically be taught to a college freshman.
School needs to use a pre-test, post-test methodology. Pass the pre-test and you can skip a topic, fail the post-test and you have to study it longer.
So sure, content-wise it was useless, but now I see that I can pick up any project or subject learn it and apply it really quickly. But I am still not ok that they were not capable of providing valuable content and practical knowledge in class.
Neither in college nor in high school did I learn anything from class or teachers (except for a handful), my education was mostly Google, Wikipedia, and blogs, not textbooks or teachers. (I stopped buying books my last semesters in College after I realized I never opened them when I did)
That's a horrible argument that defines your disdain for learning.
I was a teenager -- I dropped out of school, moved out of my parents home, and took a full time technology job at 16, and began working my way up. This meant that by the time my peers graduated from college, I had 6 years of experience under my belt.
I wasn't special, I was simply motivated. If my home and school life had been satisfactory, I probably would have been content to sit out my future high school and college years with very little responsibility, and I imagine this is the situation that most teenagers find themselves in.
High school works decently enough for the rest of the 95%.
95% of teenagers don't accept real responsibility and behave like capable adults because there is no external motivation or encouragement to do so.
Is this beneficial to their well-being?
Dropping out is not an option. You 100% will have a much harder time with acceptance with most colleges (and asian parents.)
That depends on what you would like to do with your life. Returning to college later in life is surprisingly easy.
Teenager's have significantly different levels of cognitive ability compared to adults. There is a reason most people look back on their teenage years and say "why was I so stupid" and honestly it's because your brain was less developed on a biological level.
My circumstances were special, not me.
Teenager's have significantly different levels of cognitive ability compared to adults. There is a reason most people look back on their teenage years and say "why was I so stupid" and honestly it's because your brain was less developed on a biological level.
Cognitive differences do not preclude all responsibility. As it currently stands, most teenagers are provided with none at all, despite their historically demonstrated ability to shoulder considerably more than our institutions provide.
I was not special -- I did quite a few phenomenally stupid things as a teenager -- but I also learned how to be an adult sooner.
[Edit] One of the dangers of expressing this opinion is that it triggers cognitive dissonance amongst those who did follow the standard protocol.
So, allow me to reiterate -- given the proper circumstances, I believe all teenagers are well capable of accepting quite a bit more responsibility than they are currently allowed, but most never have the external encouragement or motivation to do so.
I started working at 17, mailroom boy at first, worked my way up to systems programmer then started my own business. By the time my friends graduated I had a nice little business going. But I doubt if that would have been possible in the period after I got started and before the whole www thing happened.
The barrier to entry was pretty high for a long time.
I attribute most of what happened to luck and the little bit that's left to plain old fashioned hard work. But then again, I like my work. That really helps.
As far as I can tell, that pattern holds for at least another decade.
Randomly sample a bunch of kids, hook them all up to monitoring devices, put them in different schools and societies that involve transitions into adulthood at different rates and onsets, set up a control group (Lord of the Flies setup), do the longitudinal study, and write it up. An associate professor and his 5 grad students would get a bunch of solid papers out of it. Theorists would have fun defining "optimality" in this context (to be fair, the philosophers have been gnawing at it for a while..)
This is unethical .. right? Then, you have to ask yourself: wouldn't it be more ethical to do the study, figure out how best to raise kids, and let all human young for posterity (or at least 'til the results are invalidated) benefit from the wisdom?
Hmm.. :)
In contrast, most capitalist democracies (all that I can think of anyway) are centered on individualism... the only ethically allowable sacrifice is the voluntary sacrifice... and children (anyone under 18) are not considered sentient enough to make decisions about their own lives and futures.
Consider spending less than you make (i.e. not going into massive credit card debt). I highly suspect most people can do this - they certainly did just fine up until the 1970s. But many people don't - at least, enough that the savings rate was negative until the current financial crisis.
I've heard a few people argue that this proves people are constitutionally incapable of managing money. I think this is bullshit. They're incapable of managing money because the environment and incentives around them provides them no reason to manage their money. If you stopped handing out credit like candy, you'd find that people could very easily manage their finances.
So it is with school. Just because 99.99999% of the population doesn't drop out and support themselves while building their career doesn't mean they can't. It just means they find it easier and more imaginable to stay in school.
Invalid assumption, since during my undergrad and graduate years I was exposed/worked on large systems (Vax), administered the math dept systems, tutored statistics/calculus, etc. If I add in the wonderful people I met, studied with or learned from during those college years (something that is hard to find in the common workplace btw), those years are far more valuable that 6 years in the workplace.
Experience isn't just putting down years at task X, it is what you gained and the effort you put forth.
A degree program provides the opportunity to learn, but no guarantee that you have. Real-world experience provides a measurable demonstration of your abilities. Both are valuable, but for different reasons.
Bad code comes from bad and/or inexperienced programmers, which in my experience seems to have very little correlation with level of education, and quite a bit more to do with a lack of "real-world experience".
A CS degree is not a free pass to a well paying and interesting job.
I enjoyed turning on, tuning in and dropping out, fwiw. It's not for everyone, but life experience has fine-tuned my BS filter, given me infallible icebreakers and generally purged that poisonous Life-As-A-Race mindset.
By my experience getting into university after doing the dot-com years and a few years of domesticated life, colleges only care about their straight-out-of-secondary rates (given, I went to a state school, not an Ivy League, but I feel that the end effect would be similar.) Asian/1st generation immigrant parents, on the other hand, are a terrible burden to bear!
I would encourage the younger HN demographic to manage their expectations. Spending 3 decades in school doesn't give you a whole lot of common ground with a VC panel, other people in your chosen field or (really) anyone outside of a similarly-academic background. While that may be who you're working with or hiring, 8/10 times that's not who you're ultimately selling to. Freight-train academia can, however, set up a crushingly intense fear of failure that can break a young hacker's willpower in half.
Short story: never be afraid to walk away from a raw deal, especially if there's an implication that it's "mandatory." Life doesn't have to be a Dostoyevsky novel.
Care to share? I've never had much luck on developing those ...
I think you need to actually experience a story to use it as an icebreaker. Nobody likes a liar.
And yes, the stories are often more fun in the telling than in the living.
Fewer than 70% of US high school students graduate with their class. Few districts do better than 80%. About 3% or so homeschool, so that leaves you with about 67% who graduate in the system.
The 2005 data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress shows that 34% of 12th graders rated "proficient" reading abilities.
Not exactly a glowing success.
There are good options if you're looking for alternatives. I know a bit about the situation in Seattle because I opted out of high school there. The school district there has a "school" set up where home schoolers can register, do some non-home friendly classes (science & theater mostly IIRC), and benefit from government education funding. Many cities have programs that let high schoolers get credit for taking college classes and some universities are set up to do early admission (I did the UW program). Before all that I did an apprenticeship at a small electronics company (age 13). Pretty much you need to do the legwork though, you may find that the school district isn't interested in helping students leave the system (taking their funding with them).
Funny. If you listen to the political-sphere, the argument is that high school sucks for most people, but works brilliantly for the well-off.
But if you actually ask the well-off and the people at the top of the class, they almost unanimously decry it as an awful waste of time.
High school does not really work for anyone. The vast majority of people end up learning their trade on the job. Why delay that process 4 (or 8) years?
Come to think of it, If you were to ask me what I want to do now (I'm 19, a junior in college), I'd probably give you the exact same answer. Even though one of my majors has nothing to do with computers at all (other one does), nor did my internship this summer.
I'm three years out of college. Most of my friends had no idea what they wanted to do in graduation. They picked a job, didn't like it, and now are switching. Except now the biological clocks are ticking, and it's becoming more important to pick the right path, because there is a major costs in switching careers.
If people started working at 14, or even 18, people would have a lot more time to discover the career they loved, before they had to assume the burden of earning enough to support a family.
I would say that school does help. It exposes people to different ideas and topics (Wait, I can get paid to do something with math besides run a business? You mean I can spend my entire life researching something?).
Personally, my opinion is that its absolutely great to know a lot about your specific field that you (want to) work in. But I would never want to limit myself to only knowing about one particular topic of knowledge.
//edit (to reply to this bit): If people started working at 14, or even 18, people would have a lot more time to discover the career they loved, before they had to assume the burden of earning enough to support a family
There's a lot of careers that require years of training to go through before you can begin working. Lawyers, Doctors, etc. We on HN might like to think that anyone can pick up a profession and just hack away and be able to make a living at it on whim. But it doesn't work like that. Its not as simple as deciding "I don't like being a lawyer, but I think I'd like being a farmer. I'm going to buy some land, plant seeds and call it a day".
I'm currently frustrated by high school. I've known I wanted to do "computers," like you, since middle school. High school hasn't changed that. Maybe some people aren't exposed to enough options in middle school. So why don't we fix middle school instead of sticking adolescents in 4 more years of useless education? Assuming a high schooler can take 8, and assuming only two will be in his or her subject of interest, fully 75% of the student's time is wasted learning facts and skills that are unimportant. Even accounting for an additional class in a subject of moderate interest that may be useful later in life, that leaves 5/8 periods wasted. Assuming an additional 2 classes (I'm feeling generous) are useful for the skills they provide, such as communication and... (You pick. I can't even think of another useful skill that a high school class might teach.), that leaves 3/8ths of a student's time wasted.
Consider a business where 37.5% of _every_ employee's paid hours was spent playing video games. (For all the good the other 3 classes do our student, I don't think that's an unfair comparison. Except the games would be more fun.) How do you think that company would fare? That's shockingly wasteful under any other circumstances. Why do we expect it of our schools?
Because, as an 8th grader, I wanted "computers". Now, I although I still want "computers", I don't know if I want to focus on web/scripting languages, on embedded systems (or something in between), on computer graphics or on UI/UX, etc. Now, I know what fields I have available to pick from, and have (some) experience in most of them. I can make more of an informed choice now then I could have a decade ago. I can tell you that as an 8th grader, I wouldn't have been able to understand most of the things that I do today.
Maybe some people aren't exposed to enough options in middle school. I think its because when you're 9-13 years old, theres limits to what you're capable of doing and what you know. Its completely and utterly impractical to even pretend that it is possible to expose someone to every field and topic by the time they're 13.
..fully 75% of the student's time is wasted learning facts and skills that are unimportant. See, I don't (and didn't) think think that any of my classes were unimportant or useless. I might not have cared about them. But I could see the value in the fact that the knowledge is there and in knowing the basics of the topic.
I might not be an English major, but I can read a book and then be able to understand it and write about it in a coherent manner. The ability to write (and therefore express yourself) is very important to have. I might not do anything with Chemistry or Biology, but at least now I can look at a food label, read the list of ingredients and (somewhat) break down whats in the food, to figure out how unhealthy it is for me. I might never need to know about the causes of the Industrial Revolution or what the big deal about the Enlightenment was, but, in its own way, thats exploring human thoughts and behaviors - that still influence the world today.
I had to fill a "Modern History" requirement here at college. I took International Relations. I found it interesting enough so that I took on a second major to study it some more.
The knowledge might not be directly useful to you. But its knowledge. And you can take it, and with some thought, apply to the rest of your life. The concept of learning the basics about a number of fields wasn't randomly chosen by people hundreds of years ago for no reason. They were onto something. That something might not work well for everyone. I'm not going to pretend it does. But, a majority of the time, it does work.
Schooling and learning — all of it - is what you make of it. At the end of the day, if you choose to make nothing of it, thats your choice. If you think that you can learn more on your own, then I hope that you're right. Because learning is something good, you should enjoy it, not hope to get out of the way so you can make money.
Oh, just for laughs, I went back to my elementary (primary) school yearbook. In the "When I grow up, I want to be.." field, I had down: "Baseball Player, Stock Broker, Lawyer, Scientist". This completely changed after Middle School. If that yearbook asked a similar question, the answer would read "Computers, Musician, Author, Politician". By the time I graduated High School, it would have read "Computers, Journalist, Graphic Artist". In college, if I had to fill out that field, it would likely read "Computers, Something to do with international politics, Author"
(On a less cynical day, I'd say that eventually taking all these "useless" classes in HS might come in handy some day, you never know. I realized what I had gotten out of it the moment I left. I had an art history and ceramics class that's prompted me to look for a pottery studio near my home to continue on because I love making cups. The scant amount of chemistry I've learned bored me in HS (and I thought it was useless...) but it gave me a foundation in college to take so many chem classes I'm considering a double major in chem and CS. My last HS phys ed teacher over the course of a year never let me give up no matter how badly I was doing - something I've never had happen at the gyms I've been to with all the trainers I've seen. His voice is the voice I hear internally encouraging me to keep on running/swimming/working out or to even get my ass out of my chair after sitting in it all day. All these little things I thought were stupid ended up making a fairly large impact on my life. I wonder if I'm the exception to the rule.
I might also note I actually ended up dropping out of HS after my sophomore year because I thought going to college early would help me more with my interest in "computers" since I still had to take some number of "irrelevant" classes but I could focus more on my interests. I don't regret that, and occasionally I wish I had left earlier on, but I can't deny that what little I did do in HS has impacted me.)
Nor would getting a job at 14 preclude a career in physics.
Most people who discover an interest do so in their own free time. I know very few creative works (programmers, architects, scientists) who picked up their careers because of a high school class. Do you?
Perhaps a kid might work at carpentry from 14 to 16. Then get interested in physics books he read in the library, and apply for university. Who knows. The real harm is that society has cut off a productive path (work) and forced students into a path that is neither productive nor enjoyable for 99% of the kids (school).
There must be ways around the PhD, but I bet they are a lot harder.
Whereas I do consider http://ramamia.com a startup, and http://tickrtalk.com a startup (funded and in dev), and http://classleaf.com a startup.
I can change that to 8 if Avecora (which did previous web stuff, but now is developing a mobile dev) doesn't count as one, since it's in development. In fact. I'll list them and try to qualify them, chronologically sorted.
DebateWare - sold enterprise event mgmt software. sponsoring debate event in bos in oct
Avecora - doing a mobile device in dev
Avecora OnDemand - CRM/Project Management app. only connected to Avecora by name. market sucked.
Cadmium - social advertising network. used facebook data to target ads. decent revenue, closed down later b/c market was :/.
Student Concourse - was at WebInno 22. Lots of users but bad retention rate. Closed down.
FB Idol: >15,000 Facebook users and very active. monetized via ads, with good money. said screw it and sold it.
Ramamia: with hnuser:jasonlbaptiste. few thousand users, in public beta. tons of gigs of photos. launching next month.
TickrTalk: in dev. funded by UPenn Weiss Tech Fund.
Classleaf: sales force started making calls last week. software. it's selling.
Adaptance: in dev: advanced ad network built on a complex algorithm combining behavioral + contextual + 3 other targeting metrics.
I don't really know what the definition of a startup is, but I know it's certainly different than a website. HN in general tends to have a very liberal definition of the word. Side projects that never made a dime or had more than a few hundreds visitors are rightly or wrongly considered startups rather frequently. The word "startup" is so overused that like the terms "breaking news" and "celebrity" it doesn't really mean much anymore.
Website -> Startup
News -> Breaking News
Reality TV Appearance -> Celebrity
That children and teens have an immature brain is supported by biological research:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1899715
http://harvardmagazine.com/2008/09/the-teen-brain.html
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2008/09/15/health/2008091...
I was not happy in high school (only ten years ago), so I think efforts to improve that period of people's lives are well spent. But I can't support something that starts from what I consider a faulty premise, which is the assumption that children and teens are miniature adults.
My point is that teenagers are mentally not adults, and as such, they should not be in the same place as society as adults. I'm not saying they should be completely divorced from it, but I worry when people claim that the concept of a "teenager" is completely a cultural construction. Neurological research indicates it is not.
What would I make different? Not that it's practical (or even non-nebulous), but I would restore the "child-adult continuum" that the article mentions, because I agree with the author when he says the age-based restrictions tend to delay the onset of real, actual, adulthood. Which is bad.
The reason that no one cares too much about an age line like this is that it hits everyone equally and eventually you will age past it. During the years immediately following this event you will see it as as unjust but you demographic insignificance will prevent any real change. Only when you can look back with the benefit of a decade or more of life-experience and hard-won wisdom will you be able to really make an objective judgement; restrictions that were unjust or ill advised from this perspective might change, but I would not expect much to appear unwise...
Logistically speaking, an arbitrary age limit is the best option for the way western urban society is set up (it actually self-reinforces the whole thing). The fact is that society does segregate young from old, and it does delay adulthood for a great number of teens.
But I'm young and inexperienced, and in due time I will see that the way our society is set up is the only way, right?
Yeah, I know it sounds lame, but as a matter of fact you _will_ have a better perspective upon the folly of your youth once you are well past it.
Accumulated experience generally correlates with more appropriate responses, granted. But inappropriate experiences lead to inappropriate responses. How do you verify that your experiences have led to correct conclusions? They are influenced by the society in which you live. And society (the entity itself, not the collection of people involved) generally prefers the status quo, because of natural selection.
Of course there must be a line. There is a minimum level of development necessary for reasonable integration into a society with a specific set of values and expectations. But humans mature at different rates. Age is not the appropriate unit to be using, here. We need a measurement of an individual's ability to _grow_ from immersion in the adult world. Instead of the SATs, we need CATs... Coping Aptitude Tests. It's not such a big leap for the College Board, either. (Now all that's left is to figure out how to measure maturity. Sweet deal.)
Simple, I have experienced life from both perspectives while you have not. You have no basis for evaluating the folly of my adulthood because you have never experienced your own adulthood, while all of us who have made it this far fondly remember the joys and certainties of our youth. I do so miss that period of youthful rebellion, when we managed to figure out a couple of things about life and felt we were ready to pass judgement on everything around us; this conversation is already maxing out my deja vu quota for the week. Enjoy your youth and keep true to what you believe, it is the only way you will ever effect any change in the world, even though the particular cause that started this thread is a fools errand.
One of the reasons teenagers act so irresponsibly is because they've grown up with the idea that teenagers are inherently irresponsible and therefore aren't completely accountable for their actions. It becomes self-fulfilling.
Personally, I don't feel like I was a mature adult until about 22, and I was never considered an especially immature teen or young adult. I'm 28 now.
Was that about the time you left college? I think a lot of feeling "mature" is actually having responsibility for yourself. If teenagers had responsibility for themselves, and didn't have the artificial environment of high school to pressure them in the wrong direction, I believe nearly all of them could be fully functioning adults.
I don't think mature brain connections correlates with mature decision making. People become adults when they're finally faced with adult decisions and have to deal with the consequences.
All one needs to make mature decisions is a sense of the consequences of actions and an ability to delay gratification to reach later goals. Both of which is fully within the grasp of teenagers, if they're taught properly growing up.
I'm not in any way saying it would, but it would be hard to prove otherwise.
I think what the author is trying to say in his article is that teens are capable of much more than they are allowed to do. And that very fact may be what causes the results in the research you linked above.
I think it's ridiculous that it is now normal (or actually preferable) now to be in school until you are done with 1/4 to 1/3 of your life without seeing what "the real world" was like. This means the average person won't be able to do anything significant until they have already wasted their best years in school and low level positions.
I can get decent grades pretty easily (much like many people here) and so slacking off and procrastination was just a smart way of using my time. Now that I think I'm of the age where I can make something of myself, I need to unlearn a lot of the bad habits learned in school in order to get things done. Many smart, ambitious people I know do not try to start independant projects because they are still "just students," but then go on to do amazing things after graduating and finding their purpose in life. Much of this can be prevented with an early firsthand exposure to a life outside of the artificial punishment and reward system of school.
Chances are, even after reform people will probably still go on the same path -- highschool, college, graduate school, but they will have a much better reason to do well, since it will be what they chose to do.
It's just that they either don't have the chance or given the option, prefer to cruse through and muck around for as long as possible before being force to get serious.
I did learn how to be more self-actualized, etc. since then, since a good portion of even the best K-6 education constitutes obedience training... which I had to unlearn.
I’m a father of four children, and about 10 years ago I noticed—I couldn’t help but notice—that my 15-year-old son was remarkably mature. He balanced work and play far better than I did, and he seemed quite ready to live on his own.
For parents that help educate their children, stimulate their interest and set an example this might be so, but for others, school might be a better alternative.
My impression is that kids that are that mature at 15 find non-school ways to improve their lives/skills/education. The rest need the extra time (and of course for some, no amount of time is enough).
A lot of people in this discussion are trying to use the product of the putatively broken system (themselves or others they know) to prove that the putatively broken system must be left in place. This is simply begging the question (in the original sense), not an argument.
Edit: Fine, I'll spell it out. You can't counter an argument that says we have a system that is generating excessively dysfunctional 15-year-olds by pointing out that the 15-year olds generated by the system are excessively dysfunctional, and then follow it up with the conclusion that therefore we need the current system. That doesn't disprove the point, because the point in the first place is that the system is broken. You can cite millions of examples of actions taken by publicly-schooled 15-year-olds that were stupid, but none of them actually provide any useful information about the argument.
My post here isn't an argument either way about the issue; it's just simple logic. Arguing that of course 15-year olds are stupid and need to be in school is begging the question, or circular logic, and an invalid argument. It doesn't prove anything either way, it's not even evidence either way. Modding it down doesn't change that.
This isn't all spelled out in the exact post I'm replying to, but this bad logic is shot through this entire comment thread.
Where did I argue that! Your putting words in my mouth. All I am saying is that, speaking from where I am now, at 15 I wasnt equipped to face the world. School was a good place for me.
This stuff has sod all to do with the schools; it's simple logic about maturity. Have you bothered to read the studies posted elsewhere about brain development??
The education system is broken: but that doesnt means it's a bad idea. If we dont impart our knowledge then you end up with a problem. It could, ofc, be taught better than it is now.
You don't "say" it. The idea that school is the only way a childhood can be is so deeply ingrained in your argument you can't even perceive it. It's such a given that you consider it a logical axiom, and you end up arguing circularly without even realizing it, you and about half the other posters in this discussion.
Your last sentence would seem to me to reinforce the point. Maybe school can be "improved", but the idea that it is potentially fundamentally flawed doesn't seem to be thinkable. Mind you, I'm not saying that you (and others) think the idea, then reject it (which if done properly would be perfectly valid); people don't seem to be even capable of thinking the idea.
Your picture of maturity is shaped by the system under question.
Again, I'm not actually attacking or defending the schools here. It's the logic I'm talking about. You can't justify the current system by using the current system; it's circular.
If you look at the last 60-70 years, you see that kids become adults later and later. My grandparents were married and on their own in their late teens (15-17 years old). My parents were in their early 20s. My generation seems to average around the end of college. The current generation (my sisters) are approaching 25 and still not making the transition.
This is worrisome for me, since I've got my own kids coming through that process. I know my 15 year old could succeed, but there is no way the societal infrastructure would let him. I worry more about my other kids who aren't as self-aware as he his.
I can say that I totally agree that a huge part of the problem is that kids are kept in the kid group until, one day, they are just expected to flip the switch and be adults. They aren't learning how to be adults in school, that's for sure.
After I turned 16 I enrolled in a community college, fully paid by high school, using a local dual enrollment program. When I was 15 I started working as a C++ developer, which was quite fun.
Yes, I was a freak and still am a completely asocial misanthrope. But no one is limited -- it is solely by choice (and probably fear of the unknown) that children stay in high school.
Signing contracts, however, isn't hard and so I worked as an independent contractor (1099) :)
Or because of the social benefits. You state that you consider your former self a freak, and consider your current self a completely asocial misanthrope. I was following a very similar path to you, but realized that I was on my way to being a social outcast. To me, being a C++ programmer was not my purpose in life (although it was a very interesting field I ended up making my career). A great deal of what I see as the "purpose of life" consists of those social relationships. If I didn't have those, C++ wouldn't make me happy, so what would be the point of it all?
I don't mean to sound argumentative - I'm just pointing out that although I was capable of doing more, I chose to stay close to my own age group because of a legitimate quality-of-life benefit. You did state that it's by choice, but I think that's an aspect a lot of people don't consider, especially the author in question.
I believe the majority of teenagers will rise to the responsibility given to them, if it is genuine. You can't expect them to act responsibly on one hand but then subtly treat them as nothing more than overgrown children.
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/08_45/b41070852...
That is one of the reasons we like to hire 17 year olds in Zoho and combine education with work. Labor laws won't let us hire any sooner, but if it were my own family members, I would hire them sooner.
Good on ya.
as a framework for practicing computer programming related to pure mathematics, and runs his own literary discussion website both to learn about online community administration (including coding site features) and about creative writing. The most annoying aspects of his teen years, for him and for me, have been his closest approaches to "high school" experiences. Senior year of high school for him should be mostly dual enrollment at our friendly state university and a distance learning course in advanced microeconomics.
(They were, in fact, brother and sister and had spent six years in Denmark as the children of foreign service officers. They did not take well to American high school.)
The dual enrollment is allowed here (one must apply to the college that offers the dual enrollment classes). This choice is not used by as many students as could benefit from it. Many seek the "socialization" of high school. Yeesh.
I left home at 16, and eventually wound up graduating high school by going into an adult learning center at age 17 or so. I said, "I am fully emancipated, and living as an adult. I would like to complete the adult program." After some talking with a very nice fellow and being politely evasive, he agreed. I took a series of competency exams, completed the silliest multiple choice packet of American history I've ever seen, and I was awarded a diploma. I went and took the standardized tests and got into university. They were kind enough to loan or grant me almost my full tuition, though I dropped out of university once as well. Same reasons.
Anywho, with a quick perusal of history, it's pretty obvious that maturity does not come from age, it comes from having unique experiences and learning from them. If you see someone who is forced to become "head of household" at a young age due to parents illness and cares for his/her siblings, they are very mature and adultlike even in their mid-teens. Likewise, people dragged into a war move differently, with less naivete - characteristics you'd usually see in someone in their 40's. There's kids in their mid-20's with that look.
At least, that's the hypothesis I made: Unique experiences and learning from them = maturity. So I set out to have a lot of unique experiences, and I think I did rather a good job. I've had an interesting, enjoyable life. The only part I regret is wasting my age 13/14/15/16 years in middle school and high school. I had some fun with extracurricular activities and friends, but I could have done something so much more interesting during the actual classtime. Yuck.
One in particular that made me wake up when I read it was Tokugawa Ieyasu. He was third of Japan's great unifiers. In the 1600's, he founded the Tokugawa Shogunate - his family ruined in almost complete peace for 250 years after one of the most lawless and brutal times in Japanese history. Ieyasu married for the first time at age 13 or 14, and was Captain of a small division of troops around the 14/15 years. He did a pretty admirable job of it, grew up fast, and the rest is history.
But I think the flipside is true, too - if you don't let someone have responsibility, if you treat them like a child, they'll stay childlike and immature. Being an American who has traveled, I see people who are age 26-28 who are barely capable of functioning in the world, and I sometimes see people age 14-18 doing amazing things. This could be the norm, if we wanted it to.
I had a 17 year old fellow apply to work for me - he was half-generation American, if I've got the terminology right - he immigrated here with his parents around age 10 or so. I didn't wind up hiring him, but I became a mentor to him. We'd go get tea or coffee every couple weeks and I'd give him some generally no-BS advise. A very good guy, he's done some really impressive things in a short period of time - all he had to do was shake off the reigns and shackles, but that is harder than it sounds to do. At least in the average American school, they punish you swiftly, thoroughly, and publicly if you try to abstain or dare to question them. There's the occasional good teacher - I had maybe a dozen excellent professional teachers in my life, which I count myself quite lucky to have had. But the rest? Well, I guess we shouldn't be too hard on them. They're just doing what they were taught, too.
That's not so true today as it once was for kids who have access to the internet. If you've got a hunger to learn, there's plenty of fodder. My life would have been quite different if I'd had the net to learn from.
As to whether it's necessary depends on what you feel life is all about, and/or what real talents (not addressed by mainstream ed) you have. Highly self-motivated people (or who fortune smiles on) can usualy live without HS. Most of the rest of us need it to cope in an ever-more-complex world.
People are good at being smug, and thinking they know everything. The best way to realize that there's actually some depth to a topic is to study it a bit. Since (from reading other comments here) none of us would have wanted to learn some of these topics, maybe we'd all still think that those other topics are all a stupid waste of time, and people who do them are also useless.
This is a very common misconception. It's quite possible and legal in many (most?) US states to remove a child from school and keep them home to let them learn at their own pace.
The fact that kids didn't have to go to school back then is not at all an argument in support of them not doing so now and should be left out of a serious essay in favor of that position.
Take a look at this article of mine for instance http://cnxs.com.br/posts/an-emergent-participatory-design-fr... .
After the age of 16, make school non-compulsory. At the end of the 10th grade year, have everyone take the GED/ACT/SAT and if they get a threshold level, congrats, you can now move on.
So when kids start misbehaving, you don't have to keep them there.
"Finally, a wealth of data shows that when young people are given meaningful responsibility and meaningful contact with adults, they quickly rise to the challenge, and their inner adult emerges."
http://www.amazon.com/Teenage-Liberation-Handbook-School-Edu...
Seems to work quite well.