Drop Out of High School to Succeed in Life, Part 1
High school.
You spend 12 years of your life in a sub-optimal environment (to say the least), following rigorous schedules put in place by others, submitting your will and desires and interests to the education-industrial complex, just to get a piece of paper that proves that you are average. And then you go to four more years of school to prove that you are, I don't know, extra-average? People want to act like graduating high school and then college are some kind of special achievement, but how can it be that special if almost everyone else does it, too?
In actuality, the only reason high school diplomas are important is because they represent a cultural rite of passage. But it's a stupid rite of passage, and should therefore be abandoned.
I'm not the only one who thinks this, by the way. More and more, society is catching on to the fact that school is not all it's purported to be, and that education, and thus job readiness and ability to succeed in life, have less to do with how much time a person spent at an uncomfortable school desk and more to do with their personalities and how motivated and focused they are.
Emerging trends in hiring and recruitment lean toward evaluating job candidates based on entrepreneurial experience and the ability to self-motivate. Don't believe me? Just ask Elon Musk.
There are many excellent reasons why a teenager might choose to withdraw from high school, and it's hard to argue with most of them.
High school is boring. Students are expected to put aside their passions and interests for free time or pursue them only as "extracurriculars". Even if a student's passion is something on the curriculum, like chemistry, they're only going to get to immerse themselves in it for maybe an hour a day.
It's petty. You get judged for every single surface attribute. Your hair, your weight, your skin, your teeth, what you wear. You are grouped into herds based on your age and academic level. This keeps you from interacting with interesting people of all ages and abilities. You are further grouped into "cliques" based on interests (in the best case scenario) or personality attributes (in the worst). Jocks, nerds, theater kids, cheerleaders, misfits. You will be categorized by the second month of freshman year, and then good luck trying to align with a new clique. High schools are full of shallow, average people. And for the large part, it's school that made them that way in the first place.
It's overwhelming. High school entails far too much work. There are too many demands for even a super productive person to keep track of without experiencing severe burnout, and the work is organized into completely untenable schedules. You spend an hour doing calculus problems, and then the next hour you diagram sentences. The next hour you listen to some old guy drone on about what dates which battles occurred during the Civil War, and then you get a blessed forty-five minutes for lunch. After that, it's on to biology, where you dissect a frog or something, and then if you're lucky you get to chill in pottery class. Finally, you end the day with a few coerced laps in the gym and a lecture about calorie intake. You get home and collapse on your bed, but don't fall asleep! You've got five hours of homework to do. If your job required you to switch mental gears six times a day every day, doing 180's between incompatible tasks, you'd quit after two weeks. Colleges don't even require that many classes per semester of their students.
High school restricts your autonomy. At a time in your life when every shred of your being screams for the independence to take on challenges, captain your own destiny, prove your competence in the world, you are prevented from making even the most inconsequential choices for yourself. You are told how to dress. You are told what to study. You are told when to move from one task or pursuit to the next. You are told when and where to eat. You are prohibited from expressing yourself. You have no privacy. You must stay seated at your desk, raise your hand to speak, keep your opinions out of the discussion, and ask permission to use the bathroom, and you are even told what to do after school and on the weekends.
It can be traumatic. If you do not "fit in" well with the other kids, your life is probably going to be hell for four years. You'll likely be bullied, and even the kids who don't bully you will avoid hanging out with you for fear they'll be bullied, too. You'll be subjected to insults, stares, taunting, and even violence, and chances are your harassers will never be reined in by the administration. Even some of the teachers will treat you as subhuman. Or, if you're one of the "popular" kids, you'll be under constant pressure to perform. To be the prettiest. The funniest. The smartest. The coolest. No one will ever reward you for being the friendliest, the kindest, or the most creative.
You are filling your head with information that you will neither remember nor need as an adult. Adults in the audience, let's do a little experiment, shall we? Get out a piece of paper and a pen, and list twenty important pieces of knowledge you gained in high school. This will not be an easy task for most. You might have to struggle to remember even one important thing you learned in high school. Which is kind of weird, considering all those tests and quizzes you took. Two or three a week, with ten or more questions each. And they wouldn't test on things that weren't important for you to know as an adult, right? Let's see, five over eight, carry the three...if you studied for all those tests, you should be able to recall at least 2,560 facts that you learned in high school, all of them important. But you can't. Chances are, the things you remember learning are almost all things you were interested in, anyway. It was your interest, not the constant drilling and studying, that cemented them in your memory. And if you were interested in them anyway, chances are you would have learned them of your own accord, outside of school.
Is it fair to say that our society places too much importance on the high school diploma? I hope you're beginning to see that there are plenty of rational reasons why a young person might want to drop out, or not attend in the first place.
But how can you succeed in life without a diploma?
Find out tomorrow!
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Hi, I'm Starr!
I believe all human interactions should be consensual.
Yes. Love this artilce. Touches on many important issues.
We are unschooling our young kids. Or at least trying to.
Years of formal schooling have had a lasting impression on ourselves as parents, so we're in the process of unschooling us.
I couldn’t have said it better myself! I absolutely hated school and they almost ruined my future. Luckily I stood up for myself and made my own choices.
Love it!
I never wanted to be average and especially not extra average!
My favorite high school drop out has to be Sir Richard Branson! This man is an absolute fucking legend in my eyes =)
Great post...... As always!
Average = Directionless, unfulfilled, boring, and in debt up to your eyeballs!
I'll be mentioning Richard Branson in Part 2, so stay tuned! ;)
I agree whole heartily, school is preparation for a life of submission. It sets one up to really fit ino the system, to listen and obey. there is no place for creativity, individuality and freedom. There is definitely no place for strong opinionated young adults.
And yes so many are aware, this I am very grateful for, because if anything is to change we need to be empowered and so do our children.
People always say "Children are the future", but then they stick them in minimum security prisons. I don't get it.
What people say and do I'm finding are alot of the time two different things. How can we expect kids to be respectful if they are shown no respect. Kids are so intelligent and we are dumbing them down by sending them to those 'minimum security prisons*.
I think we could solve a lot of the problems we see in higher education if people could get a refund for their degrees. Then they would only teach useful shit. Brick and mortar high schools will be gone in one or two more generations, they are too expensive and inefficient and dangerous, completely outmoded industrial age anachronisms. On the other hand I read a lot of books and learned a lot of useful things in high school that I otherwise would not have.
What's sad is that because of the internet and social media kids make their identities in high schoolor younger and then those follow them instead of being able to shed them when they finish high school, as evidenced by the large community of adult Juggalos.
Agreed, college tuitions should be refundable.
How do you know you wouldn't have, though? If your whole life was built around exploration and self-directed learning, it's likely you still would have stumbled upon the same books and different opportunities to learn the same useful things. Or other ones that made just as much of an impression on you. And you could have done it without the four years of bullshit.
Where do they come from? Is ICP even still a thing???
I doubt I would have stumbled across free access to fully outfitted darkrooms and excellent free wood and metal shops and materials or a lot of the lessons from history and law and psychology I was introduced to. I may never have actually built a pickle lamp or tesla coil or wind tunnel or air cannon. I would never have gotten to meet a lot of the friends I met in high school. Adolescence is a tumultuous time no matter what you do, I hated school but I wouldn't be being honest if I said I didn't learn anything or experience anything there that I would not have otherwise.
My point exactly, ICP should have ceased to be a thing a long time ago and yet it persists because people are locked into their personas from high school by social media. Instead we have this:
The only truly fun year of school for me (besides college, which was all fun, mostly for the social aspect) was my senior year of high school. I only had one required class, filled up the rest of my schedule with electives, and spent most of my time hanging out with my friends in the Drama Club. Other than the friendships, there wasn't any real reason for me to be there after I finished my one required class.
what happened to useful classes in high school that taught real world skills? why is "balancing a checkbook" and "how not to screw up your credit" topics that are covered? our education system has gotten stuck in standardized testing and so far, Ive not once needed that bubble filling skill in real life, lol.
Great quote from Isaac Asimov at the beginning of the article.
I recently read Deschooling Society by Ivan Illich. It got me thinking about these ideas. School is very destructive. If I understand you, the way you advocate for change is to encourage individuals to voluntarily drop out of high school. I wish more people would, as school keeps our young people so busy they can't do hardly anything on their own.
I do not think high school is bad but the people who run it. You look at other countries outside the USA and see that their students do better in math, science, and reading than USA. The teacher unions and university faculties in general have this thought of entitlement. From unions protecting teachers or professors who have tenure the drive of most teachers teaching our kids are sub par at best.
School should be a place for people to share knowledge, but it has been distorted as some sort of chore or waste of time. Bill Gates, or Steve Jobs may not have graduated from college and Elon Musk may not be praising college, but they are all successful because they had a lot of help from people who actually went through college. School is a sanctuary for bettering one self.
Yet the teachers if are caring and thoughtful enough to better the students to me it does not have to be in a school to do so. I agree schools should not be a requirement. It is just that I believe school is not really bad if the teachers are good. Thanks!
Well, in my opinion. I think the whole process goes to impart into you a discipline, and the culturing of a routined life. Successful people have successful routine. And you must be disciplined to be successful
Yes, I agree that discipline is important, but I do not think that school imparts true discipline. To my mind, true discipline arises out of a desire to do well and achieve personal goals. The kind of "discipline" you find in most public schools is actually the fear of getting behind or being punished. Personal goals are often not even part of the equation.