
Smart Kids Should Skip High School - exolymph
http://sonyaellenmann.com/2015/09/why-skip-high-school.html
======
mjevans
Could I instead have had the curriculum at my own pace?

Really it should just be a national, fully open, stack. No expensive text
books (there's a nice racket) / etc.

Not just high school, but all of it. If we need to have 'learning centers'
where parents can warehouse their kids while going to work, lets just fund
that with those results in mind, and have additional tutors (maybe other
students for extra credit, based off of the realistic improvement rate in the
grades of those tutored) for those who aren't advancing quickly enough.

Of course, full boarding that the kids can opt in to (for predictable meals
and escape from abusive situations) could also help.

------
clessg
I dropped out of high school in my junior year. Predictably, most people
remarked that it was a poor decision and that my prospects of employment would
be forever decimated.

I skipped ~50% of days in grades 8-10, but somehow passed. I spent those days
coding and learning on my own time.

As school got progressively less challenging, I dropped out in grade 11 and
decided to stop wasting my time.

Finally, I could pursue my passion in software full-time. That additional time
and freedom was instrumental in achieving my dreams. It was almost certainly
much more valuable than more wasted years of high school. By the age of 19 I
was already earning a very significant sum of money and had years of solid
experience.

But who knows? Maybe I missed out on some important friendships or valuable
connections. Perhaps my lack of a high school diploma will be an
insurmountable barrier in the future.

Although I believe it was the right decision for me (who knows), I don't think
it's the right decision for the vast majority of people. You must have
discipline and passion. You must be your own boss and have a plan. You should
enjoy learning on your own. Treat time as a precious resource.

I am fortunate that my chosen field, software development, generally does not
require a diploma or degree. Exceptions exist, but I'm not interested in those
jobs. Any other field and my decision could have been disastrous.

~~~
TimPrice
> You must have discipline and passion. You must be your own boss and have a
> plan. You should enjoy learning on your own. Treat time as a precious
> resource.

Sadly, most of that is not taught at junior/middle school. Getting out of the
labor force factory that 'education' is in most countries, may not be the best
idea even for the majority of 'smart kids', as you say.

------
visarga
I don't think kids should skip high school, but I think parents could let up
on expectations placed on children to compensate for the uselessness and
tedium of much of the subject matter.

On the other hand, engaging in passion driven projects that also involve self
directed study is the way to go. Parents should encourage the latter while
being less fussy about grades. Grades don't matter anyway 10 years later when
the child will be hired or try to make a business, but a few passion driven
projects could go a long way towards later success.

~~~
quanticle
The problem is college admissions. Sonya says, "Skipping college is almost
middle-class mainstream at this point," but she's dead wrong. It might be
mainstream among the lower classes, but they aren't doing too well these days,
are they? And it's mainstream among a certain fraction of the upper-classes
who have enough of a safety net in family wealth and connections that it
doesn't matter. But for the vast majority of the middle classes, the true
middle classes, college is still very much a mainstream choice, and
increasingly important as a backstop against falling into the lower class. If
you don't have a high school transcript, your chances of getting into a
college go down by quite a bit.

As for, "I could have spent three years writing and reading and working on
interesting projects, instead of enduring the sociocultural hell of high
school," I nearly giggled when I read that. Maybe Sonya was among the special
1% of kids who would actually have done that, but realistically, if I had
skipped high school, I would have spent my days playing video games and
getting into trouble, not "reading and working on interesting projects".

~~~
thaumasiotes
Given that I spent my high school years reading anyway, I feel pretty safe in
saying that had I skipped high school I would still have spent the time
reading. There's nothing about going to high school, or having any other
occupation, that precludes you from reading.

I would have spent most of the time playing video games, as I in fact did
during college, but I wouldn't have done any getting into trouble. This would
have been largely unproductive, much like attending high school was.

------
thinkingkong
Im going to take a different position. I think school is valuable. But only
because it informs you about a curriculum and subjects you might not know
exist.

People are smart. But people need to figure out what they can be geniuses at.
If we remove opportunity in this way, we absolutely must find an alternative
to telling people what they dont know they dont know about.

------
twotwotwo
I half did this: after sophomore year, I left high school for what's now
called Bard College at Simon's Rock, a college specifically for younger kids.
tl;dr if you think you might be ready for college you should look at it. There
are scholarships.

I have no regrets about that. It's as demanding as you want. About 2/3 of kids
there get an associates' to transfer to another school after two years; those
that stay all four do a B.A. thesis. Some folks who transferred reported being
bored at their new schools, but I don't have much of a sample. :) I'd probably
have had a slightly shinier-looking résumé if I'd gone on through high school,
but there's more to life than that. For me the résumé thing is moot (the Rock
actually helped; I got work through a teacher referring me to an alum), and
plenty of classmates have done well in tech or law, become doctors, gone into
research (including in hard sciences), etc. It produces a good number of high
achievers for its small size and high acceptance rate, probably because kids
interested in rushing into college are a sort of funny pool already.
Occasionally bureaucracy requires some grad to take a GED exam because they
left high school, but that's straightforward.

For high-school me, the focus on the liberal arts and the beliefs of folks
there really contrasted with how I looked at the world at the time. Same would
be true for a lot of folks here I figure. The tension from being exposed to
something different was productive for me. Sounds icky I bet, but what you
need to learn is not always the stuff you come in wanting to learn.

Anyhow, the site is [https://simons-rock.edu/](https://simons-rock.edu/). Hope
this is useful to folks.

~~~
qrendel
The problem is that's a small and selective school that only accepts a few
hundred people. It's hardly a solution for the entire country, much less
world. While it lists an 89% acceptance rate, that's out of only 199
applicants and with a total student body size of 329 (in 2015). It's an
"elite" school for "elite" kids to basically start college early. Possibly a
model for other schools, but it alone doesn't scale to the rest of the
population.

Full disclosure: I applied when in high school, remember getting the full tour
and sample class, etc, but was rejected, imo because I pretty clearly didn't
hit it off with the interviewer. It seemed like a very nice place though, if
you can get in.

------
waterhouse
Very smart kids should skip multiple grades at least.

[http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ746290.pdf](http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ746290.pdf)

"A 20-year longitudinal study has traced the academic, social, and emotional
development of 60 young Australians with IQs of 160 and above... The
considerable majority of young people who have been radically accelerated
[skipped 3+ grades], or who accelerated by 2 years, report high degrees of
life satisfaction, have taken research degrees at leading universities, have
professional careers, and report facilitative social and love relationships.
Young people of equal abilities who accelerated by only 1 year or who have not
been permitted acceleration have tended to enter less academically rigorous
college courses, report lower levels of life satisfaction, and in many cases,
experience significant difficulties with socialization. Several did not
graduate from college or high school."

~~~
mrkgnao
I would guess Terry Tao was one of them?

~~~
waterhouse
Correct. In case studies of a subset of 15 of these kids, he was one of three
with a 200+ IQ. What happened to the other two?

"Christopher Otway"'s story is described in the link. "While in Grade 1, Chris
was accelerated to work with fifth-grade students for math and sixth-grade
students for English. The following year he did math with seventh-grade
students ... at the end of his second-grade year Chris made a full grade skip
to fourth grade but took math with the eighth grade. By age 12, he was
theoretically enrolled in 9th grade but took five subjects (physics,
chemistry, English, math, and economics) with 11th-grade students 5 years
older than he." Eventually, "He entered university at 16 years 2 months,
graduating with Bachelor of Science (First-Class Honours) in computer science
and mathematics at age 20. Chris won a scholarship to a major British
university and graduated with a Ph.D. in pure math at age 24. Since then,
based in London, he works for a worldwide consultancy assisting other
companies with financial strategies."

As for "Ian Baker": starting with preschool, "only after his parents had
gently informed the teacher that he had just finished reading Charlotte's Web
was he permitted to forego reading readiness exercises". In grade 1 and 2, his
teacher worked with him to give him stimulating material, ranging up to grade
8 math, and he was in a pull-out program with other gifted children; however,
in grade 3, a new principal canceled the pull-out program, and Ian's teacher
permitted him to work on a grade 7 math textbook "with no guidance or
assistance, and no other children to work with", and Ian lost interest. Ian
was bored and miserable in grades 3-4. He switched schools, and partway
through grade 5, was given a high-school math teacher mentor, who took him
through math up to grade 9. In grade 6, he took 10th grade math, and the
following year skipped into grade 8, taking 11th grade math and CS and 10th
grade science. In grade 10, he began taking university math. Ian enrolled in
university at 17, did a bachelor's degree in "computing systems engineering",
graduated at 20, and was in his fourth year of a Ph.D in digital hardware
design at 24.

According to the author of the study, "Ian Baker's mathematical ability is
certainly on a par with that of Christopher Otway and may well equal that of
Adrian Seng [Terence Tao's pseudonym]. Unlike Adrian and Chris, however, his
astonishing potential has largely been ignored by the education system ... It
is unfortunate that he had to suffer through four years of appalling
educational mismanagement." The author also says, "Adrian is the only child of
the 15 who believes that he has been permitted to work, at school, at the
level of which he is capable."

What was Adrian's educational program? At age 3.5, he tried entering
preschool, but couldn't cope with a full school day at that age and left. At
age 5 (by which time he had done all of elementary school math in home study),
he entered school again. His parents worked with the principal to design a
flexible program, in which he was able to progress through two grade levels
per year. At age 6.5, he was attending grades 3, 4, 6, and 7 in different
subjects. At age 7.5 he attended high school for part of the day, doing grade
11 math; the rest of the day was spent in grades 5 and 6 at the elementary
school. At 8 he was doing math, physics, English, and social studies at high
school (variously at grade levels 8, 11, and 12). At 8.5, "having informally
sat and passed university entrance mathematics", he started taking university
math, first in independent study and then guided by a professor; at age 8.75,
he stopped attending any elementary school classes, and spent 3/4 of the day
at high school, doing sciences in grades 10, 11, and 12, and humanities and
"general studies" in grade 8, and 1/4 at university. By age 12 "his studies at
university included fourth-year algebra, second-year physics, and second-year
computer science". "By age 14, he had passed university entrance examinations
in mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, and English, and completed
university courses in areas such as mathematical physics, quantum mechanics,
discrete mathematics, linear and abstract algebra, Lebesgue integration,
electromagnetic theory, optics, and several areas of computing science."

(source: "Exceptionally Gifted Children", 2nd edition, by Miraca Gross)

It is, shall we say, interesting to imagine what might have been, if all the
kids in the study had been afforded such a program.

------
s_m_t
I agree. Despite going to one of the best public high schools in the country I
don't remember learning much of anything. Looking back on it it was more like
a very pleasant teenage internment camp. Parts of it were fun, the drugs and
alcohol being a highlight. Going to school high or getting high at school was
pretty fun. Sometimes competing with other students on the tests without
studying or doing any of the homework was fun. But I imagine I could have had
a lot more fun and learned a lot more elsewhere.

~~~
dalke
I went to one of the better public high schools in my district, so not one of
the best schools in the country.

I learned quite a bit. Both the US history and European history teachers were
very good, the calculus and differential equations courses were an excellent
base for college physics and applied math, the computer class marked the start
of my transition from an avid hobby programmer to a software developer, and
drafting changed the way I understand a building.

As it happens, I'm still interested in history, math, science, programming,
and building design, so perhaps I remember those best because I found them
interesting. You were interested in getting high and competing with your
friends, so perhaps that's why you remember that part best?

~~~
calibraxis
That last paragraph would sound unpleasant if it replied to me. :) That poster
can take solace that they're in good intellectual company:

 _" In fact, I can remember a lot about elementary school, the work I did,
what I studied and so on. I remember virtually nothing about high school. It’s
almost an absolute blank in my memory apart from the emotional tone, which was
quite negative."_ — Noam Chomsky
([https://chomsky.info/reader01/](https://chomsky.info/reader01/))

~~~
dalke
I can see that interpretation. Let me try another way.

I remember nothing about my government or human health class, very little
about my sociology class, I try to forget everything about my senior year
English class, and I took Spanish only because there was a state scholarship
where part of the requirement was to take three years of a foreign language,
instead of the state-mandated two years.

I surely learned things in these classes. I've likely forgotten them because
the contents didn't interest me enough. If I regard the brain as RAM, there
was no refresh so the memories faded.

Just like I remember very little now about most of my college classes. I took
numerical analysis, thermodynamics, theater, psychology, database
organization, and more, but I've forgotten them. Even my analysis course,
where I remember I adored doing epsilon-delta proofs, has faded into all but
emotional tones. I've also forgotten how to do PDEs, but knowing that
technique saved my butt a few years later when I took the qualifying exam for
physics.

While I vividly remember my theory of automata course, my discrete math
course, and a few others which are still so key to what I do every day.

It seems I remember best the things I like, and the things which I still use.
I can totally understand that someone who liked high school because of friends
and getting high might only remember that part. That doesn't have to mean
there was no learning, nor even that the learning wasn't useful. Only that
it's no longer recallable.

------
LyndsySimon
In the context of the article, my wife and I are being even more extreme - our
kids are skipping _all of it_. We're unschooling.

Our oldest is seven, and shows a ton of potential. Instead of trying to sit
her down every day and "teach", we literally just gave her a pile of books and
told her to have fun. Two or three days a week she tends to sit down while her
younger sister is napping for the sole purpose of learning. That's usually
math, but it could be anything. She's starting to take on small projects of
her own design as well, which is exciting.

For example: we were out walking on a popular trail last week, and she emptied
her water bottle. She decided it would be a good idea to sell water and snacks
on the trail. Without input at all from us, when we got home she started
listing out all the things shed need to set up a mobile food cart of sorts,
with cold drinks and snacks. Then she shared it with me and we worked together
to polish the idea a bit - I suggested she use a wagon instead of a stroller,
and limit herself to bottles of water and prepackaged trail mix.

She will probably see that particular project through to completion, break
about even on it, and move on to something else. She did that in the past with
a lemonade stand at our apartment complex.

As for her progress, her math skills are significantly ahead of her peers. Her
reading ability is something I think needs improvement, but we test her twice
a year and they show that she's at parity with her public-schooled peers.
She's picked up reading very quickly in the past 2-3 months though, and I'm
very interested to see how she places this time around.

So, yeah, skipping high school doesn't sound all that crazy to me. What the
author calls "smart kids" \- which are in reality intelligent kids with the
advantages of a good familial support system - can make much better use of
their time than sitting in a classroom waiting for the bell to ring.

------
visakanv
I hesitate to describe myself as a smart kid, but I wish I couldn've skipped
most of my formal education.

I ended up making a living from the things I was doing outside of school, and
wish I had been able to pursue those things more, and with less guilt and
shame.

I'm still unlearning a lot of the bad habits and dealing with the anxiety I
developed when trying to deal with school. Sigh. It's not a huge deal, there
are worse problems in the world, but it upsets me to know that there must be
others like me going through this year after year.

------
HytDskUYS66
I don't get the trend of being all cool and dropping out of High School or
College or whatever. High School gets out at 2 or 3 pm, leaving plenty of time
to learn on your own or build projects. At that age are you really going to
start a business? Besides, school provides motivation to learn, especially
Colleges, because you are paying for it and don't want to fail classes.

~~~
PretzelFisch
high school does not provide motivation. That comes from the students that
know what their next step is and want to get into college.

~~~
dalke
Umm, you realize a lot of people are motivated to graduate from high school
because they have career plans which _don 't_ require college, right?

There are entire high school programs of vocational, technical, and career
education for those whose idea of a "next step" is different from an
academically oriented career that most colleges teach.

There are also people who graduate from high school because their goal is to
enter the military, either as a career or for specialized training, and the
military requires a high school degree.

Also, by the same logic, college does not provide motivation either.

~~~
PretzelFisch
I thought I had more emphasis on next step when I wrote the reply. I don't
believe school is ever the motivation. Those that are motivated in school see
it as a means to an end.

~~~
dalke
In my school district, school was only required until 16. Some did leave
school then. _Everyone_ who remained had some sort of motivation, because it
was voluntary.

------
cel1ne
School education often has a leveling effect. It helps people below the
average to get better and blocks people above average or brings them down by
boring them, leading to avoidance of any real effort. As far as i know most
nobel price winners are below IQ 150, because apart from being smart, they
learned to work hard and not go through school with minimum effort.

------
rdl
I dropped out of high school to go to MIT early, then dropped out of MIT to do
a startup, and never bothered submitting the class transcripts to my high
school for the gym and English classes I needed to get a diploma, so
technically: "highest level of education completed: middle school."

------
pakled_engineer
In first grade was given a bunch of tests and determined I had a "grade 12
reading level" whatever that means. I was sent to one of those so-called child
prodigy schools but had no interest in anything they were teaching me. Instead
I would disassemble every electronic box in the school and hack around with
it. They kicked me out of that school for doing nothing the entire time except
taking apart electronics and returned me to the public system. First day, when
we received our texts for the year I'd read through the entire text on the
weekend and do all the exercises. Then I'd just slack off all year, usually
only showing up to do the tests and weekly quizzes while spending the rest of
my time hanging out with the other delinquents in my school who never went to
class. This worked fine until about Grade 10, when I decided to not even
bother reading the textbooks on the first weekend of school anymore and just
didn't show up or do any work at all. I was solely interested in hanging out
with the crazy STS chatboard goths and IRC hackers I befriended who all
partied at this guy's warehouse downtown everyday, which I got away with for
about 8 months until one day I forgot to intercept the mail and phone calls
from my school and my parents discovered I wasn't even going anymore.

My routine was to get up and walk to school, attend homeroom to show I was
actually there then just take off to go downtown to said hacker/drug dealer's
warehouse. There was always a ton of people there it was a defacto hackspace
and party house. I learned more hanging around those people for a few months
than I did all of high school. When my parents gave me an ultimatum I decided
to go squat with a bunch of street punks and just hang around the hackerspace
all day.

I probably would've been satisfied going to some kind of engineering or
compsci program after school if it had existed at the time. I liked hanging
out with my friends in high school and was glad I still went to be social but
it would've been great if school was only a few hours, and the rest of the day
I could have pursued my interests in electrical engineering at a non
institutionalized type environment. Hanging with my friends was fun in school
between and after classes but everything else about it felt like prison.
Somebody you don't elect hands you arbitrary rules to follow and you just end
up feeling trapped. I'm sure plenty of other kids don't mind high school for a
few hours a day but would much rather spend the bulk of their time learning
something else they're actually interested in. I have no idea how this can be
accomplished but a full day slogging through half a chapter in a textbook on a
subject you have zero passion about isn't it.

------
brudgers
[US centric]

Some kids should skip some part of some high schools. Smart is orthogonal to
the issue. "Skip" is a sliding scale. Early admission to college, home
schooling, and starting in a trade are all on it. So is just getting the fuck
out of a bad situation.

The people who should skip are those for whom the "these are the sizes we
carry" [no high school is actually one-size fits all] doesn't carry a healthy
size. The likelihood that a part that should be skipped is inversely
proportional to it's length: senior year is more broadly appropriate than 9th
grade.

------
vhost-
I dropped out because the school system wasn't designed for kids with
dyslexia. All I ever felt was left behind.

------
agjacobson
The writing in this article was disorganized, meandering, and it was not even
clear what theses were being defended.

------
joesmo
High school in the US is a joke. What did I learn? I learned math is horrible.
Wait! What? Yes, school actually killed my passion for math. When I wanted to
do matrices, they wanted to do arithmetic. When I wanted to do trigonometry,
they put me in 3 (THREE) years of pre-algebra. How much fucking pre-algebra
can you have?

Everything I attained during and after high school was DESPITE school, not
because of it. I taught myself how to program like many here, 3d graphics,
sound, music, writing, etc. I wrote a book that got me a full tuition
scholarship (despite having no official extracurricular activities) in my
spare time. High school was so useless, I went a whole semester doing homework
only one time and getting all A's and the occasional B+.

And this is at one of the best public schools in New Jersey. Seriously, what a
joke. What a waste of time. What torture to be put in there with all the rest
of the kids, most of them unlikable idiots. And worst of all, what lost
potential during those days. How much more could I have done had I not been
forced into this elaborate babysitting scheme we call high school? How many
books would I have written? What software would I have developed? What
animations would I have created? If only I hadn't been so tired from the daily
bullshit of high school ...

------
gscott
My son went to Grossmont Middle College which is a charter school for the last
two years of high school located on a jr college campus. He was able to get
enough college units to save him a year and a half at 4 year college. High
school, depending upon your goals and classes can be not the best use of time
if you can just jump in and do the college courses anyway... why do double
work.

~~~
foolfoolz
because taking your time through college can be an incredible experience.

~~~
quanticle
On the other hand, parent-poster's son probably saved enough money to buy a
car. College credits are incredibly expensive, and if you can do them for free
in high school, there's no reason to skip them.

On a broader level, I would very much like to disagree with people who say
that you should take your time through college. Take your time through
college... _if you can afford it_. Don't forget that you're paying a good ten
to twenty thousand a year for the privilege of taking your time.

~~~
gscott
We are ridiculously poor so money saved is a large benefit. But because he
qualifies for the whole fasfa aid and since he saved a year of college he is
doing a double major. So getting college units in is allowing him to do more
and still be the right age getting out.

------
xiaoma
I went to college before high school, starting at age 13. I was a full-time
student until the age of 15, when I went back to high school due both
financial and social reasons.

Going back to high school was great for my social life, but it was horrible
for my education. Having already taken a good chunk of a math major, I had to
take high school math and science courses because those were the rules. I took
a ton of AP courses but still had a poor GPA. In the case of AP chemistry, I
got more college credit for passing the exam but an F for the course due to
the heavy weighting of homework. Over the next couple of years I lost all
respect for formal schooling and became a pretty bad student. On the other
hand, I played sports and made some great friends who I still know even now.

In all honesty I can't say if the social costs of staying and finishing a
degree at such a young age would have been worse or not. My current thinking
is maybe it's okay to skip high school, but don't go back if you do.

------
melloclello
I wish I had skipped high school. At best it was a waste of time and at worst
it was a highly traumatic experience for me. I guess I'm doing better now but
the first few years I spent in the real world were spent desperately trying to
unlearn everything I'd learned from that experience.

------
1stop
Is this like saying "Rich people should hoard their wealth"?

There is something to be said for Smart kids being at school both receive and
PROVIDE benefit to/from the other students.

But I guess, who cares about dumb kids, who had less opportunity than the
smart ones? They'll get a better draw next life!

~~~
dkopi
Actually, smart kids usually end up a net loss for classes. They get bored. so
they skip classes, or end up sitting in class bothering everyone else. They
also end up frustrating other kids because "why does it come so easy for X but
not for me?" Bad teachers even use smart kids as examples: "See, you all
should be a lot more like smart kid".

A smart kid isn't going to magically become a free tutor for other kids at
school. Let teachers focus on educating. Don't shift that responsibility to
teenagers who could be advancing significantly in other environments.

~~~
1stop
Research shows the opposite. Mixing ability levels increases the median mark.
The point of public funded education is not to produce a minority of geniuses
but a majority of smart people.

------
coldtea
The best thing about school is it being a forced social experience --
preparing one for life itself, and even having them interact with others even
if that's not their "thing" (it wasn't for me either).

Not the learning.

~~~
MustardTiger
What makes that the best thing? All available evidence suggests it is not a
relevant thing at all, since home schooled children are indistinguishable in
social skills to regular schooled children. The forced social experience of a
typical school is very artificial, and does not apply well to many other
social settings. The only real similar setting is prison. Unless the goal of
school is to prepare children for the social experience of prison, I don't see
how that could be the best thing about it.

~~~
coldtea
> _What makes that the best thing? All available evidence suggests it is not a
> relevant thing at all, since home schooled children are indistinguishable in
> social skills to regular schooled children._

I, for one, very much doubt that "available evidence".

~~~
MustardTiger
Facts don't really care if you doubt them or not. Please, answer the question.
What makes that the best thing?

------
cant_kant
School is only incidentally about education. For instance, never underestimate
the power of networking at a elite private school.

A few random stories, all true:

A client of mine is global <role_deleted_to_protect_anonymity> director of a
multi-billion dollar Scandinavian corporation largely because a school friend
knew a few board members.

A friend obtained deep access to a person, considered to be among the five
most powerful people in his country, due to his school network.

Another friend was contacted by a school friend and helped him to land a job
in an elite investment bank despite the lack of any relevant experience.

------
carogeraci
So maybe what we need are high schools where students start by learning how to
devise a project and work on it. This stage will give students the skill set
to do their own project while introducing them to a wide variety of concepts.
In stage two, students write the question they want to answer and form a study
group to work with. Stage three is completing the project and stage four is
some form of publication.

------
teslabox
John Taylor Gatto [1] says that it's more important to skip as much of the
early years of schooling as possible. If the child spends that time in the
real world, nothing of importance will be missed. For me, kindergarten was
incredibly boring... Nothing of importance to me was ever learned at school,
that couldn't have been learned quicker on my own.

[1] [http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/](http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/)

------
cloudjacker
There have been times when I felt I would be more productive doing something
else, at different phases of life.

Statements like this article's really depend on what someone's end goal is. If
you are striving for some kind of above average monetary success ... earlier,
there's nothing about this that guarantees it. If you aren't, then you need a
different end goal to make this useful.

------
enthdegree
Dad and mom did this to me and my sister, and dad wrote a blog on it. Here is
his post-mortem:

[http://chapmankids.net/blog/why-not-skip-high-school-a-
serie...](http://chapmankids.net/blog/why-not-skip-high-school-a-series-on-
our-experience/)

Skipping high school may not be bad idea, even for the not-extremely-gifted.

------
microcolonel
I skipped half of middle school and high school, I think it paid off. I have a
great job and a jumping off point for whatever ambitions I might have.

------
aufa
The main problems that constrain the development of education in a country is
the government's policy.

------
nphang
Well this is a load of drivel. And all yall are agreeing with it because every
single person on this forum considers themselves smart so you like agreeing
with people who claim to be smart and know smart people stuff.

"so I took California’s GED test in June, 2012. It was dead easy."

If that's your basis for calling yourself smart then I'm not impressed. I took
the GED high as a kite and got a perfect math score (know what's similar about
both our statements? we both sound like jerks). The GED isn't a smartness
metric, it's a soap bubble test so white people don't get stuck as fry chefs
for their whole lives. It's _supposed_ to be easy as long as you understand
the questions. Welcome to the upper class nimwit.

"People worry about Google and the instant availability of knowledge making
people dumber, because we don’t have to memorize much anymore — Socrates felt
the same anxiety when writing and reading were invented."

Your events are off by a few _millenia_.

"contrary to what teachers and school board members might want you to think,
getting into college is easy if you’re intelligent and work hard to do
interesting things"

False. Just false. I mean, I'm assuming you want to go to a top tier college,
not community college. Top tier colleges are for expanding the upper tiers of
the gentry class, while community colleges allow entry into the gentry class.
To move to the upper tiers of the gentry, you need to have shown that you
respect the institution of the gentry, ie. going to high school. Exceptions
maybe exist for prodigies or minorities who built a clock once (because that's
soooo amazing, who here _didn't_ build shit like that as a kid), but in
general skipping high school to learn sewing and greenhaus building is an
acceptable path to an Amish lifestyle, not differential equations and the Ivy
League.

I thought it was generally acknowledged at this point that school isn't about
education? School is about socialization, connections, and a prodding to at
least have some depth of knowledge about a general corpus that it's accepted
people should know about. No one actually expects you to be able to find x in
real life, but everyone is familiar with the concept of finding x. I am an
_astrophysicist_ and I use, at maximum, 5% of shit found in my physics texts
through the year. _School is not about the shit in the books, that is not the
point of school_, you're like an atheist telling a Catholic that Jesus was an
asshole because evolution -- it's a valid point but it has nothing to do with
the conjecture. School is an indoctrination procedure so we don't schism even
further into our already highly segregated class based society, saying that
it's a waste of time because class and homework are stupid is a correct
statement, but misses the entire point.

Even anarchists believe in school.

~~~
corser
Elite universities are not for expanding the gentry class. They are so that
the elite can meet other elite as they are extremely distributed
geographically, get married and continue on the class system. The lower class
people that go there are aiming to join the elite, but the vast majority of
them simply become highly paid servants to the owning class. We like to think
that startups made by dropouts establish that anyone can make it big, but for
the most part these startups are children of millionaires living off trust
funds until they break through; like Trump, no one should consider these rags
to riches stories, accomplished though they may be.

The main point is that for elites, their schools are so that their girls can
bring a nice boy home and not some trash from main street while their boys can
find a wife that actually stands a chance at domesticating them.

It's really just that most geeks are so focused on their projects that they
forget that there are more important things, like their family. Hence why we
constantly hear incredibly talented but socially awkward people call for the
repeal of school. Because social things don't mean anything to them. They
generally become tools of the elite class.

I generally agree with the idea of creating environments where people can meet
their future family because finding a quality spouse is extremely difficult
without expensive and fool-proof filters in place. Connecting it with
education is inevitable because children and young adults are nearly useless
in a modern economy. We can't make it excellent education because there is a
lot of economic and social pressure for truly talented individuals to abandon
academia in favor of the market. My main complaint is that the elites are no
longer virtuous so they do not deserve to exist anymore.

------
pirdiens
i'm 21 and still in high school oh gods get me out of this.

~~~
pirdiens
to be more clear on this, i've skipped classes ever since high school started,
this was due to being introduced to a computer at young age and having access
to the internet - i was amazed by the world and got to see the "oh what the
hell this is vile" stuff; it's difficult to fit in my classes. my parents
didn't care what i did on there because they had to focus on their job. my
mother was, and still is, kind about this. she probably knows the horrors i've
seen.

so, uh, i guess, i agree with this article even though this applies on where
you're from. there are no "smart kids", though, because, imo, everyone is
smart.

