Why I pulled my daughter out of high school to teach her to code

Or to put it another way, she tried web-design and liked it, she could have tried a dozen or more other things in high school (social or classes), but now instead you're dropping all of those opportunities, and putting her on this one unified path at the ripe old age of 16.

Online high school might get her a certificate she'll need for college (and certainly if she applies to a CS program all of this will be a benefit) but she is still missing opportunities to discover who she is and what she loves. Plus making friends...

Because, you know, fuck History. What use is that?

> I felt like public high school just wasn’t serving her best interests anymore, and it was time to do something radical on her behalf, and at 16, she just didn’t belong there anymore.

I can't decide whether it's just the way you wrote it, or whether you're genuinely making these decisions on behalf of your daughter.

Did your daughter feel like high school wasn't serving her best interests? I don't know, because you don't say in the post. It's all about you, and your actions. I would hope a sixteen year old would be at a point where he or she would have a degree of independence. I will be honest with you: if my parents had done this to my, my life would have been considerably worse. I code for a living, but I didn't learn any of those skills in High School, or college. I was a studio art major in college, and English Lit / Music in High School.

There is not necessarily anything wrong with a purely vocational education, although personally I think the humanities are vital. However, there is to me something wrong with unilaterally pulling your daughter out of high school because of the hopes and dreams you have for her.

I hope that really the problem is one of phrasing. The post would come out in a much better light if rather than portraying yourself as the decision maker it turned out actually, your daughter was the instigator. If that's the case, I apologize. But if it's not...well, that makes me uncomfortable. It seems like others here feel the same.

And the judgements against her parents are unfortunate. This is one family doing something different. We need more people willing to do interesting things with their educational choices, not less. This is not something a parent would do lightly, without taking great care to discuss with her what she wants. Her parents probably know her far better, and care far more for her well being then anyone here does!

As far as missing out on liberal arts/other subjects... 1) she is still going to take high school online, and 2) it's not like high school education is all that great. A person could do better off teaching themselves at khan academy, and listening to history podcasts, and reading books that interest them.

I'm amazed how critical people are being, who know nothing about the person or situation.

Albeit if he intends to not teach his daughter any history then he is doing her a great disservice. Let's give him the benefit of the doubt. I think the sentiment he was expressing was similar to the one I expressed when I dropped out of high school at 16. I loved to learn, I loved to read (especially about history), I read my text books cover to cover, but I was bored and trapped inside a system that absolutely wasted my time (from my 16 y/o perspective). I loved to program and I was getting paid for it. Why sit in a school 8 hours a day, shuffling from room to room, dodging bullies, waiting on teachers to deal with disruptions, dealing with teachers who were incompetent or didn't care (never mind the few great ones). I did a spreadsheet with my own sort of ROI calc. School lost, and the rest is history.

I applaud him for doing this. She can still get into a great CS program at a great school. She'll certainly have more free time to prep for her entrance exams.

Also, regarding "teaching" things in homeschooling. Once a kid reaches a certain age there's not much you (or a public school teacher) can teach them better than Khan Academy, a great book, or a life experience.

What keeps me grounded and open minded to the approach is that my wife knew what she wanted to do from 6th grade on and while she grows and changes in that career, she is where she wanted to be.

Maybe people know what they want at 16, but I think the purpose of taking just another history class and opening themselves up to many things they didn't know about is important and keeps your skills versitile rather than atrophying all but one muscle.

There's a certain ego endemic to our field, stoked by politicians who worship the "STEM fields", that other fields are "less important" or "less useful". Maybe my view is skewed because, both in high school and college, I was blessed with stellar history teachers. Understanding how the world works - what makes people, people, the situations that have led people to where they are today - learning what we can repeat and what we can avoid repeating? There's a whole lot of value in that, and this attitude contributes heavily to the lack of human decency in our field.

Even from a purely "practical" perspective, the gap between being good at "coding" and being good at "writing software" is the "writing". Probably the most prolific engineer I know from my alma mater was an history and philosophy major, and I honestly believe a great writer is closer to being a great software engineer than a great algorithmist.

And yet my alma mater creates and harbors a culture where CS majors above history majors in the academic hierarchy.

Isn't it at least a bit more important whether she was frustrated? Did she want to be "pulled out"? Or did she leave?

I say this as someone who switched schools a few times, both of which was due to having a terrible time and my parents offering.

But I had a normal highschool experience, learned a lot about civics and a bit about history and literature. I mucked about with computers in my spare time, did a math undergrad, work in software dev now. I had a lot of support from my family, but they never made my decisions for me.

Ed: And I'm literally one of those devs who was given a book on programming at age 10 and never looked back. But at no point was highschool a waste of time. (Middle school, on the other hand...)

It may not be the right trend to set for everyone but I think it's just as naïve to think that traditional public / private highschool or homeschool / online school is the right path for everyone. It's a case by case basis, Our school system as we know it hasn't been around for very long and as a matter of a fact is criticized pretty heavy for being inefficient. I wasn't around in the Greek / Roman days but I'm sure they did things pretty different and they probably had inefficiencies and benefits to what they did.

Lastly I feel a lot of the criticism comes from FUD. Finding something you love to do is not as common as you might think and is a huge factor in success. I took an unconventional education myself and found the most important aspect of all my of learning was that I did something I loved and I tackled it hard which lit my desires for all kinds of other knowledge.

My high school didn't have a computer science program at all (late 90's), but I grew up during the dot-com boom in silicon valley. My friends were getting internships at web and networking companies over summer earning an unhealthy amount of money for a teenager. I tried my hand at writing some computer games, and found I liked making games even more than playing them. So I thought: screw high school and all these classes which have fuck all to do with what I'm interested in.

What actually happened is that within a year I found out that like any teenager I had no clue what really interested me, except that it was easy to find stuff which interested me more than being a code monkey. Yet I was getting more and more locked into that as a career path.

Also, my social circle went to hell. I was neither with a cohort of friends my age I could relate to and could relate to me, nor did I get to share in the typical senior year of high school, and freshman year of college rites of passage. I did not really know what I was missing until later.

I jumped around a lot trying to undo mistakes and find something I really liked, which ended up costing me a small fortune in debt via 8 years of college.

In the end I still write code instead of doing something more intellectually and emotionally satisfying to me like archaeology or art conservation. Why? Because some mistakes can't be so easily undone. I enjoy what I do, and am paid well enough to support my family. But sometimes I wonder what could have been, and why in the world my parents let me do this...

I dropped out and only regret it ~every other Thursday, and then only because I think I would have enjoyed college, if I had picked the right one. And then only because I would have possibly enjoyed the friends and networking benefits.

I strongly feel, based on observation and anecdotal evidence, that traditional school encourages people to need guidance their whole lives. If the social and networking benefit can be replaced, anyone who can self-direct learning is better off without the classroom structure. That goes double for people of above average intelligence, and should be logarithmically more true in this day of infinite internet information. Obviously this doesn't apply to accredited professions.

This doesn't mean being self-taught is so great either. Mentors are everything. But High School isn't typically a bastion of real, useful, mentorship.

I find the parent's motives noble, but he clearly had to work hard to get her to go to this class, which I don't think is a good idea for kids. At the very least they may feel like they have no choice (because they live under your roof), or they might develop an unhealthy dependency ('dad will love me if I do this class, right?'). Obviously parents should try to expose their kids to different things, but I wish they'd stop short of 'pushing'.

Traditional high school is absolutely not a place where you go to "learn how to socialize" or you get to learn all about "history" and being a "well rounded person. It's a place where, for the most part, you go to get babysat so your parents can go to work and not have to worry about you.

Very surprised at the reaction here, where in a different context I'd imagine the same people would be talking about the failures of public education instead of how much a sixteen year old is supposedly missing out on by dropping out.

However, while reading the post, I felt annoyed with the author's attitude toward public education and especially the spiteful comment about history. Partially perhaps because I liked history lessons at school and still do like the subject and partially because I think that a person must have a well-rounded education.

Also, I believe that that it doesn't make such a huge difference when one starts programming and maybe pushing the child towards it too early might do more harm than good. I have discovered programming completely by myself in the last school year when I was 17 or 18. Many guys who studied together at university had started programming several years earlier and they definitely knew more at the time, however the differences mostly disappeared in a couple years. And those who still were better, they either were much smarter or worked harder and the coding experience or lack thereof that everybody brought from teenage years didn't really matter that much.

Wasting her time taking a history class? Oh, I don't know, maybe something about being a well-rounded citizen who understands how society works from a non-programming stand-point. Also, learning is so much more than just the facts and what's going to land you a job. And formal education, more than anything, is about the informal education you get while not in the classroom -- like learning to interact with others, learning other perspectives, meeting and getting along with people who are different than you, and the list goes on, and on, and on.

That said, I will say that I enjoyed finished high school. Having that piece of my teenage experience was nice and I was able to judge my other passions with studies fairly easily. It was nice to meet other kids, make friends, go to prom, have that experience growing up.

It's great that this girl is passionate about something but committing to a career path so early in life makes me a little hesitant.

Also, I'm glad I "wasted" my time with the liberal arts. I probably won't use the literature or the history I learned from school in my career but I think it was a good experience.

Just because this young woman is currently learning to code and is going through a good old-fashioned apprenticeship with her dad doesn't mean that she'll necessarily become a professional programmer, any more than my profession at 16 led me to be a grocer or retailer. But what I learned about retail and mail-order sales at the game store really helped me when I went on to build one of the first ecommerce engines in the 90s. What I learned about HTML and design doing websites about ecology in college was essential to my entrepreneurship later on.

So the negative comments about this father pressuring his daughter or all the fabulous high school opportunities she'll miss out on are really rubbing me the wrong way. High school kids need guidance, and there's no harm whatsoever in encouraging them to focus their energies in one particular area, even if that means shutting out other opportunities. She's a young person, and she'll have plenty of time to consider other things, especially if she ends up going to college in a couple of years. Even if she doesn't end up being a software developer for her permanent career, this youthful experience will form a firm foundation, even if she ends up in finance, or business, or medicine. Couldn't all of those fields use a few more people who know (or once knew) how to code?

My coding skills are now woefully out of date. But I understand enough about how to make software that when I'm working with an engineering team, I have realistic notions about what can and can't be done, and roughly how hard it will be. But because my dad wasn't as engaged as this guy, I also have some ace grocery bagging skills are are really just wasting space in my brain.

You don't go to school purely for knowledge. We are social creatures and should be learning how to interact socially as much as we should be learning about calculus.

College is the same way, whether it's undergraduate or postgraduate. By taking his daughter out of school he is implicitly making the tradeoff that coding is more important than any social interaction with her peers. That seems dangerous.

Or compulsory education just till 16 and then everyone is on their own?

I think it's dangerous... learned a bunch of interesting stuff after I was 16 in school.

In 1999, this 20 year old kid (only took two years to get every cert) was making $300K/year.

I assume that got cut a lot in 2000, but at least for a while it seemed to be a pretty good strategy.

Good for her, for sure, and well done. Still seems a bit fishy though.

"He thinks it's great, like getting to climb a climbing frame all the time; that's all he liked doing in school anyway."

First off, I applaud her for doing what she's done so far. I think many people here forget the confidence that takes at 16, and especially with the pressures of public high schools for everyone to conform into the perfect image of a "teenager", it's great that she's found her passion and is pursuing it. Keep it up.

Now, about pulling her out of high school. I think it's really something on a case-by-case basis, and not something that should just be judged here by people without all of the facts. I think the biggest takeaway is that if she's happy with this path, then she should do it. Simple as that.

Personally, though, I wouldn't choose to do that. I've had the opportunity to do so, and I did consider it for a while. In the end though, I've decided to finish high school at a public school. I have a few reasons behind this:

1. My friend group. While I don't know what her social situation was like, for me, my friends have been very important to my success. As a group, we're diverse in our interests. We all have different ideas for what we want to do next, and how we're going to get there. This is what makes it awesome. The tech industry is, largely, a monoculture. So, I think it's very important to have people around you who are diverse, so you can grow as a person by knowing someone else's ways, views and ideas. This is important in high school especially, since it's the time when you're finding out who you really are.

2. Class selection. Building on the last reason's spiel on diversity, I definitely think having a diverse class selection is great. When I started high school, I already enjoyed programming, and was considering it as a career. So, my class choices were chosen to be everything I needed to move onto a good post-secondary program. However, the next year, I needed an extra class to fill out my timetable, and on a whim decided to take a film class. This turned out to be one of the greatest decisions I'd made. I got to meet some really great people (that are some of my close friends now!), the class itself was extremely enjoyable, and it really opened my eyes that not everything has to be focused on one goal. If anything, taking this course that wouldn't be for post-secondary has helped my career, since I have an additional outlet to be creative in, plus another potential career path that I'd enjoy for later.

3. Social situations. Again on diversity (I think this is becoming a theme here... ;-)), public school gives you the, uh, "opportunity" to deal with many... interesting people. In other words, you have to deal with people that aren't like you. While it's not always easy, I think it's one of the biggest things that public schooling can teach you. In life, not everyone is like you, and if you're immersing yourself in a monoculture early, you miss out on being able to deal with these people. It's a life skill, and for anyone wanting to move up into any sort of management, it's something that I think is necessary.

Overall though, this is all just my opinion. I'm not here to say that what this father did was wrong, and that his daughter will regret this, blah blah blah. In the end, I'm sure she'll be just fine, and likely be successful. Doing things differently is great, and while it may not always be 100% optimal, that's also life. Nothing is 100% optimal. We're all just trying to make the best choices we can. This father thinks he's done so, and good on him.

Anyone else has any finishing ingredient of this recipe for disaster? Ah right, forcing feminism in tech by pushing your daughter into speaking at public events.