It's not just that I could have told you this. It's that I ranted and screamed this to anyone who would listen at age 14. EDIT: That's ten years ago, folks.
And, strangely enough, once I recovered some sanity, I actually did leave high school, I did a lot better for it, and now my parents basically agree with me.
It's amazing how people always seem to start at the statement "self-discipline has been good for me" and somehow arrive at the conclusion "optimized regimentation is what's best for everyone!".
When you're 14 though every injustice seems gross and all the broken parts of society seem obvious to you and you don't understand why everyone else doesn't see it too.
When you're 14 you're smart enough to recognize hypocrisies, but you're still not wise enough to have perspective and "pick your battles".
I agree. The problem is when you arrive to age 24 and much of it turns out to really, truly have been gross, broken, and stupid -- but now you're "wise" enough to know how little chance you've got of fixing any of it!
EDIT: On the other hand, most other people don't seem to have the insistent inner child I have who's always asking when it's time to go play, so maybe I'm just fucked-up.
24 year-olds can also be stupid, yes. Were you just looking for an excuse for a snide remark, though, or do you actually have some N years old I can reach at which point my opinions become valid?
14-year old's are wiser in many ways than 24-year old's. Most people in either age group aren't wise or mature enough to think from other people's perspectives, but 14-year old's are less pretentious about their motives. You're not posting here out of concern for the people you think are not being served by the current system, but rather out of some narrow sense of having been wronged by the system (despite almost certainly being extremely privileged). You have no idea how to improve the system as a whole, or even what the system looks like top to bottom, but you can't stop complaining about how you felt when you were young. Why?
>It's not just that I could have told you this. It's that I ranted and screamed this to anyone who would listen at age 14*
When you're 14 you'll also shout that it's unjust that your parents don't let you hang out with your 21 year old crush you met of FB. Or that they don't let you ignore school and focus on a career as a professional videogame player.
I've met more kids who wasted their time on a "career" as a professional baseball player than as a professional MLG player. Nobody takes the latter seriously. Too many people imagine the former is a real possibility. It doesn't help that many colleges offer free rides for people who make a good addition to their team.
Again: that's quite correct, but the issue is that my view on compulsory schooling (at least, as we currently have it) has held up for another ten years after that and even proven persuasive to my parents.
Read the rest of the comment. I dropped out of high school at 16, then went to university at 18, graduated university with honors, and have now worked in the tech industry and started graduate school at an elite institution. And I honestly don't think I could have done any of it if I'd stayed in high school.
On top of my own example, my fiancee is one of the people the article mentions as being brilliant, obedient, excellent little students who find themselves completely and utterly burned-out by the whole process.
The system isn't designed to maximize your personal well-being. Your extrapolation from "this was good for me" to "we should have everyone do it" is troubling.
Except that's the opposite of the inference I made. My reasoning is, "If I'm an exception, then other people might be too, so the system broadly should be less uniform."
Whereas you seem to be defending a system that focuses, above all else, on uniformity.
The system isn't designed to maximize your personal well-being.
That would imply the system gives a damn about well-being of anyone, whatsoever, at all, so it's pretty obviously wrong.
By that standard, you're an exception that the system successfully accommodated. So what's the problem? I'm also going to guess that you've taken advantage of help from tons of people that the system has successfully placed around you to help you. I may not have needed high school education, but it's quite unlikely that I haven't benefited dramatically from a system that gives everyone high school education.
At some point, you have to stop whining from a personal sense of being wronged and start asking how you can help.
By that standard, you're an exception that the system successfully accommodated.
No, I'm an exception who the system made miserable, at extra cost and burden to itself, for 10 years until its rules finally allowed me to leave.
I spent an actual post elsewhere specifically making suggestions for what I think would make a better system for everyone, not just myself.
It starts with:
1) Let people make choices for themselves.
2) Hit them with the natural consequences of their own choices as soon as possible. Don't make any effort to delay consequences; instead, hasten them.
2a) It's ok to soften the consequences for children when they make a mistake. What psychological studies show is that sure and consistent consequences are better at training behavior than more extreme consequences that arrive unsurely and inconsistently.
3) Actually attempt to reason with people, including children. Children are foolish, but not stupid. The more you reason with them, the more they learn to use reason with people. The less you reason them, the more they learn to manipulate and exploit people.
4) Make sure your kids know what the adult world really is. They don't have to like it, since most adults don't, and knowing that it sucks earlier on will help them develop the moral fiber to fix it.
5) Teach your kids ("your" referring to any parent or teacher or adult in general) useful stuff that will help them when they become adults.
This isn't even remotely coherent from a policy perspective. You couldn't even handle schooling as a child because somehow you weren't handled in some special way and couldn't do what you wanted to do, but now you think somehow all parents must act in a specific way that you prescribe? What if they refuse? Why should they follow any of this? Maybe they are all special too? So your "system" is hoping that parents follow some random set of rules that you came up with, having, let me guess, zero parenting experience? Do you really feel that behind all this lies your incredible concern for the world's children?
So your proposal is to replace the entire education system with the principle that children need to become adults? What is there to converse about? We're not at all talking about educational policy here, we're talking about your childhood problems - only you're confusing the subject matter.
History has been going in the exact opposite direction - we treat more and more adults as children, with extended schooling, cushy jobs removed from front-line business concerns, etc. I'm sure you've benefitted from all this. The reason that you felt that you could opt out of school is not that you were ready to be an adult, but rather because over time environments outside of school have become more school-like and conducive to ongoing mental development, as opposed to grueling hard work.
But this isn't remotely close to universally true for most people in the world or even in the US or in the western world. For many people, not having to go to school means dealing with abusive parents for longer, being forced into manual labor, being continously tempted by criminal life, drug trade and prostitution. You have a privileged background and skills that are extremely valuable in the real world - this isn't true of many people and school is their only chance. Universal education serves to stigmatize those forces that attempt to take advantage of children by enforcing the norm that children are not adults and should be in school. Is this not ideal for every single person? Of course. Is English the perfect language for everyone born in the US? For obvious reasons, real world laws and real world social norms aren't going to be perfectly nuanced and flexible to be ideal in every single possible case.
The huge problem with this suggestion is that society is built around the idea that you have a "High School Diploma" and a "College Diploma", so just up and quitting school isn't a good solution.
I think the best solution for someone trapped in the school system is to basically do a few things:
Middle School
1. Survive.
2. Get ahead. You're not old enough (in society's eyes) to out maneuver the adults yet. Prepare yourself.
3. Develop a love and interest in another foreign culture.
High School
1. Take every "legal" chance to get out of normal classes. Do joint-enrollment, AP, and technical classes.
2. If you must take "normal" classes, sleep in them, or do tomorrow's homework (the rest of the year's homework if you can) in class. Test well. Then study more interesting stuff with the extra time you have at night. Remember: Homework is largely graded on completion and is typically the largest part of your grade, so do the easy thing.
3. Apply for scholarships like hell. Every dollar you can get now is worth 1,000 times itself in the future.
4. Learn a language and culture of a (very) foreign country. Don't take Spanish or French. Do German, Chinese, Russian, Japanese, Korean, etc. Learning a language doesn't just allow you to interact with others from that country, it gives you perspective on your own situation. This is vital to your education.
University
1. Buy the best education you can for the value. An online degree is cheap, but not valuable. An Ivy League degree is expensive, but the value may not add up to the expense. Try Georgia Tech, not MIT. Try University of Washington, not Harvard. Use your own judgement here.
2. Don't go into debt if you can.
3. Do an exchange program. Spend a year in a country you care about. See also: High School #4. Don't stay in the "international housing" if you can. Try to stay in the dorms with other normal students.
4. While in University, do paid work in the field you are going into. The more recognizable the name of the company you work for, the better. If you're doing work at the University, don't do retail, food staff, etc. Do technical support, tutoring, or administrative. Not only are these jobs easier and pay more, but they look way better on a future resume.
5. Take an advanced finance class and an advanced programming class, even if you have to "sit in" on the class (larger universities don't take roll and you can sneak in these classes sometimes). These are the two human systems that make our world work today. If you don't get this, you're going to get swindled as a professional.
6. Join clubs. If they don't exist, make your own club. Get on the club's officer list. Put it on your resume if it looks good. You'll make lifelong friends from these people. You might even start your own business with these people.
7. Don't really bother with Frats / Sororities / Bars. The real fun and parties are with deep friendships you make and that allow you build a better lifestyle. See #6.
> An Ivy League degree is expensive, but the value may not add up to the expense. Try Georgia Tech, not MIT. Try University of Washington, not Harvard. Use your own judgement here.
If you're poor however, reverse this. UW or Georgia Tech will maybe give you enough aid to cover half the tuition.
Harvard and MIT will give you a full ride plus money for a return flight home and extra spending money each semester, all before you get a work-study job.
This is one of the greatest equalizers of income disparity available in America and I'm very glad to be able to take advantage of it.
4. While in University, do paid work in the field you are going into
That's pretty much the most important bit of advice I try to give to young people. Companies will hire a college student with no experience but will not hire a college graduate with no experience.
Wow, looking at this list, it's actually pretty surprising and impressive how much I've apparently managed to do right, at least starting at the "University" stage.
Apparently I should have taken an advanced finance class, but I'm pretty sure my finances are fine right now anyway.
> Don't really bother with Frats / Sororities / Bars.
Food for thought: Data seems to indicate that those who drink more, earn more. It is thought that the uninhibited random connections you make at those kind of social functions may open up opportunities to find better jobs.
This may explain why people who go to college, and are exposed to the stereotypical party scene, also statistically earn more. If you stick to parties with with a close nit group of friends, you may actually set yourself back career-wise, statistically speaking.
Of course there is a lot more to college than just finding a future career, but your opening statement seems to imply that focus.
The public school system in Utah provides language-immersion programs where students are taught regular subjects (math, geography, etc) in a foreign language for half the day. The elementary school nearest me offers Mandarin Chinese.
The system still may be prison-like and focused on standardized testing, but learning a foreign language at a young age is a nice benefit I'll be considering for my kids.
And, strangely enough, once I recovered some sanity, I actually did leave high school, I did a lot better for it, and now my parents basically agree with me.
It's amazing how people always seem to start at the statement "self-discipline has been good for me" and somehow arrive at the conclusion "optimized regimentation is what's best for everyone!".