I'm three years out of college. Most of my friends had no idea what they wanted to do in graduation. They picked a job, didn't like it, and now are switching. Except now the biological clocks are ticking, and it's becoming more important to pick the right path, because there is a major costs in switching careers.

If people started working at 14, or even 18, people would have a lot more time to discover the career they loved, before they had to assume the burden of earning enough to support a family.

I would say that school does help. It exposes people to different ideas and topics (Wait, I can get paid to do something with math besides run a business? You mean I can spend my entire life researching something?).

Personally, my opinion is that its absolutely great to know a lot about your specific field that you (want to) work in. But I would never want to limit myself to only knowing about one particular topic of knowledge.

//edit (to reply to this bit): If people started working at 14, or even 18, people would have a lot more time to discover the career they loved, before they had to assume the burden of earning enough to support a family

There's a lot of careers that require years of training to go through before you can begin working. Lawyers, Doctors, etc. We on HN might like to think that anyone can pick up a profession and just hack away and be able to make a living at it on whim. But it doesn't work like that. Its not as simple as deciding "I don't like being a lawyer, but I think I'd like being a farmer. I'm going to buy some land, plant seeds and call it a day".

I'm currently frustrated by high school. I've known I wanted to do "computers," like you, since middle school. High school hasn't changed that. Maybe some people aren't exposed to enough options in middle school. So why don't we fix middle school instead of sticking adolescents in 4 more years of useless education? Assuming a high schooler can take 8, and assuming only two will be in his or her subject of interest, fully 75% of the student's time is wasted learning facts and skills that are unimportant. Even accounting for an additional class in a subject of moderate interest that may be useful later in life, that leaves 5/8 periods wasted. Assuming an additional 2 classes (I'm feeling generous) are useful for the skills they provide, such as communication and... (You pick. I can't even think of another useful skill that a high school class might teach.), that leaves 3/8ths of a student's time wasted.

Consider a business where 37.5% of _every_ employee's paid hours was spent playing video games. (For all the good the other 3 classes do our student, I don't think that's an unfair comparison. Except the games would be more fun.) How do you think that company would fare? That's shockingly wasteful under any other circumstances. Why do we expect it of our schools?

(On a less cynical day, I'd say that eventually taking all these "useless" classes in HS might come in handy some day, you never know. I realized what I had gotten out of it the moment I left. I had an art history and ceramics class that's prompted me to look for a pottery studio near my home to continue on because I love making cups. The scant amount of chemistry I've learned bored me in HS (and I thought it was useless...) but it gave me a foundation in college to take so many chem classes I'm considering a double major in chem and CS. My last HS phys ed teacher over the course of a year never let me give up no matter how badly I was doing - something I've never had happen at the gyms I've been to with all the trainers I've seen. His voice is the voice I hear internally encouraging me to keep on running/swimming/working out or to even get my ass out of my chair after sitting in it all day. All these little things I thought were stupid ended up making a fairly large impact on my life. I wonder if I'm the exception to the rule.

I might also note I actually ended up dropping out of HS after my sophomore year because I thought going to college early would help me more with my interest in "computers" since I still had to take some number of "irrelevant" classes but I could focus more on my interests. I don't regret that, and occasionally I wish I had left earlier on, but I can't deny that what little I did do in HS has impacted me.)

Because, as an 8th grader, I wanted "computers". Now, I although I still want "computers", I don't know if I want to focus on web/scripting languages, on embedded systems (or something in between), on computer graphics or on UI/UX, etc. Now, I know what fields I have available to pick from, and have (some) experience in most of them. I can make more of an informed choice now then I could have a decade ago. I can tell you that as an 8th grader, I wouldn't have been able to understand most of the things that I do today.

Maybe some people aren't exposed to enough options in middle school. I think its because when you're 9-13 years old, theres limits to what you're capable of doing and what you know. Its completely and utterly impractical to even pretend that it is possible to expose someone to every field and topic by the time they're 13.

..fully 75% of the student's time is wasted learning facts and skills that are unimportant. See, I don't (and didn't) think think that any of my classes were unimportant or useless. I might not have cared about them. But I could see the value in the fact that the knowledge is there and in knowing the basics of the topic.

I might not be an English major, but I can read a book and then be able to understand it and write about it in a coherent manner. The ability to write (and therefore express yourself) is very important to have. I might not do anything with Chemistry or Biology, but at least now I can look at a food label, read the list of ingredients and (somewhat) break down whats in the food, to figure out how unhealthy it is for me. I might never need to know about the causes of the Industrial Revolution or what the big deal about the Enlightenment was, but, in its own way, thats exploring human thoughts and behaviors - that still influence the world today.

I had to fill a "Modern History" requirement here at college. I took International Relations. I found it interesting enough so that I took on a second major to study it some more.

The knowledge might not be directly useful to you. But its knowledge. And you can take it, and with some thought, apply to the rest of your life. The concept of learning the basics about a number of fields wasn't randomly chosen by people hundreds of years ago for no reason. They were onto something. That something might not work well for everyone. I'm not going to pretend it does. But, a majority of the time, it does work.

Schooling and learning — all of it - is what you make of it. At the end of the day, if you choose to make nothing of it, thats your choice. If you think that you can learn more on your own, then I hope that you're right. Because learning is something good, you should enjoy it, not hope to get out of the way so you can make money.

Oh, just for laughs, I went back to my elementary (primary) school yearbook. In the "When I grow up, I want to be.." field, I had down: "Baseball Player, Stock Broker, Lawyer, Scientist". This completely changed after Middle School. If that yearbook asked a similar question, the answer would read "Computers, Musician, Author, Politician". By the time I graduated High School, it would have read "Computers, Journalist, Graphic Artist". In college, if I had to fill out that field, it would likely read "Computers, Something to do with international politics, Author"