

To Those Who Want To Drop Out of School - chetan51
http://chetansurpur.com/blog/2014/03/dropout.html

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peteforde
I grew up in a small town, and after school many days I'd go read books at an
alternative bookstore. I was able to give myself an autodidactic education in
everything from feminism to anarchism to labour politics and more.

One day I decided to sample from the "education" section, an area which I'd
been avoiding. As fate would have it, I started with The Teenage Liberation
Handbook.

[http://www.amazon.com/The-Teenage-Liberation-Handbook-
Educat...](http://www.amazon.com/The-Teenage-Liberation-Handbook-
Education/dp/0962959170/)

It was written by a disgruntled former English teacher and explained that the
education system robbed children of their creativity to turn out a constant
stream of factory workers that wouldn't talk or waste time. School was to keep
kids out of gangs.

What really got me, however, was the idea that 75% of what we were doing was
in fact "make work". We were in a glorified day care. The only reason they
cared about truancy was because the school gets paid based on the number of
classes we attend.

I was furious; basically I became a walking Rage Against The Machine song for
about two years.

There are pictures.

I'm 35 now, and my only regret about dropping out of high school is that I
didn't do it 2 years earlier. All of the people who told me that I was
throwing my life away now come to me for life advice. I have started several
companies and to date have never woken up in a ditch. I am not plagued with a
sense of wonder about what I could have accomplished had I just written those
last few exams.

I told my principle and the other students that I did not want the school to
take credit for my future success. I was a bit of a shit, sure. But I wasn't
entirely wrong, either.

These days, seeing kids like this gives me hope for the future:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h11u3vtcpaY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h11u3vtcpaY)

~~~
crystalmace
I loved that book! It really managed to give a voice to the frustrations that
I felt with my school, and how I was being taught. The on thing that I would
like to emphasize though is that the book isn't advocating just dropping out
of highschool, it is talking about replacing the school system's stifling
attempts at education with teaching yourself what you want to learn. Make no
mistake, you won't be getting out of work by dropping out, but you will be
actually spending your time and effort on learning something important and
helpful instead of wasting it on recieving a 'standardized' education that
only exists to make sure that all the grunts have at least a base level of
knowledge about 'stuff'. While it is much easier to just sit in school and be
spoonfed information, it is ultimately a waste of your time. Your time would
be better spent going out and learning about the stuff that interests you.

------
timonv
Or, turn it the other way around, don't let bad schooling take years of the
best period of your life.

I dropped out after 3-4'ish years of AI, and now I'm working on AI projects
year round.

I think it's slightly patronising and playing it safe to say people should
consider staying just because they might not ever get the chance to learn
these things later in life. For one, that's _their_ responsibility. The
knowledge you pick up at a university can deprecate just as much (if its not
already). If you don't continue to pick things up later in life, that's your
own fault. Secondly, grades and bureaucracy, in my opinion, instil competition
and stress in the areas where it doesn't matter. Universities should be
concerned with obtaining knowledge.

