I realize this advice may be appropriate for some people, but speaking personally as a parent who is both lucky enough and financially fortunate enough to send both of my girls to a private school, I think it's misguided for them. The school they go through is K-12, diverse, and the high school portion of it is pretty amazing. I'm personal friends with several of the teachers and I can say with all honesty that the classes they teach are easily the equal of the most interesting college courses I took at a very well regarded university. Obviously I haven't sampled every single class, and I'm sure there are some duds, but I've sampled enough to feel like I have a pretty good feel for it. It would be a huge mistake for my kids to forego the opportunity to learn more about the world with those teachers.
What would happen if that kind of education was available to everyone?
What would happen if world-lead expert personal tuition was available to everyone? (Obviously impractical, but let's pretend, as a thought experiment.)
To what extent are we standing our own feet as a species by prioritising hierarchy and economic discrimination over free access to the best possible education for everyone?
Especially for those who want it and can benefit from it?
Teaching ability isn't evenly distributed, and teaching doesn't seem to scale up to even the city scale, much less national or global. I'd love for everyone to be able to take Environmental Science from Mr V, but he's only one teacher.
A start would be to (mostly) privatize primary education. Every revolution in mass production and delivery of goods and services that used to be the exclusive province of the rich was generated by free enterprise.
That might work if you can figure out a way to fund private schools proportionally to the quality of the education they provide, but I'm skeptical there's any straightforward way to do that. Also, the portion of money that goes to shareholders is money that isn't spent on education.
Governments can be inefficient, but part of the reason for the inefficiency is that they have to provide the same service to everyone and that's hard. They can't cherry-pick their customers.
There may be new educational funding models we should be looking at. Maybe a lot of educational YouTube videos should be directly funded by government grants, and ad-free video hosting provided by government infrastructure if they want it.
private schools are generally set up as nonprofits. "shareholders" are not really a concern, though sometimes you end up with unreasonably high admin salaries.
except that education is not only a service, but also a place to learn social skills.
Also, i highly doubt your claim, considering that many inventions where made by public universities funded by states around the world, or even state controlled economies with no free market.
> the classes they teach are easily the equal of the most interesting college courses I took at a very well regarded university
If they can handle this, then they could take college level classes and get high school credit and college credit at the same time.
I went to an alternative high school that met on a community college campus and had 50% of the requirements for HS graduation for junior and senior year served by taking college courses. I was only able to get about half a year of college credit this way, but I was able to get half a year head start on college. In hindsight, I would have liked to start that process a year earlier and skipped as much HS as I could. I don't think that path is for everyone, but if you're capable and motivated I recommend exploring alternative pathways for reducing the traditional HS experience in favor of more profitable uses of time & talent.
I don't think college credits are the point, really. The general rule of thumb for people coming out of this school is that they feel like their first or possibly even second year of college is significantly less challenging than their last two years of high school. But as a result they can do extra-curriculars, do independent studies, smell the flowers a bit, etc. That doesn't seem like a bad thing in my view.
My friend did this in hs (well, he "dropped out sophomore year") to go to college, he got his degree in math and is doing quite well. But I will say there is something to be said for having a traditional social experience of hs which i thoroughly enjoyed
Fun way to make this argument is to use College/University instead of highschool and then, if people more or less agree on that, also suggest Highschool. You can keep moving down the stack. At some point, people start to be concerned about socialization, which is a very fair concern. I did not learn anything in highschool (or college) but I made friends that I have to this day and learned how to be a human in a world of other humans. Hard to untangle things after the fact but I went straight into the working world after highschool and I am really, really glad that I ended up eventually going to college solely because of the people I met there and the ways they challenged me to grow and become a better person.
edit: there are obviously ways to get this socialization without being in a traditional, horrible, highschool environment. I do not know if I would homeschool my kids or not!
> I did not learn anything in highschool (or college)
Is this really the case or do you just not remember specific things you learned or even abstract concepts around learning itself that are hard to quantify?
I personally spent most high school classes either sleeping or playing on my laptop, and often literally learning about what we had been seeing in class when reading the exam's title. Often doing things like completing the math exams based on recollections from middle school. And yet got by, year after year, as well as anyone else.
I then spent over a decade having a hard time figuring out how to actually take and keep any kind of notes, study and how to learn things that didn’t just "come to me" on their own.
Quite a weird experience.
Looking back, I can only wish it had been different. But that’s pointless.
I'd charitably interpret this as something like, "I did not learn anything useful or interesting in school that I did not learn elsewhere first or more effectively".
I'd endorse that claim, for the most part. I definitely learned all kinds of things that are not useful nor interesting, and then promptly discarded them. Maybe 2 or 3 isolated things in university passed the above criteria for me, and those were only possible because of the greater freedom offered in universities over K-12.
The times where I actually learned things, including abstract metalearning, were always when I was trying to do difficult things independently from school. School was just taking time away from that. It's important to keep in mind that the alternative to the current education system isn't 'child sits in a box devoid of all sensory input'- there are tons of possibilities.
Though no alternative is friction-less. Having been the home-schooled kid in AYSO soccer, I remember being regarded as an oddity since no one had seen me before.
I’m wondering if there is a way to create some sort of less structured alternative to the government education system. I think socializing with people of different classes, beliefs and abilities is necessary, and I would probably not send my kind to some kind of system where he would only meet other high IQ peers, but the gov education is >95% wasted time. Perhaps a combination of homeschooling + mandatory sports team participation + some artsy stuff?
There's pros and cons to any style of teaching, but the Montessori method has some of what you're looking for. Specifically, it allows students to move as fast or slow as they want in any particular subject area.
I went to a Montessori school for a year in middle school, and I remember being in a class with 5th graders doing math at the 9th grade level. I also remember a few kids in 5th grade doing math at a 4th grade level. The key was that the teachers could teach their subject at all of those levels.
I feel like some of this could be implemented in a less structured educational system. Being able to move at varying different paces while still socializing with peers of the same age is a good combination. I would add a little more structure than Montessori schools though, to make sure that students are moving at least at a baseline pace. It also takes some scheduling work to make sure that teachers aren't teaching an hour lesson to one student at a time.
Another way to drill down into the question is to start with smart kids and then, if people more or less agree with that, to talk about all kids.
Think about it: if smart kids benefit from a more personalized, stimulating, and nurturing approach to education, then this is even more true for the kids who are less intelligent. Why do we assume that the kids who are academically behind are well served by an apathetic, inflexible, impersonal system?
For example, consider very small classes taught by highly trained, highly motivated, highly paid teachers - but instead of having this be the solution for an elite cohort of "smart" kids, let this be the solution for all kids.
> I did not learn anything in highschool (or college)
That's on the student; in college, where you can pick your classes and course of study, it's on the student completely. But regardless, I was told: 'Don't blame the professor or the class or the book or the weather; it's your job to learn.' Good preparation for professional life too.
I think this can be true to an extent. However, as a current college student I have been required to take courses to advance in my degree program that have been scoped entirely within things I already knew.
For example there was a course that almost entirely covered collaborative development and some regex, when I already had enough regex knowledge and was actively working as a software engineer, doing collaborative development all day every day.
There are definitely some areas where you have to make an effort to learn- and I do. But so far in my computer science degree (I'm taking third-year courses right now), all I've really learned is C++, but that's really not much considering I taught most of it to myself before my first term since I tested out of the entry-level courses.
Then study different things, arrange something with the professors, arrange independent study or an independent degree program. It's up to the student.
It's an important part of life and becoming an adult in so many ways and skipping it deprives the child of the opportunity for the good and bad experiences that humans need to experience to become balanced adults.
Life has bad bits for everyone. Chopping out high school preemptively is not only not a solution but is actively detrimental.
Adult work & social life has practically nothing in common with high school. Neither does college. The only times any of that looks even a little like high school is when something's gone very wrong.
From about 6th or 7th grade through graduation, school is a weird environment all its own.
worse - when 'adult' situations go sideways, you can often take a sideways look - and damn if they aren't all acting like they are still in high school.
> Adult work & social life has practically nothing in common with high school.
Some might say it is similar to being in prison though…
At least for part of high school that’s what it felt like at times for me. The biggest issue being the forced labour - sorry, I mean “homework” - of which the burden was substantial and the benefits not at all clear.
At the time I remember being very depressed that even when I was at home and away from the school that I often didn’t enjoy, instead of indulging in my hobbies (which, coincidentally, is how I learnt practically all of the specialised skills that I used to kick off my techology career) I was forced to complete endless hours of dull and unsurprising homework. I understand the benefits in moderation but the sheer amount assigned to me was actively detrimental to the point of robbing me of a big chunk of my free time as a teenager.
I desperately wanted to continue teaching myself programming (this was in the early 90’s) but instead I had to complete some mindless essay about sedimentary fucking rocks.
Not to mention that I had undiagnosed ADHD so the homework took me forever and created considerable stress.
Having said that, it was so bad (and felt so pointless) that even though I was academically pretty strong and had wanted to go to University from quite a young age, I instead quit school at 16, immediately got a job in a business consultancy (using my self-taught programming/design skills) and was running small software projects for huge multi-national businesses within a year. By the time most of my peer group graduated University, I had about 5 years of a software development career under my belt and had already started my first business.
In retrospect I don’t think I would have done anything different, apart from putting about 500% less effort into the sedimentary rock essays.
Damn, you're me except I did finish high school. In hindsight I very much wish I'd gotten my GED at 15 or 16 and snagged an associate's degree by age 18. Turns out non-elite college gen-ed classes are easier and have way lower time requirements than the high school I went to (which was just, like, a totally normal high school, nothing special), so it'd have been a breeze. I had no clue about that, and just (reasonably, I think?) assumed it was even harder than what I was already doing. Could have put more time in at my tech job, which was hugely valuable to my future, too.
Although I say I wouldn’t have changed anything, I think it’s really tough to go back and reevaluate choices like this - you can never really know what alternative paths lay ahead, better or worse.
I think we tell ourselves stories about how we got from A to B (like mine above) but in reality it’s never quite as simple. It’s always easier to rationalise and construct what feels like a meaningful narrative in retrospect.
For all you know, the choices you made, even if they now feel slightly uniformed in retrospect may still have been 100% right for you!
I suppose reflecting on my previous comment, the flip side of the situation is that I was incredibly lucky to go to a pretty good school (even though I didn’t always like it much) and the single biggest benefit I got was the utterly amazing life-long friends I made there, who are still great friends today. Those friends have had 1000% more positive impact on me than my schooling did, but I wouldn’t have met them without school.
Hit close to home! At age 15 I was literally being paid 3x minimum wage by my friend’s dad to build an e-commerce site for his photography business. But my slavemaster (school, of course) took priority and I never had time to finish the project. Ended up failing out of college (undiagnosed ADHD as well) and enlisted in the navy as an escape hatch. The “real” experience of military life straightened out all my dysfunctional behavior, and makes me wonder how things might have been if I hadn’t been so depressed and hopeless and bored for so many years of my adolescence.
> The “real” experience of military life straightened out all my dysfunctional behavior
Interesting. I've often thought that this would have really helped iron out some of my character flaws early on too. At least in the military you are willingly signing up for an experience that you know will be hard, but likely also rewarding and character shaping.
Everyone I know who has been in the military seems to have developed a more resilient and disciplined approach to life which has served them very well later on. Although clearly it's not universally good for everyone who takes this path.
Nothing about high school is relevant to the real world. At no other point in your life are you in forced proximity with random people within your age cohort, who have no responsibilities outside of school work and maximizing their social status. This is an unnatural environment and nothing about it is necessary to becoming a functioning adult. The benefits that high school does bring to social development is not exclusive to high school. But it brings so many detrimental experiences as to be a net negative in many cases.
I'd be interested in what you describe as detrimental experiences and why they potentially weren't net positive in ways that you might not immediately recognize
Anything can 'potentially be net positive in ways you might not immediately recognize'. There is literally no event that description does not apply to.
In many cases the 'negative experiences' are daily abuse.
I myself had a horrible and painful time in high school, but listening to people of various backgrounds I concluded it's pretty much hit or miss. I can't generalize from my negative experience, but you can't generalize from your positive one either.
Getting slammed into lockers, having people steal your notebooks, having half your friends spontaneously turn on you...
I'm reading into your comment a little bit and projecting my own thoughts of "these things might have been character-building." That might be true, but for some they could also end up causing PTSD/similar things, difficultly trusting people, severe low-self-confidence, etc.
Specifically the forced proximity with people who may bully you, or encourage damaging or anti-social behavior, as well as the environment where social status, and the avenues available to gain it as a high school student, is the end-all of your existence.
How many bad habits are learned in high school, from catty behavior, to acting out for attention, to being physically dominant, to spending money on flashy gear, to gain status? How many environments outside of high school do these behaviors result in meaningful, lasting status gains? Not many, at least none that can be considered healthy environments. If the goal of high school is to prepare kids for adulthood, they don't do a good job of it.
Granted, not every school is like this and not everyone has these experiences. But putting teens in a social pressure-cooker among their age cohort will result in some very unnatural local optimums for behavior.
While I am not and won't dismiss your personal experiences with high school, but I think there is value in that pressure cooker environment, even if unpleasant. College and the workforce/academia is rife with similar bad habits that I can see myself not being prepared for if I hadn't had a dose of the petty viciousness (albeit with somewhat less consequence in the long term). It's one thing to be emotionally abused by some catty behavior in a setting that is less likely to screw your life over or at least gives you a chance of redemption post hs. Than to find out that even worse cattiness exists within your PhD program and now you're royally screwed over with it becoming harder and harder to get a fresh start.
> Specifically the forced proximity with people who may bully you, or encourage damaging or anti-social behavior, as well as the environment where social status, and the avenues available to gain it as a high school student, is the end-all of your existence.
> who have no responsibilities outside of school work and maximizing their social status.
I suppose this might be true in middle-class, suburban areas; but where I grew up, and I imagine in similar places elsewhere, there were plenty of working teenagers who held responsibility for their family's well-being. They worked in the family corner store/restaurant/shop/farm during the weekends and evenings. Others provided primary care for family members; their younger siblings or infirm adults.
Let's certainly not make it more like the internet, where you can set things up so you only see those who agree with you already and disdain everyone else without risk of confrontation.
>Nothing about high school is relevant to the real world.
I wouldn't say "nothing." Going to school 5 days a week mimics a workweek, even if the timing is off. Being with random people of your age group in close proximity is a little extreme, but it has some similarities to working in an office with a random assortment of personalities. Having tasks assigned to you that you then have to complete isn't exactly how workplaces function, but having a baseline ability to complete work that isn't your favorite is a valuable skill.
Now, all of these things are taken to the extreme in high school and that should be adjusted. However, saying that none of high school is relevant is a stretch.
> At no other point in your life are you in forced proximity with random people within your age cohort
Maybe this is a shortcoming of our modern world outside of school, rather than a shortcoming of schools. I rather think it's a point in public school's favor that students attend the same classes, do the same work, and are judged according to the same standards as their peers regardless if their parents are well-off, middle-class, or poor. (That's the ideal, anyways. There are always exceptions.)
Having exposure to a wide swath of humanity at a young age is, I think, quite valuable. It's easier to hate people you've never met.
Removing high school doesn't necessarily deprive a child of formative experiences, it just changes them.
It's possible for the change to be bad (e.g. parents in a cult pulling their kids out of school to move to The Compound), but I'd wager that if you took a kid who felt like high school was a terrible experience and gave them other constructive options and the resources to pursue them, it'd almost always be a net win.
The value of the 'high school experience' is contextual, not everyone will experience the same balance of good and bad. For some people, the bad is so overwhelming that it goes beyond the point of constructive and well into destructive. Those situations aren't hard to detect.
Americans who go to public schools get enough of the "bad bits" in grade through middle school to prepare us for life.
I used to get knots in my stomach on the first day of school. I just knew there would be an after school fight, and I would be involved even though I tried to remain invisible.
I should have gone to a community college instead of high school, but didn't even know it was an option at the time.
(I wasen't a big kid, but taught by my Irish father to never back down from a male on male confrontations. That might explain some of my problems with bullies? By the time I hit high school, I was so beyond fighting, and any form of bullying--to any of my classmates. I really didn't like high school, with the exception of a few girlfriends. Everything I should have learned in high school, I made up for at a community college in a semester. I remember sitting in a chem class with 35 year old nursing students, and I was in heaven. I loved college so much, I didn't want it to end.)
I constantly hear about how hellish is high school in the US. Do other countries experience the same? I enjoyed the high school equivalent of my country, met some of my best friends there. My peers don’t seem to ever mention bad experiences during that period. Is it really as bad as in the movies? Stereotypical bullies, popular guys vs nerds and all that?
I left my school at sixteen in the UK. Five years of barely sleeping, dreading the next day, crying for fifteen minutes before going in and experiencing endless torment and violence including being knocked unconscious on several occasions, having my glasses shattered on multiple occasions, bullying by members of staff, and on one occasion having someone punch the bridge of my glasses quite literally inside of my nose, and yes, there's still a scar to this day, and yes, it knocked me out cold. To say that I was genuinely suicidal at several points is putting it lightly, and that's without going into the problems outside of school. "Fag" or "faggot" is a word I never want to hear again in my life.
I wanted to transfer. I wanted to be home schooled. I wanted to do absolutely anything but be there. I had a plan though: start my own business whilst I was still at school so that I would have goals at sixteen, and it wouldn't be like I was bumming about doing nothing when I left. So I did that.
Fast-forward to me now twenty-eight and I'm very happy, working on my own terms with my own biz. Life is good. Partner of six years, wonderful family. Never went to university.
Did it build character? Yes. Would I go through it again? I can only say that I'm glad I will never have to. However, it gave me insight to knowing what schools of the time were willing to overlook and tolerate, and will definitely inform my style of parenting when it comes to problems at school.
Not the US but The Inbetweeners very accurately summed up my experience of a British comprehensive school. It was like that but the buildings weren’t as nice.
French high school was perfectly fine for me. At least from a social point of view. By the time they reach high school, kids are little more mature and respectful. Probably not the best time of my life but not too bad either.
However, it was a lot of wasted time sitting in classrooms daydreaming. This time could have been spent much more productively. But we don't have any better.
I don't know, that seems kind of trite. Lots of kids have really bad experiences in high school, including being physically attacked: Slammed into lockers, rocks thrown at them, that kind of thing. I don't think that does them any good. Plus, high school makes a few kids miserable enough that they are willing to commit suicide. What doesn't kill you makes you stronger only if it doesn't actually kill you.
Anyway, we do have some empirical evidence of what happens when people skip high school, since many kids are homeschooled. My general impression of people who have been homeschooled is that they are just as much balanced adults as anyone else. That shouldn't be too surprising. Homeschooled kids still socialize with their friends, still struggle to understand concepts, still get into trouble on occasion.
I found school academically useful for two reasons. First, I am very lazy, but I also don’t want to look it, so I actually took notes, did problem sheets, &c.—and in lessons, since I had nothing better to do, I paid attention and talked about the material. This assumes of course that the school is able to impart something useful, which may not be the case.
The structure really helped me. So I did quite well, could have done better, but that really wouldn't have mattered in the end. The less structured University went less well. But lot of it was also good teachers in good school.
Towards the end of high school, I started a fairly profitable startup, and went on to do that for a few more years after in lieu of college. At the time, I really struggled with my parents desire to keep me in school and my own desire to drop out and get a GED. They won out. And actually, I’m glad they did. Even though my grades were very poor and I never did homework, I really do think I came out of high school better than I would have been with only a GED.
Now, 6 years out of high school, I attend a community college part-time to work on a bachelors degree. Funny how I completely discounted higher education just a few years ago.
A lot of public schools these days let students take these sort of classes at a local community college and these credits can even transfer into your undergrad. Probably not available in more rural parts that don't have these colleges though.
The International Baccalaureate high school program is international and offers exactly that, my experience with it has been incredible so far and I know that it's helped me prepare for college in uncountable ways. Our capstone essay is 4000 words on a class of our choice, so whatever the student is passionate about, they can write their essay on. This is a perfect solution to students who may be intelligent but unmotivated outside of their interest area. For example, mine is about peer-to-peer networking; I spend most of my nights doing research for the paper and it certainly is preparing me for college.
It's not available everywhere I believe, but if it's available, there's another option compared to AP classes or regular classes (or other magnet/governor schools).
I read somewhere that kids with IQ 140 waste about half their time in school. Kids with IQ of 170 waste all their time at school. It's no wonder that kids with IQ 145 or greater are mostly home schooled, because there's no real school that can handle them and the issues that come with those kids. Skipping high school definitely sounds like a better path, especially given the social problems with being with kids so much older than you.
I didn't know but I simply googled it. It's from Leta Hollingworth, a researcher on gifted children from the mid-20th century, her book "Children Above 180 IQ".
I think it's 99.7% within three standard deviations (e.g., in either direction) so presumably half as many are three standard deviations above the mean—99.85% (top 0.15%).
I feel the need to be pedantic here, because your post makes a couple simplifications in the same direction that skew the results by roughly an order of magnitude.
145 is the top three tenths of 1 percent, not the top tenth.
The average high school size in the US is 854 students [1].
In an average school, you would expect there to be 2.5 students with 145+ IQ.
The largest school in each state is about 5-10x the average size school for that state. Let's call a large school 3x average, then.
In a large school, you would expect to find 7.5 students with 145+ IQ, or roughly 2 per graduating year.
"About 8" and "Maybe 1" are almost an order of magnitude apart.
Really? I thought that std. dev. was 15, so 145 would be the .9987 quantile, which I abbreviate to about the top .1%. If std. dev. is 16 then it's the top .25%.
But we agree on the bottom line: 145 is not rare. You might know someone of this IQ.
Unless you went to HS with one of biggest gifted programs in a major city, where that level was common. I would say with some certainty they were fine with college aged social activities.
It sounds like the author just went to a lousy high school. I was fortunate enough to go to a private school (my tuition was waived because my mother was a teacher there) where I took a ton of APs in small classes. Compare that to the large gen-ed courses at college where the pace was glacial and the tests were multiple choice.
I dropped out of high school in the late nineties, and went straight to work at a dot com. My life (best I can tell) was never impacted negatively, and I far surpassed my friends in most measures (certainly financially) as a result. My only regret is having not dropped out sooner.
If you can't figure out how to benefit from high school then sure, it's a big waste of time. It is also a unique setting in American life. In no other setting is such a broad range of activities, athletics, and arts available to a person. You aren't very likely to find opportunities to participate in competitive sports and athletics, amateur bands and orchestras after high school. I, personally, just ignored the academic parts of it after I'd piled up enough AP tests and whatnot for admission to selective colleges. Hell, in my senior year I barely had any real classes at all. I filled up my schedule with three different music subjects, newspaper/yearbook/photography, sports, and pointless electives like drafting, which was, by the way, a lot of fun. High school is also, how to put this politely, a rather unique atmosphere of sexual experimentation. Skipping that and attending a college where everyone is much older than you is not going to replace that.
College, on the other hand, was an abject waste of four years.
If you have a plan and motivation, go for it. Assuming you need to make money, you can either be self employed, in a partnership, or employed by someone else. The first requires you be a good business person, which is not a common innate trait but can be learned to some extent. The second is often a great option if you have equally motivated partners with complementary strengths. The third usually requires some sort of signalling to get employers to hire you. Having a degree is part of that signalling. This is, of course, completely ignoring that some professions require a degree, like being a doctor, which is rewarding work. As a teenager, you often have no idea what you will find meaningful and rewarding later in life, making this type of decision quite risky.
I skipped 7th grade. I was also young for my grade as it was, with a summer birthday that meant I was in the youngest cohort just past the cutoff. This had absolutely zero effect on me in high school and I got great grades and did some notable stuff and got into MIT. But the result was that I entered MIT nearly two years younger than most of my peers.
I turned out fine - but in retrospect I had a lot of growing up yet to do, and I think I would have made better use of my college experience if I had been able to do that growing up before college as opposed to during freshman and sophomore year, where you make a lot of decisions that will influence your life for a while. I missed many opportunities at MIT because I didn't really understand how the academic and professional world worked and what would be important to focus on for my career - let alone more personal matters. Looking back now I wish I had actually taken a year off before college, as opposed to skipping a grade in a hurry to get there, and I encourage every high school student and parent I know to think in these terms.
This will of course be very situational. Yes, if you are in a bad high school with bad teachers and bad students, you might be better off skipping it in favor of some alternative. But in general, a lot of growing up is just getting experience and doing things, and high school is how you get a lot of that experience before you go to college and have to do bigger and more consequential things. Don't be (or don't let your kids be) in a hurry to get ahead of that curve.
Yes - actually I had just finished editing my post to say that. For me at least I think it would have made a major difference. You are absolutely correct - I still sometimes kick myself over stupid decisions I made as a freshman and sophomore.
I skipped a year in elementary school and had a gap year (because I was in Israel I couldn't start university because I was supposed to do mandatory military service, and had a year to wait). Man oh man, did this year suck. I had no skills to manage myself with no routine, all my friends were a year older than me and started their military service. I worked for a few months, but then I just did nothing for what seemed like an eternity: I slept during the day, I was alone most of the time, internet was a couple years away so I didn't even have that, I honestly can't remember what I did but it was terrible.
I would agree with you in general about a gap year before college- but mostly from the perspective of it's a great time in life to be responsibility-free and do something meaningful
I think everyone is immature/makes poor decisions/could have chosen better paths their first couple of years in college regardless of age of matriculation. The first time you live with little supervision, have to start thinking about a career, etc. is going to be rough regardless of whether you are 17 or 20 because it is all such a new experience
The people I have met who went back to school later in life (e.g., some years of military service first) had it together in a lot of ways that aren't likely for an 18 year old.
* Managing adversity
* Deeply engaging with issues they care about
Now I understand the search for self-identity is important, and college _can_ be a place to develop that. There are other ways to develop that don't involve paying $$$ as you try to balance personal emotional and intellectual development.
I think the education received for money spent isn't as high at 18 as it would be a few years later.
College is wonderful for some, maybe even a lot of the posters here.
But honest question, for people who have done college and graduate school: how do the first 2 years of college & graduate school compare in terms of focus, intellectual reward, depth personal relationships? I'm not saying it's 100% better later in life (graduate school), but ... I would be very interested to hear peoples' takes on this.
The thing is, absent going into the military, there isn't really another system set up to help people become mature. A gap year works, if you can afford it. But unless you have a strong plan, it can accidentally move to a gap two years, and possibly never going back to school.
And if you don't do one before college, ABSOLUTELY do one after if you're doing grad school, no matter what anyone tells you.
I'm going to guess that many (probably not most, but many) of us here come from a tradition where education is paramount and deviating from that without a clear plan is like deadly frightening to the parents et al.
Yeah, in my case it was like "okaaaay so you're gonna have a job?" Ended up being two, no "travel the world" at the time or anything like that, more the opposite...
I'm in my mid-40's now, but I swear to you I have never felt older in my life then that time nearly 20 years ago; After a completely awkward TGI Friday's dinner, I'm in my hotel room in Miami. Instead of being out visiting friends which I had planned weeks earlier, at the last minute the boss decides we should go over the powerpoint a one-hundred and SIXTH time.
The first day of grad school was DELICIOUS after that.
Over time, MIT's acceptance of diversity, intellectual and otherwise, has waned. Right now, it's the top university brand in the world. That's a tightrope political game to play, and MIT optimizes to it very well. It's been a slow process for many decades, but it's really accelerated recently.
I'm not sure what the better schools are now. I've heard good things about Georgia Tech.
We do need nerd camps and nerd schools still. The old MIT was awesome.
I skipped the last year of High School; I took (and passed) the California High School Profeciency exam as soon as a I could, but was convinced to stay one more year and they made the credits work to get me a degree. Then I did two years of Community College and got an AS before transferring to an out of state 4-year engineering college (where it took me three more years to get a BS, because the curriculum weren't aligned). Community College felt a lot nicer than high school, and the two years of college experience made it easier to manage living in the dorms and later with my not-yet spouse. Having almost all of my humanities already taken care of was nice too. Having a gap in hard Math classes wasn't great though; having swapped that information out, it was hard to page it back in.
> Looking back now I wish I had actually taken a year off before college, as opposed to skipping a grade in a hurry to get there, and I encourage every high school student and parent I know to think in these terms.
100% agreed. I took a year out to work in software before University. Despite being completely disregarded by employers, it changed my perspective on independence, time management, and the risk of not making the most of opportunities. It's one of the best life decisions that I've made.
It would seem better to do as many hard, high investment (i.e. time and energy), high risk of failure but high reward things as young as possible while still having a societal protection blanket of "that's impressive for a high schooler". No one expects much from a high schooler so if your "exploration" (startup, project, etc.) hits a bump - you can recover quite easily and just re-join the mainstream. "Explorations" after graduation can look like unemployment to potential employer.
Also with today's plethora of online education available there's unlimited amount of options for exploration. In fact going deep application domain wise before college can be a great way to motivate deeper study of theory once in college. Imagine being a high schooler today mucking around with tensor flow apis. Once you get to college all those black magic random functions (i.e. predict(), fit()) you were calling in the Google tutorials will all of sudden make sense.
I did something like that, but I never stopped. Software doesn't need a degree, and I realized I wasn't interested in the debt. We'll see how it turns out, but I'm enjoying making my own way so far.
I would implore some form of higher studies though. Not all college is a waste, and even within software, putting your focus towards a topic and doing a PhD is life changing in terms of giving you more structure. The world needs smart people to guide it in all directions. Too many of them are now being wasted moving money around and showing ads.
Your comment provides an interesting perspective on why:
You lament people are doing X, and implore them to do Y to accomplish Z, but don’t analyze that perhaps X-not-Y is the rational way to accomplish Z from their perspective.
My thinking is so many viewing college/graduate programs as a waste is a sign they’re offering a bad product.
Software, plumbing, and car mechanics don't need a degree. They are technician work.
However, if you can have a much more fun life if you have a deep understanding of things like signal processing, image processing, differential equations, control systems, dynamics, etc.
Those let you do things like building medical imaging systems, autonomous robots, or deep learning systems. They're much more intellectually fulfilling than just coding, which loses its charm after a bit. You're also not competing against low-cost coders, which isn't a problem in the current market, but economies are cyclical. When the next recession comes, having more specialized skills is more helpful.
These do require mentorship, guidance, and some form of study.
As much as coming into university straight out of high school is often a bad idea, so is skipping it altogether.
The key problem is these aren't skills you can pick up incrementally. They take years of focused study. For example, you can't learn control systems without diff. eq. which in turn requires calculus. There's little immediate reward to learning calculus and diff eq, and little way to know what's important without expert guidance.
You assume I have interest in those deeper aspects, which I don't. I enjoy my work, but it's just a job to me. I stay up-to-date and develop my skills, but I have a life outside of work, and generally stay away from writing code in my other endeavors.
I think it’s both true that most people do a lot of growing up at university and that it can make the experience worse if you are younger than everyone.
From a U.K. perspective one issue is that many student things generally assume everyone will be over 18 and therefore able to enter places that serve alcohol and only admit people over that age. Even if you don’t want to drink you may still be barred from participating. But this might not be such a big deal in the U.S.
If you’re only interested in your studies and you excel at them then maybe things don’t matter so much but I think for most people, university is mot so much about learning the subject you are reading as it is about being socialised into the middle class, and this is harder to do if you come in with one hand tied behind your back.
College in the US is usually about getting a piece of paper in order to be a nurse or teacher or accountant or social worker or civil servant. At many schools,, people show up for class and go home. Nobody cares what age you are and it is a service.
I think the college experience in the US varies pretty widely depending on what sort of college you are at what you are studying, and your own attitude. An average state school, a small liberal arts college, an MIT/caltech, business school at Yale or Harvard. These will all be vastly different experiences.
+1 to this, there are a large number of low cost opportunities for 16-22 year olds that become orders of magnitude more difficult and expensive later in life.
Notable examples include taking a year off to hike the AT or PCT. Volunteering in peace corps or americorps. Working in a different country, or working in a resort/tourism community.
Later in life taking such actions will put a major dent in your career ambitions and finances, but early in life it’a much easier to avoid the question “what were you doing between X and Y”
Just to chime in with the other experience- due to a bout of mono, I had to repeat 7th grade. I was already young for the grade, and as we had just moved stateside, I was having trouble integrating socially.
The repeat year was the best thing that could have happened to me. I was finally with my age-peer group, was appropriately socially aware, and just had a better scholastic experience across the board for the rest of my early education. I completely agree that much of early education is simple life experience, and it does the academically-gifted students no favors to push speed at the expense of everything else.
I agree, but I suspect that there is a good chance that a long essay or a short book could provide a lot of that needed learning and growing up. I could contribute several paragraphs of what I wish someone had told me when I was in the first grade, fifth grade, eighth grade, a freshman in college, etc., told me about girls and women, love, home, and marriage, organizational behavior, the economy and careers, politics, etc.
I knew a few kids who went to college very early. To say that it messed up their life is an understatement. Schools should figure out how to teach smart kids useful stuff while they get to learn how to be social with kids their own age.
Lots of people start doing olympiads (often there are relatively big correspondence programmes and similar to train people before selecting teams for the international ones). I was never intelligent enough to do well in them, alas.
This woman dropped out of high school and illegally became an underage prostitute because she was struggling with depression. I don't mean to minimize her experience or suggest there is anything intrinsically wrong with that, but I don't think you can just project whatever terrible school experiences led her to that and think everyone has that bad of an experience in high school.
This reminds me a bit of Scott Alexander's extreme bias against school, due to all of the extreme bullying he faced.
It might make more sense to say kids who are having a truly awful experience in high school should skip high school, rather than just "smart kids should skip high school." I think I was a pretty smart person, perfect SAT score even, and I certainly could have learned everything I learned in high school must faster with less wasted time if I studied on my own, but I don't think the experience was worthless. It's the last time I had real, truly close friends. It was the last time I competed hard in real sports leagues. Theoretically, I could have tried to find other ways to do those things, but there's some benefit to just being around the same people all the time and doing things together if you don't hate each other and make each other's lives awful.
I don't know what else I would have done. I may have been academically ready for college a lot earlier, but I wasn't socially ready. I wasn't socially ready even at 18 and probably should have waited even longer. You can't just actually go to work even if you're able to because of child labor laws.
I skipped 5th grade and I can't for the life of me really pinpoint what possible negative impact it has had on my life. And, even if you suggest that there really wasn't any positive, either, just as a sheer function of entering the labor force one year earlier, the lifetime income impact is quite significant. I certainly don't want to dismiss that I had one less year of fun elementary school times with friends, but it's fairly clear to me that the way we've organized schooling isn't really rooted in anything that really promotes the success of an individual, but more what is socially most efficient/easiest.
I generally think advice from .001% fringe elites is less than useless, it’s actively harmful. People like you are completely detached from reality and most of you have nothing but active disdain for people of lesser intelligence like me - hell, you probably would support euthanizing people with IQs like mine.
Friend, I remember your posts from the past several months. I honestly think you need to go through some therapy. You have been through a lot of bad experiences because of your parents and because of unrealistic expectations put on you. It's not your fault.
But being angry like this is really toxic for yourself. Life should be happier than this for you. Please find a way to talk to a therapist because you need to release your anger, get past your trauma, and find happiness.
My parents don’t understand why I believe this actually, they’re pretty smart and went to selective institutions. I, on the other hand, am an example of generational decline with nothing to live for because people like GP think state schoolers that didn’t skip multiple grades are subhuman.
You need to learn to be happy being who you are, not who you "should" be. If your parents are toxic, then take a break from them. Surround yourself with people that make you happy and forget about your past. You should really see a therapist because this anger and resentment is not the way to live your life. You're still young and you can have an incredibly happy life. Please consider it strongly.
We've banned this account for repeatedly abusing HN. Attacking other users like this is totally not cool.
We can all empathize with the difficult experiences you've been through, but translating that into hundreds of off-topic HN comments is not a good use of energy. You've been doing this for a long time, with multiple accounts, and we've asked you to stop many times. Many other HN users have had difficult experiences too, and they're not behaving this way. It's time to stop doing this.
My Wife left high school after sophomore year, she didn't like the bullying etc. and got into "middle college" a program with college level classes at the local community college taught by professors. She got into NYU and a few others once she graduated so there is a path outside of high school for some. I do feel like there is a valuable lesson to be learned from high school besides education and that is socialization. Going straight to college after middle school seems unrealistic for 99% of folks anyway so what will be filled with that 4 years before college starts?
I'm naturally suspicious of anyone's "shoulds" about education unless they base them on research in sociology, psychology, and/or pedagogy. Otherwise, they are usually based on the person's own personal history and our interpretation of our history is always suspect and biased.
(The author's disclaimer means my point doesn't apply to the linked article.)
It may be the case that the author's high school experience wasn't worth the time, but that's a retroactive observation. It's probably true that for some people high school is a net good and for some it isn't. But unless you have an effective way to distinguish one from the other before they go to high school, it's hard to draw actionable advice from that fact.
Broadly, I think the mistake is thinking that "what is taught in school" is somehow objectively good or necessary.
I've come to think of it more in terms of "School helps people navigate a world in which you are generally expected to go to school."
Some people will get a great deal of value from it, and really need it, whatever "it" is -- it could be what's in the books or it could be what's in the people around you.
Some people may not need it much at all.
Furthermore, of course what makes this especially complex is the variance in "schools."
I'm a highschool dropout, but I did a decent job of attending most of the way through anyway cause all my friends weren't fuckups. I have a hard time imagining what sort of person I'd be if I didn't have that growth with a cohort of friends.
In terms of my success as a human who is part of society I don't think anything has been as helpful as the social skills that I learned in high school. I don't think it's the only way to learn these skills, but I certainly feel like my social-learning velocity was by far the highest in high school.
Ultimately how other people perceive me influences my quality of life more than any other thing. I don't think as a "smart kid" skipping high school would have helped me, I think it would have hurt me a lot. I feel like my life opened up immensely when I accepted that being smart and correct and having a deep understanding of the problem at hand matters so much less than being able to get along with people.
In order to make a convincing argument, the author needs to elaborate more on how the time should be spent instead
While I can agree with him high school is a lot of tedium and busy work, I'm skeptical sitting around at home doing whatever you want will result in a more enriching use of time
There will be the natural tendency to avoid learning about things you don't like, which can result in a biased worldview. There is the natural tendency to procrastinate. There is the need to interact with people with different perspectives who will challenge your ideas. I don't see this will be an environment that helps budding minds flourish.
I might have been more inclined to agree with him pre-pandemic, but the experience has taught me I (and probably most other people too) actually suck at using time well when there is no structure
I think high school education was very good for me. Then again we had proper educational system here. Much more so than university, which I think had much less effect.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 224 ms ] threadWhat would happen if world-lead expert personal tuition was available to everyone? (Obviously impractical, but let's pretend, as a thought experiment.)
To what extent are we standing our own feet as a species by prioritising hierarchy and economic discrimination over free access to the best possible education for everyone?
Especially for those who want it and can benefit from it?
Governments can be inefficient, but part of the reason for the inefficiency is that they have to provide the same service to everyone and that's hard. They can't cherry-pick their customers.
There may be new educational funding models we should be looking at. Maybe a lot of educational YouTube videos should be directly funded by government grants, and ad-free video hosting provided by government infrastructure if they want it.
If they can handle this, then they could take college level classes and get high school credit and college credit at the same time.
I went to an alternative high school that met on a community college campus and had 50% of the requirements for HS graduation for junior and senior year served by taking college courses. I was only able to get about half a year of college credit this way, but I was able to get half a year head start on college. In hindsight, I would have liked to start that process a year earlier and skipped as much HS as I could. I don't think that path is for everyone, but if you're capable and motivated I recommend exploring alternative pathways for reducing the traditional HS experience in favor of more profitable uses of time & talent.
I thought I was skipping high school, but in reality I was actually skipping college. It is really bad.
edit: there are obviously ways to get this socialization without being in a traditional, horrible, highschool environment. I do not know if I would homeschool my kids or not!
Is this really the case or do you just not remember specific things you learned or even abstract concepts around learning itself that are hard to quantify?
Repeat that exercise with other areas of knowledge.
I personally spent most high school classes either sleeping or playing on my laptop, and often literally learning about what we had been seeing in class when reading the exam's title. Often doing things like completing the math exams based on recollections from middle school. And yet got by, year after year, as well as anyone else.
I then spent over a decade having a hard time figuring out how to actually take and keep any kind of notes, study and how to learn things that didn’t just "come to me" on their own.
Quite a weird experience.
Looking back, I can only wish it had been different. But that’s pointless.
I'd endorse that claim, for the most part. I definitely learned all kinds of things that are not useful nor interesting, and then promptly discarded them. Maybe 2 or 3 isolated things in university passed the above criteria for me, and those were only possible because of the greater freedom offered in universities over K-12.
The times where I actually learned things, including abstract metalearning, were always when I was trying to do difficult things independently from school. School was just taking time away from that. It's important to keep in mind that the alternative to the current education system isn't 'child sits in a box devoid of all sensory input'- there are tons of possibilities.
I went to a Montessori school for a year in middle school, and I remember being in a class with 5th graders doing math at the 9th grade level. I also remember a few kids in 5th grade doing math at a 4th grade level. The key was that the teachers could teach their subject at all of those levels.
I feel like some of this could be implemented in a less structured educational system. Being able to move at varying different paces while still socializing with peers of the same age is a good combination. I would add a little more structure than Montessori schools though, to make sure that students are moving at least at a baseline pace. It also takes some scheduling work to make sure that teachers aren't teaching an hour lesson to one student at a time.
Think about it: if smart kids benefit from a more personalized, stimulating, and nurturing approach to education, then this is even more true for the kids who are less intelligent. Why do we assume that the kids who are academically behind are well served by an apathetic, inflexible, impersonal system?
For example, consider very small classes taught by highly trained, highly motivated, highly paid teachers - but instead of having this be the solution for an elite cohort of "smart" kids, let this be the solution for all kids.
We don't assume that, society just isn't willing to pay for more expensive more personalized education for the masses.
Disagree. Kids who are smarter can take better advantage of improved education. I think diminishing returns would quickly kick in for most kids.
That's on the student; in college, where you can pick your classes and course of study, it's on the student completely. But regardless, I was told: 'Don't blame the professor or the class or the book or the weather; it's your job to learn.' Good preparation for professional life too.
For example there was a course that almost entirely covered collaborative development and some regex, when I already had enough regex knowledge and was actively working as a software engineer, doing collaborative development all day every day.
There are definitely some areas where you have to make an effort to learn- and I do. But so far in my computer science degree (I'm taking third-year courses right now), all I've really learned is C++, but that's really not much considering I taught most of it to myself before my first term since I tested out of the entry-level courses.
It's an important part of life and becoming an adult in so many ways and skipping it deprives the child of the opportunity for the good and bad experiences that humans need to experience to become balanced adults.
Life has bad bits for everyone. Chopping out high school preemptively is not only not a solution but is actively detrimental.
From about 6th or 7th grade through graduation, school is a weird environment all its own.
Some might say it is similar to being in prison though…
At least for part of high school that’s what it felt like at times for me. The biggest issue being the forced labour - sorry, I mean “homework” - of which the burden was substantial and the benefits not at all clear.
At the time I remember being very depressed that even when I was at home and away from the school that I often didn’t enjoy, instead of indulging in my hobbies (which, coincidentally, is how I learnt practically all of the specialised skills that I used to kick off my techology career) I was forced to complete endless hours of dull and unsurprising homework. I understand the benefits in moderation but the sheer amount assigned to me was actively detrimental to the point of robbing me of a big chunk of my free time as a teenager.
I desperately wanted to continue teaching myself programming (this was in the early 90’s) but instead I had to complete some mindless essay about sedimentary fucking rocks.
Not to mention that I had undiagnosed ADHD so the homework took me forever and created considerable stress.
Having said that, it was so bad (and felt so pointless) that even though I was academically pretty strong and had wanted to go to University from quite a young age, I instead quit school at 16, immediately got a job in a business consultancy (using my self-taught programming/design skills) and was running small software projects for huge multi-national businesses within a year. By the time most of my peer group graduated University, I had about 5 years of a software development career under my belt and had already started my first business.
In retrospect I don’t think I would have done anything different, apart from putting about 500% less effort into the sedimentary rock essays.
I think we tell ourselves stories about how we got from A to B (like mine above) but in reality it’s never quite as simple. It’s always easier to rationalise and construct what feels like a meaningful narrative in retrospect.
For all you know, the choices you made, even if they now feel slightly uniformed in retrospect may still have been 100% right for you!
I suppose reflecting on my previous comment, the flip side of the situation is that I was incredibly lucky to go to a pretty good school (even though I didn’t always like it much) and the single biggest benefit I got was the utterly amazing life-long friends I made there, who are still great friends today. Those friends have had 1000% more positive impact on me than my schooling did, but I wouldn’t have met them without school.
Interesting. I've often thought that this would have really helped iron out some of my character flaws early on too. At least in the military you are willingly signing up for an experience that you know will be hard, but likely also rewarding and character shaping.
Everyone I know who has been in the military seems to have developed a more resilient and disciplined approach to life which has served them very well later on. Although clearly it's not universally good for everyone who takes this path.
In many cases the 'negative experiences' are daily abuse.
I myself had a horrible and painful time in high school, but listening to people of various backgrounds I concluded it's pretty much hit or miss. I can't generalize from my negative experience, but you can't generalize from your positive one either.
I'm reading into your comment a little bit and projecting my own thoughts of "these things might have been character-building." That might be true, but for some they could also end up causing PTSD/similar things, difficultly trusting people, severe low-self-confidence, etc.
How many bad habits are learned in high school, from catty behavior, to acting out for attention, to being physically dominant, to spending money on flashy gear, to gain status? How many environments outside of high school do these behaviors result in meaningful, lasting status gains? Not many, at least none that can be considered healthy environments. If the goal of high school is to prepare kids for adulthood, they don't do a good job of it.
Granted, not every school is like this and not everyone has these experiences. But putting teens in a social pressure-cooker among their age cohort will result in some very unnatural local optimums for behavior.
...
How is that different than an office?
I suppose this might be true in middle-class, suburban areas; but where I grew up, and I imagine in similar places elsewhere, there were plenty of working teenagers who held responsibility for their family's well-being. They worked in the family corner store/restaurant/shop/farm during the weekends and evenings. Others provided primary care for family members; their younger siblings or infirm adults.
I wouldn't say "nothing." Going to school 5 days a week mimics a workweek, even if the timing is off. Being with random people of your age group in close proximity is a little extreme, but it has some similarities to working in an office with a random assortment of personalities. Having tasks assigned to you that you then have to complete isn't exactly how workplaces function, but having a baseline ability to complete work that isn't your favorite is a valuable skill.
Now, all of these things are taken to the extreme in high school and that should be adjusted. However, saying that none of high school is relevant is a stretch.
Maybe this is a shortcoming of our modern world outside of school, rather than a shortcoming of schools. I rather think it's a point in public school's favor that students attend the same classes, do the same work, and are judged according to the same standards as their peers regardless if their parents are well-off, middle-class, or poor. (That's the ideal, anyways. There are always exceptions.)
Having exposure to a wide swath of humanity at a young age is, I think, quite valuable. It's easier to hate people you've never met.
It's possible for the change to be bad (e.g. parents in a cult pulling their kids out of school to move to The Compound), but I'd wager that if you took a kid who felt like high school was a terrible experience and gave them other constructive options and the resources to pursue them, it'd almost always be a net win.
The value of the 'high school experience' is contextual, not everyone will experience the same balance of good and bad. For some people, the bad is so overwhelming that it goes beyond the point of constructive and well into destructive. Those situations aren't hard to detect.
a nice discussion on the topic can be found here https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-the-cult-o...
I used to get knots in my stomach on the first day of school. I just knew there would be an after school fight, and I would be involved even though I tried to remain invisible.
I should have gone to a community college instead of high school, but didn't even know it was an option at the time.
(I wasen't a big kid, but taught by my Irish father to never back down from a male on male confrontations. That might explain some of my problems with bullies? By the time I hit high school, I was so beyond fighting, and any form of bullying--to any of my classmates. I really didn't like high school, with the exception of a few girlfriends. Everything I should have learned in high school, I made up for at a community college in a semester. I remember sitting in a chem class with 35 year old nursing students, and I was in heaven. I loved college so much, I didn't want it to end.)
I wanted to transfer. I wanted to be home schooled. I wanted to do absolutely anything but be there. I had a plan though: start my own business whilst I was still at school so that I would have goals at sixteen, and it wouldn't be like I was bumming about doing nothing when I left. So I did that.
Fast-forward to me now twenty-eight and I'm very happy, working on my own terms with my own biz. Life is good. Partner of six years, wonderful family. Never went to university.
Did it build character? Yes. Would I go through it again? I can only say that I'm glad I will never have to. However, it gave me insight to knowing what schools of the time were willing to overlook and tolerate, and will definitely inform my style of parenting when it comes to problems at school.
However, it was a lot of wasted time sitting in classrooms daydreaming. This time could have been spent much more productively. But we don't have any better.
Anyway, we do have some empirical evidence of what happens when people skip high school, since many kids are homeschooled. My general impression of people who have been homeschooled is that they are just as much balanced adults as anyone else. That shouldn't be too surprising. Homeschooled kids still socialize with their friends, still struggle to understand concepts, still get into trouble on occasion.
Now, 6 years out of high school, I attend a community college part-time to work on a bachelors degree. Funny how I completely discounted higher education just a few years ago.
It's not available everywhere I believe, but if it's available, there's another option compared to AP classes or regular classes (or other magnet/governor schools).
Tiny % either way.
145 is the top three tenths of 1 percent, not the top tenth. The average high school size in the US is 854 students [1]. In an average school, you would expect there to be 2.5 students with 145+ IQ. The largest school in each state is about 5-10x the average size school for that state. Let's call a large school 3x average, then. In a large school, you would expect to find 7.5 students with 145+ IQ, or roughly 2 per graduating year.
"About 8" and "Maybe 1" are almost an order of magnitude apart.
1: 2011 Dept of Ed statistics https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2011/pesschools09/tables/table_05.as...
But we agree on the bottom line: 145 is not rare. You might know someone of this IQ.
College, on the other hand, was an abject waste of four years.
I turned out fine - but in retrospect I had a lot of growing up yet to do, and I think I would have made better use of my college experience if I had been able to do that growing up before college as opposed to during freshman and sophomore year, where you make a lot of decisions that will influence your life for a while. I missed many opportunities at MIT because I didn't really understand how the academic and professional world worked and what would be important to focus on for my career - let alone more personal matters. Looking back now I wish I had actually taken a year off before college, as opposed to skipping a grade in a hurry to get there, and I encourage every high school student and parent I know to think in these terms.
This will of course be very situational. Yes, if you are in a bad high school with bad teachers and bad students, you might be better off skipping it in favor of some alternative. But in general, a lot of growing up is just getting experience and doing things, and high school is how you get a lot of that experience before you go to college and have to do bigger and more consequential things. Don't be (or don't let your kids be) in a hurry to get ahead of that curve.
In general I think freshmen / sophomores don’t take enough advantages & don’t understand the professional implications of their time in college.
You and every other single human on the planet ;-)
I did have a plan for how to spend that time in a way that was meaningful, but COVID trashed it and I was left with nothing.
I think everyone is immature/makes poor decisions/could have chosen better paths their first couple of years in college regardless of age of matriculation. The first time you live with little supervision, have to start thinking about a career, etc. is going to be rough regardless of whether you are 17 or 20 because it is all such a new experience
The people I have met who went back to school later in life (e.g., some years of military service first) had it together in a lot of ways that aren't likely for an 18 year old.
* Managing adversity
* Deeply engaging with issues they care about
Now I understand the search for self-identity is important, and college _can_ be a place to develop that. There are other ways to develop that don't involve paying $$$ as you try to balance personal emotional and intellectual development.
I think the education received for money spent isn't as high at 18 as it would be a few years later.
College is wonderful for some, maybe even a lot of the posters here.
But honest question, for people who have done college and graduate school: how do the first 2 years of college & graduate school compare in terms of focus, intellectual reward, depth personal relationships? I'm not saying it's 100% better later in life (graduate school), but ... I would be very interested to hear peoples' takes on this.
I'm going to guess that many (probably not most, but many) of us here come from a tradition where education is paramount and deviating from that without a clear plan is like deadly frightening to the parents et al.
Definitely true for me as I was reading this thread, so thank you for making this a bit more relatable in my mind (and those of others, I'm sure).
I'm in my mid-40's now, but I swear to you I have never felt older in my life then that time nearly 20 years ago; After a completely awkward TGI Friday's dinner, I'm in my hotel room in Miami. Instead of being out visiting friends which I had planned weeks earlier, at the last minute the boss decides we should go over the powerpoint a one-hundred and SIXTH time.
The first day of grad school was DELICIOUS after that.
Sometimes it is because they co-signed 6 figures of student loans.
Yes, I was young for college but it’s not like college students as a whole are these mature individuals. Was probably for the best overall.
Honestly, MIT is probably a better place than most for individuals who are maybe a bit atypical relative to other places.
Over time, MIT's acceptance of diversity, intellectual and otherwise, has waned. Right now, it's the top university brand in the world. That's a tightrope political game to play, and MIT optimizes to it very well. It's been a slow process for many decades, but it's really accelerated recently.
I'm not sure what the better schools are now. I've heard good things about Georgia Tech.
We do need nerd camps and nerd schools still. The old MIT was awesome.
100% agreed. I took a year out to work in software before University. Despite being completely disregarded by employers, it changed my perspective on independence, time management, and the risk of not making the most of opportunities. It's one of the best life decisions that I've made.
Also with today's plethora of online education available there's unlimited amount of options for exploration. In fact going deep application domain wise before college can be a great way to motivate deeper study of theory once in college. Imagine being a high schooler today mucking around with tensor flow apis. Once you get to college all those black magic random functions (i.e. predict(), fit()) you were calling in the Google tutorials will all of sudden make sense.
You lament people are doing X, and implore them to do Y to accomplish Z, but don’t analyze that perhaps X-not-Y is the rational way to accomplish Z from their perspective.
My thinking is so many viewing college/graduate programs as a waste is a sign they’re offering a bad product.
However, if you can have a much more fun life if you have a deep understanding of things like signal processing, image processing, differential equations, control systems, dynamics, etc.
Those let you do things like building medical imaging systems, autonomous robots, or deep learning systems. They're much more intellectually fulfilling than just coding, which loses its charm after a bit. You're also not competing against low-cost coders, which isn't a problem in the current market, but economies are cyclical. When the next recession comes, having more specialized skills is more helpful.
These do require mentorship, guidance, and some form of study.
As much as coming into university straight out of high school is often a bad idea, so is skipping it altogether.
The key problem is these aren't skills you can pick up incrementally. They take years of focused study. For example, you can't learn control systems without diff. eq. which in turn requires calculus. There's little immediate reward to learning calculus and diff eq, and little way to know what's important without expert guidance.
From a U.K. perspective one issue is that many student things generally assume everyone will be over 18 and therefore able to enter places that serve alcohol and only admit people over that age. Even if you don’t want to drink you may still be barred from participating. But this might not be such a big deal in the U.S.
If you’re only interested in your studies and you excel at them then maybe things don’t matter so much but I think for most people, university is mot so much about learning the subject you are reading as it is about being socialised into the middle class, and this is harder to do if you come in with one hand tied behind your back.
Notable examples include taking a year off to hike the AT or PCT. Volunteering in peace corps or americorps. Working in a different country, or working in a resort/tourism community.
Later in life taking such actions will put a major dent in your career ambitions and finances, but early in life it’a much easier to avoid the question “what were you doing between X and Y”
The repeat year was the best thing that could have happened to me. I was finally with my age-peer group, was appropriately socially aware, and just had a better scholastic experience across the board for the rest of my early education. I completely agree that much of early education is simple life experience, and it does the academically-gifted students no favors to push speed at the expense of everything else.
I skipped eighth grade, and I feel the same way.
This reminds me a bit of Scott Alexander's extreme bias against school, due to all of the extreme bullying he faced.
It might make more sense to say kids who are having a truly awful experience in high school should skip high school, rather than just "smart kids should skip high school." I think I was a pretty smart person, perfect SAT score even, and I certainly could have learned everything I learned in high school must faster with less wasted time if I studied on my own, but I don't think the experience was worthless. It's the last time I had real, truly close friends. It was the last time I competed hard in real sports leagues. Theoretically, I could have tried to find other ways to do those things, but there's some benefit to just being around the same people all the time and doing things together if you don't hate each other and make each other's lives awful.
I don't know what else I would have done. I may have been academically ready for college a lot earlier, but I wasn't socially ready. I wasn't socially ready even at 18 and probably should have waited even longer. You can't just actually go to work even if you're able to because of child labor laws.
I'm not going to ban you because we haven't warned you before, but please read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules from now on.
But being angry like this is really toxic for yourself. Life should be happier than this for you. Please find a way to talk to a therapist because you need to release your anger, get past your trauma, and find happiness.
We can all empathize with the difficult experiences you've been through, but translating that into hundreds of off-topic HN comments is not a good use of energy. You've been doing this for a long time, with multiple accounts, and we've asked you to stop many times. Many other HN users have had difficult experiences too, and they're not behaving this way. It's time to stop doing this.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28517375.
(The author's disclaimer means my point doesn't apply to the linked article.)
It may be the case that the author's high school experience wasn't worth the time, but that's a retroactive observation. It's probably true that for some people high school is a net good and for some it isn't. But unless you have an effective way to distinguish one from the other before they go to high school, it's hard to draw actionable advice from that fact.
Smart Kids Should Skip High School - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11509374 - April 2016 (65 comments)
I've come to think of it more in terms of "School helps people navigate a world in which you are generally expected to go to school."
Some people will get a great deal of value from it, and really need it, whatever "it" is -- it could be what's in the books or it could be what's in the people around you.
Some people may not need it much at all.
Furthermore, of course what makes this especially complex is the variance in "schools."
In terms of my success as a human who is part of society I don't think anything has been as helpful as the social skills that I learned in high school. I don't think it's the only way to learn these skills, but I certainly feel like my social-learning velocity was by far the highest in high school.
Ultimately how other people perceive me influences my quality of life more than any other thing. I don't think as a "smart kid" skipping high school would have helped me, I think it would have hurt me a lot. I feel like my life opened up immensely when I accepted that being smart and correct and having a deep understanding of the problem at hand matters so much less than being able to get along with people.
While I can agree with him high school is a lot of tedium and busy work, I'm skeptical sitting around at home doing whatever you want will result in a more enriching use of time
There will be the natural tendency to avoid learning about things you don't like, which can result in a biased worldview. There is the natural tendency to procrastinate. There is the need to interact with people with different perspectives who will challenge your ideas. I don't see this will be an environment that helps budding minds flourish.
I might have been more inclined to agree with him pre-pandemic, but the experience has taught me I (and probably most other people too) actually suck at using time well when there is no structure