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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This topic used to come up a lot on HN, though I've not seen it for a while. My summary of reading those previous threads, where many people shared their personal experiences, is that what you are suggesting is the best idea.
Negotiate and/or move school and/or spent partial time in other institutions so that you can use at least some of your time to be exploring advanced topics that also give you real world credentials and projects for a portfolio while staving off boredom.
"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."
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...
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.
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.
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?
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/)
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.
I'm going to extrapolate a theory based on the following premise: unused memories fade.
- The things you learn in elementary school are very fundamental and you probably use them often.
- High school branches off from the fundamentals; I got straight A's in geometry, algebra, and calculus, yet I remember very little of them. I do remember everything I ever learned in my two CS classes (I am a programmer now).
- The important thing about high school is not what you learn, but that it becomes possible for you to learn what you want/like to learn and do.
I did most of my learning outside of school, but I did have a few classes that I liked, all of my history teachers were very good, my chemistry and biology teachers were awesome. I appreciate those classes and I'm glad I took part in them but I don't think it made up for the rest.
Perhaps we had similar experiences but we contextualize them differently. Do you think the classes you mentioned were worth everything else? Do you not think you could have had similar experiences to those classes if you had done something other than high school?
It is impossible to answer your questions. I would have had different experiences. I would have also said those different experiences were formative. Nor do I think it's useful to compare the "worth" of one life to another. Whose life is more worthy, yours, or that of one of your grandparents? Would you go to someone and say "my life is more worthy than yours"? Might your alternative self punch you in the nose for saying that?
I can, without doubt, say that I would have had a different life if my high school had been organized along the lines of a German Gymnasium school than the liberal arts tradition of the US. So of course I would have had yet a different life if I had "something other than high school".
BTW, I do not like your seemingly self-centered view. Public education doesn't exist only for my own "worth", but also for the benefit of society. Street signs, warnings, and public notices are more effective if (nearly) everyone is literate. One thread in pubic education is to develop an informed citizen. Another thread is to train workers at the public expense. A third is to keep cheap child labor from the workforce. A fourth is to indoctrinate children that the common good is a worthy goal. ;)
Nor do I think your question is a useful one, for policy or decision making purposes. "Could" is a question of a non-zero probability. Benjamin Franklin had no formal higher level education, and look what he managed. So sure, I "could" have been like Franklin and managed on my own. But the retrospective logic to answer "could" doesn't help answer the relevant policy question "would", or for the decision making at the time "should I take these classes, or CLEP out and enter college early?"
For me, it's pretty simple. I wanted to be a math professor. (I changed my mind when I was about 20.) Either I stay in high school, where I can take college-level courses for free, either as dual-enrolled or through AP test credits, and take classes that guarantee me in-state scholarship, or I get a job, ... or I enter the debt hole.
Sure, there are more options than that. My parents, close relatives, and neighbors have never been to college. We had no contacts in any of the careers that interested me. I knew no programmers other than hobbyists like myself. I didn't know any other options. Even now, knowing more, I don't know what I would have done if I decided to skip high school.
In that context, I can also imagine (without any basis in fact) that you had more options available to you. Perhaps your parents had money, or you had better connections to jobs that interested you, or didn't think that $40,000+ in school debt would be a problem.
But now we're far away from your original point, which is that you "don't remember learning much of anything" and therefore agree that "smart kids should skip high school." I disagree - I do remember leaning a lot of things. Since you say you went to a much better school than mine, you must have learned things as well, even if you've since forgotten it. You've now said that you haven't forgotten it, and attended classes. I don't know how you can say that you didn't learn anything from class. You say you didn't study, which means you have to have learned things from being in class and doing homework.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I'm not sure whether it happens "magically" or not, but the research is traditionally interpreted to suggest that classes of mixed ability do better on average.
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.
Even if for the sake of argument we assume your assertion that "smart kids" benefit their classmates is correct... on what basis do you assert that those "smart kids" owe their classmates anything at all?
Why are their classmates entitled to an education at their expense, and what do the "smart kids" get in return?
This is like asking "what do I get out of not robbing the old lady in the park"... You don't get anything for not doing that, and you miss out on cashing in her pension cheque.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
That kid didn't build a clock, he put a clock in a suitcase, thought it didn't look like a bomb and brought it to school. What a smarty.
I'm finding often when I'm learning new skills I realize I had some of this education in school at some point. I think that's the entire point of early schooling, to learn real skills as an adult, of any random subject, really fast.
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.
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).
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.
>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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 130 ms ] threadOn 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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
Negotiate and/or move school and/or spent partial time in other institutions so that you can use at least some of your time to be exploring advanced topics that also give you real world credentials and projects for a portfolio while staving off boredom.
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."
"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...
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.
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?
"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/)
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.
- The things you learn in elementary school are very fundamental and you probably use them often.
- High school branches off from the fundamentals; I got straight A's in geometry, algebra, and calculus, yet I remember very little of them. I do remember everything I ever learned in my two CS classes (I am a programmer now).
- The important thing about high school is not what you learn, but that it becomes possible for you to learn what you want/like to learn and do.
Perhaps we had similar experiences but we contextualize them differently. Do you think the classes you mentioned were worth everything else? Do you not think you could have had similar experiences to those classes if you had done something other than high school?
I can, without doubt, say that I would have had a different life if my high school had been organized along the lines of a German Gymnasium school than the liberal arts tradition of the US. So of course I would have had yet a different life if I had "something other than high school".
BTW, I do not like your seemingly self-centered view. Public education doesn't exist only for my own "worth", but also for the benefit of society. Street signs, warnings, and public notices are more effective if (nearly) everyone is literate. One thread in pubic education is to develop an informed citizen. Another thread is to train workers at the public expense. A third is to keep cheap child labor from the workforce. A fourth is to indoctrinate children that the common good is a worthy goal. ;)
Nor do I think your question is a useful one, for policy or decision making purposes. "Could" is a question of a non-zero probability. Benjamin Franklin had no formal higher level education, and look what he managed. So sure, I "could" have been like Franklin and managed on my own. But the retrospective logic to answer "could" doesn't help answer the relevant policy question "would", or for the decision making at the time "should I take these classes, or CLEP out and enter college early?"
For me, it's pretty simple. I wanted to be a math professor. (I changed my mind when I was about 20.) Either I stay in high school, where I can take college-level courses for free, either as dual-enrolled or through AP test credits, and take classes that guarantee me in-state scholarship, or I get a job, ... or I enter the debt hole.
Sure, there are more options than that. My parents, close relatives, and neighbors have never been to college. We had no contacts in any of the careers that interested me. I knew no programmers other than hobbyists like myself. I didn't know any other options. Even now, knowing more, I don't know what I would have done if I decided to skip high school.
In that context, I can also imagine (without any basis in fact) that you had more options available to you. Perhaps your parents had money, or you had better connections to jobs that interested you, or didn't think that $40,000+ in school debt would be a problem.
But now we're far away from your original point, which is that you "don't remember learning much of anything" and therefore agree that "smart kids should skip high school." I disagree - I do remember leaning a lot of things. Since you say you went to a much better school than mine, you must have learned things as well, even if you've since forgotten it. You've now said that you haven't forgotten it, and attended classes. I don't know how you can say that you didn't learn anything from class. You say you didn't study, which means you have to have learned things from being in class and doing homework.
[1] http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/
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.
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.
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!
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.
Why are their classmates entitled to an education at their expense, and what do the "smart kids" get in return?
It's completely irrelevant to this conversation.
I don't follow the logic.
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.
http://chapmankids.net/blog/why-not-skip-high-school-a-serie...
Skipping high school may not be bad idea, even for the not-extremely-gifted.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
I'm finding often when I'm learning new skills I realize I had some of this education in school at some point. I think that's the entire point of early schooling, to learn real skills as an adult, of any random subject, really fast.
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.
Not the learning.
I, for one, very much doubt that "available evidence".
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/. Hope this is useful to folks.
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.
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.