This really resonates for me. High school was a colossal waste of time, and a very unhealthy environment, that I think made me a worse person for a time.
I’ve been thinking a lot about how to help my kids skip high school, but I don’t quite know how to do it.
As the author, I don’t think that it should be banned, but I agree that kids should not be forced to attend. If anything, merely removing the mandate might make the experience of those who stay a lot better. For me a lot of the stress came from the hostility and bullying that the kids who did not want to be there inflicted on anyone who dared to show interest in class, ask questions, or, gasp, pass classes.
Has anyone found an alternative path for their kids to avoid high school, and if so how did it go?
I got out of my junior and senior years by taking the GED and going straight to college. I think that benefitted me a lot more than just graduating college a couple years early.
The environment was radically different and freeing. Teachers weren't babysitters. They wanted us to do well, but they weren't going to coddle us. I noticed that immediately, and it really changed how I approached my classes. I didn't have to be there if I didn't want to, so I really invested myself in a way that I don't think would be possible if I were being forced.
In Oregon at least, colleges must consider a GED score over 600 equivalent to a high school diploma. I went to the local college (SOU) for one year to get a solid transcript, then used that to transfer to a state college (U of O). I'm really glad that I did
How were you able to take the GED exam at 16? I looked into doing this while I was in high school, and found that I wouldn't be able to take the exam until I was 19, defeating the point.
Perhaps it varies by state? If so, I applaud Oregon for not forcing students into a daycare program for any longer than necessary. If I were a policymaker, I would even be comfortable with lowering the minimum age to 14 or lower.
Had similar problem some years ago in VA..
went to take the ged at 15 - signed up, then was told 16 was min age.
Went back a year later, signed up, got told the state law was changed to 17 that year - and it went into effect on my bday.
Went back year later, they changed it to 18 I was then told.
Guess it helps the schools get money by enrolling people that can't test out, I dunno. I wanted college bad at 15 and 16. By 18 I started seeing many things differently - still took it at 18 and passed just to do it. By then I'd seen many go to college and come out worse off than they went in, and was no longer enamoured with the whole college degree equates to success thing.
I believe people should be able to test out and test up - and for many people that would mean skipping more of what is sold as high school and become vocational training or what have you.
Kids of the future deserve more flexibility than what we've had / have.
I'm not sure what the minimum age here is, but it never came up for me. The one thing I know was somewhat unique to Oregon at the time was making all public universities accept the GED
From the perspective of the U.K. I can’t imagine it being a very good idea going to university early. One reason for university to be better than high school is that you get to feel like you are learning a lot about your chosen subject, and you get a lot more freedom in how you do it. This is probably still mostly the case if you are under 18. The other purpose of university is socialising people into acting like “well-rounded” middle class adults, and in many ways this is an improvement from high school (for one thing, the students are willing and if they don’t like a situation, they can just leave). I would worry that socialising wouldn’t be the same for someone under 18. Obviously a lot of socialising revolves around alcohol but not drinking needn’t be a problem—the bigger issue is that a lot of socialising may revolve around places where alcohol may be served from which a 16 or 17 year old might be excluded. I also don’t know the laws about living alone at those ages either—if one were not allowed to live like the other students it would not be good, I think. It’s surely different in the US where lots of things are cut off from anyone under 21.
I suspect the argument against would be that the social aspects don’t matter, but I just don’t buy it.
I went to the University of Minnesota my sr. year of high school. I remember a sophomore in my physics class being less enthusiastic about hanging out when I gave her a heads-up that I was (1) under 18 and (2) likely moving to Massachusetts or Michigan the next year. Otherwise, I found socialization easier than in high school.
I’m talking about the U.K. and while there is certainly the option of binge drinking culture, it was definitely not required. But my time in university was full of events where alcohol was served and I don’t know how such things would work for someone who mightn’t be allowed in due to that—if you’re 18 you can turn up and refuse the drinks and no one will care much, but if you’re 17 you maybe can’t turn up, even if you would refuse drinks.
with the states being 21 and up - I think the pressure is not the same.
In the cities I've been to, many nightclubs/bars/pubs after dark will only let in 18+ but you'd get Xs on your hands or something and only 21 and over can drink.
I believe many have gotten use to this system and the expectations that you don't need to turn up alcohol to be cool - in fact it could get you in trouble.
I also know there are plenty that find ways around the drinking 20 and under prohibition - sure - but sneaking a drink in a dark corner or whatever is not the same as being expected to be doing body shots on the bar.. so there is less pressure in many ways I believe, compared to UK I suppose.
Also - alcohol and weed for many youngsters I think is not a big deal to get or leave alone, a lot of people shrug at those things and seek out X Y or Z, and those things are not generally done in large groups at parties - from what I gather - surely it's not 100% across the board like that - but most kids have access to all the drugs and alcohol they could want by 9th grade in most places I am pretty sure -
the legal alcohol and weed is legal in many places now - seems like a thing that 'old people do' cuz it's legal - and it's not the main thing on their 'coolness radar' - at least that's the vibe I've been getting from the HS/college crowd of late.
my very little experience is of course a very small data point and certainly not indicative of the country as a whole, and I am guessing the small towns around the country are a bit different than the cities in those regards.
> As the author, I don’t think that it should be banned, but I agree that kids should not be forced to attend.
Here is the problem: high school is mostly not meant for those of us who wound up on HN.
My father taught English for almost 4 decades in a US rural school district. His comments were:
"I'm not really here for the good students. They'll do fine no matter what I do, so my job for them is to keep them engaged and moving forward. All I have to do is not kill their motivation."
"I'm not really here for the worst students. I can't fix simply not doing the work or reveling in being stupid. I can't do much to fix a student's terrible home life other than providing a sympathetic ear and space for a little while."
"I'm mostly here for the average students. They don't want to be here, would rather be doing anything else and will do as little as possible to skate through. If I can push a few of those to care just a little more and have just a bit of internal motivation, I've done a good job. For the rest, I set the average bar to the point that they have to learn what I want them to to get the grade they need to."
"And I'm really here for a few of the below-average students. This is probably the last chance before they slide into being useless. Most of them have a bit of smarts, or they'd have slipped into the worst category long ago. They probably hang out with the wrong people. They get harassed if they accomplish something. Their home life is deteriorating. If I can reverse any of these, I've done a really good thing."
Here’s an anecdata: Many of my high school teachers put me squarely in the “too far gone to help” camp, others put me in the “lazy and unmotivated” camp ... but if I liked your class, if I respected you as a person, if you seemed like you knew what you were doing, then I became the “hot damn get out of their way this kid is a steamroller” kind.
My English professor (2nd language) used to grade my essays with a dictionary because my vocabulary was so big, my coding professor said he can’t help but is happy to give me time and space to work on my opensource projects (for credit), my Slovenian professor (1st language) said it’s a shame I’m going to study CS because my essays are a joy to read and he always learns something new.
But my chemistry professor? Straight F. German? D-
It took me 5 years to finish high school and I had summer school every year except last. Because summer school senior year impacts when you can apply for college and I didn’t wanna risk that. And my grades at matura (kinda like the SAT) were higher than my high school GPA.
Most of the time I was too busy coding all day and night to care about grades and I was definitely too cool for school.
> But my chemistry professor? Straight F. German? D-
Too many people like to wear this as a badge.
No. It's not. It's just a sign that you were a dumb kid like so many others. The teacher suffered no consequences, and you only hurt yourself.
The smart kids put in the bare minimum effort to get through the shit teachers and leave them behind so they could go do what they wanted.
The really smart kids managed to make the teacher suffer actual consequences for being a shit. But you have to be really, really good at human politics to pull it off and lucky enough to have them give you the opportunity to punish them for it.
I had finished standard high school course work by around sixteen, so my parents had me start taking CLEP tests.
At seventeen, in what would have been my senior year of high school, I took a few classes at our local community college.
Basically, even in the strictest states (I grew up in one of them), homeschooling is a good mechanism for opting out of the stupid parts of high school.
My parents did most of the teaching, with private music lessons and weekly co-op meetings (get-togethers with other homeschool families to socialize and swap educational expertise - a parent who's a working chemist might run a chem class one semester, while another parent might do a painting class).
By the time I was in high school, I was mostly teaching myself, going to my parents for help only when I was really stumped by something. For example, I did the equivalent of failing algebra twice, but there was no stigma or "can't math" track - my dad just started sitting down with me in the evenings when he got home from work to teach me, and I got it well enough after that.
Socially, I was a shy, untrusting kid, in retrospect, largely because one of my family's main social circles imploded when I was in about third grade.
That wasn't due to homeschooling per se, though, it was due to relationship dynamics and values conflicts between my parents and others.
We found new circles and I always had friends growing up.
I think I would have had a much tougher time socially and intellectually in a standard school environment. The way my psychology works and the experiences I've heard described by friends who went to public school have long made me grateful for my education.
I also got to have much closer relationships with my parents and siblings than I think most US citizens get to have. Others have commented in this discussion about US school being all-day childcare so both parents can work, but our family spent tons of time together, which I'm also very grateful for.
My wife and I are homeschooling our kids, for what it's worth. Our experiences definitely weren't perfect but we see a lot of value in investing in our kids this way.
Sure but there’s a correlation. I don’t know if it’s causative though. The socially awkward kids getting bullied at public school are those that are most likely to get pulled out and homeschooled.
Not necessarily bullies but who is a parent likely to pull out of school (ignoring the parents doing it for selfish reasons like religious extremism)? The kid who hates school and has no friends and sulks when it’s time to go or the kid who can’t wait to go and has tons of friends and is involved in school activities?
If someone is doing so badly is school (they get expelled or they cannot handle school, or have special needs and the parents cannot find/ be bothered to send them to a school further away), they may get home-schooled.
Yes, so there might be this cause and effect, but this is not a correlation, i.e. we haven't seen data, they may well be more well rounded individuals being home-schooled because there are more parents who decided home schooling as a way to enhance education.
The kids I knew weren't pulled out of school. They were homeschooled the whole time. It seemed to me that the reasons where mostly quality of education in the public school was poor and cost of private school was too high, as well as a little religious benefit maybe.
Also homeschooling isn't mainstream and is largely populated by parents with extremist religious beliefs that harm their children's development and who choose to homeschool because they are afraid of their child escaping into non coercive social relationships.
This isn't true, and it hasn't been true in a long time. I've been involved in the homeschool community in Colorado for a decade, and we are, as far as I can tell, representative of the larger population with regard to religion, politics, and lifestyle, and even race to a good extent. In terms of politics, I'd actually say most of us skew liberal. The past few years we've seen an influx of queer kids, who are either obviously not gender- or sexually conformant, or questioning along those lines. Turns out, homeschool communities can offer an ideal refuge for queer kids, compared to the sheer unrelenting brutality of conventional school.
Depends on the particular community of course, but ours is good for that.
Homeschooling is not largely populated by people with "extremist" beliefs. Such people are too low in number to be largely populating anything.
5 million parents in the US were officially homeschooling their kids as of the latest Pulse survey (done during COVID pandemic to see changes in families). [1]
There are about 56 million students attending school in the US right now [2]
So about 10% of kids are homeschooled. That's not mainstream but it's not such a small minority to be discounted, nor is it small enough to be largely populated by extremists.
It did for me. Substantially. I had a rough childhood and homeschooling was one component so I don't know how much can be pinned to that one thing. It can be done well but has to be handled with care since isolation is dangerous. If your home situation is bad it will be very bad.
I got all my messed up social interaction from public (elementary) school, and homeschooling is how I met the people who helped me heal a little bit. Find other homeschoolers near you.
How do you get started doing effective homeschooling (though in my case, the UK)? It sounds hard to get a good structure or find other parents willing to do lessons as well. It seems like the network isn't very good? (I don't use Facebook)
We are homeschooling my son and he’s be a senior this next term. It’s gone very well for us, academically and socially and the like, but now we have to make him a transcript for college applications and he followed a job-standard curriculum. We were counting on the SAT scores being an important part of his transcript, we’ll see how changes in that vein work out.
Every year we ask him if he’d like to return to conventional schooling, he’s not tempted at all. His not-school devotions are numerous, so it’s also been rewarding from a family perspective.
I hated school too, and I sympathise with your quest to "save" your kids from it.
At the risk of presumption, I'd advise to be wary of overprojecting though. Different people have very different experiences, and your kids' may not be the same as your experience. Observe and react.
My high school experience is specifically one of the reasons I didn’t have kids. I wasn’t going to subject anyone to the shit I experienced in high school.
To me, the notion that school was so horrible that having children if off the table says that was a traumatic experience that hurts to this day. Not healthy to carry that.
I say that as someone who was bullied in elementary school to the point that I was afraid to go outside or have my picture taken. People who cared intervened and helped me overcome that, and anyone in that situation deserves the same.
No sure about your state but I’ve known people in Canada who avoided it by doing core subjects via correspondence programs. It freed up time for them to pursue other interests or work. It didn’t seem to be a barrier to them getting into any public universities, but I don’t know how that works in the US where elite education seems to matter a lot more.
> For me a lot of the stress came from the hostility and bullying that the kids who did not want to be there inflicted on anyone who dared to show interest in class
Are american schools really that shitty? I thought it was a movie trope.
A lot of it is contingent on school size. If you're going to a rural high school with a student body of < 300-500 people, you're experiencing middle school again with older teens. Predictably, this has a high probability of sucking if you aren't high up in the social hierarchy. My high school had almost 5,000 students and many middle schools from around the area fed into that high school. This created a college-like environment where freshmen didn't know 80-90% of the other students on day 1. The size and novelty gave people the freedom to be themselves and find friends easily.
My high school was really toned-down and chill. Everyone sort of got along (or at least it seemed like it to me, I could've been blind to some of it), we weren't all friends but there wasn't any fighting / violence. There was drama, sports, relationships, there were the jocks / nerds / weird kids, but nothing like the movies. This was in the early 2010s, and my town was suburban not rich and not poor.
After my terrible high school experience I was surprised to meet people in college who said their school was like you describe. "Everyone basically got along".
I wondered though that maybe if your aren't being the bully or the bullied, you might just not notice the hell that some of the kids are going through.
I was generally popular and got along with most everyone and still found high school to be absolute hell, though really no more than middle or even elementary school.
The issue, I think, comes from a lack of agency, you are told where to be and what to do all day every day. Every minute is scheduled and that wears on people and leads to stress and abnormal social interactions where kids pick at each other.
I do think school plays an important role in social development and learning to interact and get along with others, but I think the environment sucks and isn’t even a great parallel to the real world in most cases. It is more like prison than anything. If you find yourself in a work place and think, “jeez, this place is like high school,” you should probably run.
I went to a "bad" inner-city high school (ie, poverty and the the things that go along with that, gang activity, kids being regularly sent to jail), the type where well-to-do parents in the city would pay to put their kids in private school or move to the suburbs, but the school had thousands of students. It wasn't too difficult to find a group or two to fit into. Everyone definitely did not get along, but you didn't need to get along with everyone...
I was walking down a hallway once in middle school and a kid I had never even talked to just walked up and punched me in the ear. Just an idea of the random violence that happens, as well as the psychological warfare campaigns these kids are capable of launching. It is definitely not just a movie trope.
You will probably be suspended or expelled. I wish I was joking, but the schools usually have a zero tolerance policy which around here means both the bully and the bullied are considered equally at fault.
They're then given a "fair and equal" punishment: An academically ruinous suspension for the kid that cares, and a vacation for the kid that doesn't.
Every single problem America has, the kids end up paying for. This grew out of our sue-happy 80s/90s culture. School administrators basically opted out of their job because they were afraid of lawsuits.
Teachers get a lot of (empty) praise in the US. But many of them allow bullying. Many ARE the bullies. I've known a teacher who sold drugs to students. I remember a classmate who was r*ped by a teacher.
I had a few good teachers in high school. I had excellent teachers in middle school. It is a profession that should be respected but there is a chicken and egg problem:
1) teachers are not respected by parents, administrators and politicians,
2) so very few of the people that would make great teachers go into teaching
And in some states like California, it's very easy to become a teacher on an emergency credential. In the mid to late 90s when I was in school, most of our teachers were like 23 or 24 and were on emergency credentials. They were not the good ones.
Depends on where you are. Many schools are required to report any criminal activity, including assaults (fights). Then there's the no tolerance polices too.
Lol it sounds like you've never been in a fight. How about if you're cornered or pinned? And how about if they're faster than you? Sometimes fighting is your best or only option. If it wasn't, then the corporate lawyers wouldn't allow 'fight' in the 'run, hide, fight' internal threat training. Not to mention, punishing people who defend themselves is counter to the laws and beliefs of society. So much for schools preparing people for life in the real world.
And people who think they're fighting back usually don't do the minimum to defend themselves. They very quickly turn into just brawling themselves as much as the other person was.
Your right to defend yourself means doing the bare minimum to stop the threat against you or others. It doesn't mean 'standing your ground' and 'fighting back' like they think it does. You can see how when a teacher comes around the corner someone who's decided to fight back looks just as bad as the person who started it in many cases.
"people who think they're fighting back usually don't do the minimum to defend themselves"
Do you have any data on that? I rarely see people become excessive in defending themself.
"Your right to defend yourself means doing the bare minimum to stop the threat against you or others. It doesn't mean 'standing your ground' and 'fighting back' like they think it does."
It does mean doing the bare minimum. Who decides that? Usually great deference is given to the individual in the situation because it's not possible to cover the nearly infinite factors under legislation. There are states where you can 'stand your ground' in that you do not have to prove that you tried to run from a place you were legally allowed to be before defending yourself. Just because the words are in order does not mean that you have the option to do the first two. Things happen fast. You can skip levels in the force continuum if the lower levels are no longer an option.
With all the cameras in schools, I would think a review of the tapes should give a pretty idea of who struck first. Depending on the location, if neither party can be confirmed to be the aggressor, then both parties can be charged with a lesser grading or offense. So it would seem that treating both students under the harsh no tolerance policy would be inconsistent with the laws of the real world and society's views.
It’s a school. If you go to the police they’ll do their best to make it a school internal matter and the school will do their best to make sure there’s no external record of it happening. Maybe someone will get expelled. Absent broken bones or severe permanent scarring that’s about it unless you’re going to lawyer up.
>Kinda makes you question other things people that age claim as absolutely true like "true love" or "worst day ever" or "my biology is wrong"
In all of those cases, the best thing to do for a teen's mental/emotional wellbeing is to take it seriously and treat them with respect. Everyone has to gain lived experience by living it, and you shouldn't try to invalidate their feelings just because they've experienced fewer of them.
Depends a lot on the school, or possibly more specifically: the location or demographics of the school. Many high schools with motivated students (eg where I went) have few issues and good education outcomes. Some others are little better than prisons with dysfunctional students.
In slovenia, you first go to elementary/grade school (used to be 1+8, now 9 years) until you're ~15yo, then you apply for high schools, and depending on your grades and other stuff, you get accepted to your chosen school (either "gymansium" - basically 'everything', or some kind of specific/trades school (mechanics, electricians, construction,...)).
Usually if you're good in school, you get to a good high school and also have good classmates (atleast on your level)... but even in shitty, no-limit school (eg. 3year construction school), discipline is not really a major issue, and really shitty students either fail or get expelled very soon.
- you are assigned a school and changing schools varies from moderately difficult to impossible
- kids under 16 cannot get to any high school other than their assigned one because they can’t drive (and at 16 they’d need a car, which not everyone can afford)
- everyone HAS to be in school all day. It’s day care so parents can work.
What you described in Slovenia sounds much better. It sounds like college in the US: people are there because they want to be there. High School in the US is just… a mess. There are people who think the point is to perform in the school band, or on the sports team, or in cheerleading etc. There are people who think the point is to hang out and have friends. There are people who think there is no point. And there are a few who think the point is to learn.
Schools very a lot and in a place this big you can find all kinds of schools, but from everyone I’ve known the typical experience is academically a waste of time, and people’s feelings about High School are almost entirely determined by how many friends they had and thus how much fun they thought it was.
> - kids under 16 cannot get to any high school other than their assigned one because they can’t drive (and at 16 they’d need a car, which not everyone can afford)
Is the density of high schools _that_ low and availability of transport _that_ bad?
Not from the US, but I had a choice of 3 local public + one local private and like 5 or 6 that I'd considered on the train line and a few more that were further away by bus.
It varies by population density. Where i grew up, a small town surrounded by many rural and semi-rural areas, the nearest high school to mine was about 20mi away, and most attendees did not live in reasonable walking distance to any high school. So you had to drive, be driven, or take the school bus.
Where I live now, a very rural area, there are only two high schools in a 100 mile radius.
Distance and local regulations can make this tricky. Most people are zoned to a school based on where they live, and alternatives can be inconveniently far. Main exceptions are magnet or charter programs, but these can be competitive.
Yes they're that shitty. Example: I got jumped by a group of ~30 kids in 8th grade for, IIRC, they didn't tell me why they just felt like it?? A teacher witnessed the end of it, off duty but saw what happened. She was nice enough to drive me home then never spoke of it again. It was just... normal that there was violence? Not an unusual school that had a reputation, no big stories of extreme incidents or measures taken, adjacent to (and eventually enveloped by) new affluent schools. Just... people being hideous to each other and nothing being done about it.
I went to 8 different schools in 6 different states by the time I graduated 12th grade, and I did not even so much as see someone get punched much less “jumped”. I am a minority and I never hung out with people who caused problems, but getting jumped by 30 kids sounds like an exceptionally bad environment.
My high school was super chill. There were standard groups such as jocks/nerds/etc. but lots of people would also move from one group to the other. There were even semi regular out-of-school events that involved people from all groups.
I'm sure there was some bullying going on, but based upon my observations it didn't seem widespread. Of course I was a teenager and probably not the most observant person and may have had a skewed view of the average person's experience there.
Even inside the same city the variation between schools is huge, let alone across the entire country. So I think there's not much useful that can be be generalized about "american schools".
This is also true in Europe: the schools in the poorer city districs in my very high HDI European country are probably quite shocking to upper middle class American suburbians. (Firearms are rare, but kids armed with knives are not uncommon.)
They apparently were much worse in the 1970s and 1980s. For most people I know it was significantly better by the mid 90s. And by all reports, it’s much better now.
they are not at all... mine was great (Halifax County High, VA). It is rated 5.5/10, so average school I guess and it was diverse.
I attended it as an exchange student, (From Albania), from my senior year.
I took mostly AP classes, and they were pretty good, as the average student was very/well motivated. They were smart and most went to good colleges after it. I got the chance to advance many of my skills, computer wise, and even took programming, which was great as it cemented my desire to pursue CS. (Pascal was the language being taught in 99).
Things like AP physics and biology/chemistry were way behind my Albanian education. I can't image what Gen Ed physics would look like. (probably comparable to middle school level in former commie Europe). AP Calc, was challenging and on par with former communist country education (but very few people take those classes).
Gen. Ed classes, (the ones where average people take) were a mixed bag, as they had plenty of students that clearly didn't want to be there, and just wanted a pass grade and move on.
I also got to join the soccer team and I loved it. Made lots of friends, never got into a fight (perhaps because I was the only foreign student, and people were super friendly), went to the prom, and all that. Became friends with the popular/'in' group of girls, had a gf., etc... It was something like out of the movies.
For me it was a great experience, and it really really depends on how you use it. If you take mostly AP classes, or participate in sports, it is a great thing. If you take the gen. ed classes, you will end up in classes that are designed more to just teach the bare minimum, as most students there don't have any interest in being there to begin with.
The trend of reducing AP classes in the name of 'equity' is very troubling, as it remove the chances of smart students to have a stimulating environment, and let them learn at their faster pace.
> The trend of reducing AP classes in the name of 'equity' is very troubling, as it remove the chances of smart students to have a stimulating environment, and let them learn at their faster pace.
The arguments have shifted away from improving outcomes for troubled students to closing gaps. It’s easier to do that by fucking over AP kids than solving the unsolvable.
My experience is that most Americans love students and coworkers from other countries. I remember specifically there was an exchange student from Germany who spent his senior year at my high school and it seemed like he dated a different girl every month, the whole school was enamored with him. He was interesting, told good stories.
We had one of those, manny the German. Entertaining person, bit aggressive.... who isn’t sometimes.
Our high school was brand new my frsshman year, and they only started with 9th and 10th, in a socio-economically affluent area. They also had multiple magnet programs and mandated racial demographic requirements (which forced the system to bus kids in from less affluent areas). These policies negatively impacted the social climate fairly significantly....
so I am really excited there are so many ways to skin the h.s. cat now. Your positive stories are reassuring me about my reluctance to engage my children as they get to school age in that same system.
My high school offered a post secondary program. A student could go to a local university (Kent State in Ohio in our case) and take many of the general education classes you needed anyways. I wish I took advantage, it would have saved me some time in college! I think it was only for Juniors and seniors however.
It’s available through quite a few schools now i believe. My oldest only had half days her senior year in high school and entered college with enough credits to be a sophomore. It’s not particularly revolutionary but a nice option.
> I’ve been thinking a lot about how to help my kids skip high school, but I don’t quite know how to do it.
I’ve enjoyed reading Bryan Caplan occasionally describe how he home schooled his children through middle school and high school[1]. It started off with middle school on the basis that no one cares at all about middle school grades or achievements, with them doing an AP exam a year. On trying out high school once they were off an age they decided to keep on homeschooling and just ramped up the pace on the APs, while ensuring there was daily Math learning and eventually independent research. Most of the posts discussing it are here[2].
My older daughter was 95% home schooled. She just graduated from university, top student. She did decide to take a few specific courses in high school when she was 16 but that was her choice, she never went full time to school. So you can totally do it, it can go great. Try and find a local community to be a part of.
I should note that technically she has always been a distant learner which is a distinction made locally (British Columbia, Canada). She was enrolled in basically what is a school for home learners which counts a school but just acts as a support mechanism for home learners, you can do whatever you want.
I have a younger daughter who was also mostly home schooled but is now attending high school full time by her choice. So she is taking a somewhat different path and she is a top student as well despite basically having never studied the previous curriculum. Our style of home schooling has been study whatever you're interested in, not following any specific curriculum.
Like I said we didn't really. We generally let the kids explore. Lots of reading, just everything. My older daughter spent some time studying how to perform magic tricks. She did a lot of art, jewelry, painting, sculptures. There is a local community that organized some activities like science fairs, various day trips etc.
>for me a lot of the stress came from the hostility and bullying that the kids who did not want to be there
In Australia students are allowed to drop out of school in year 10 (age 15-16) if they have work lined up. When all these people left my grade got much better.
The problem is the one's with rich parents don't leave. They're going nowhere in life, but they're at least vaguely aware of how much their life will radically decay if they stop giving the impression of progress to the purse-strings.
I did a dual-enrollment program that was a normal ish 9th grade, and took college courses for 10-12th grade. Could see if there are similar programs in your area.
More generally, magnet or charter programs kinda select for people who are interested in the program (and in some cases people forced in by their parents), which could provide a better environment
Kinda? It was in South Florida, but it was a test-lab school kinda program.
My brother did an alternative where he could take some credits at the local CC, but it was still part of the standard high school experience. Seems a little closer to your experience in your other comment
There was definitely more camaraderie among the students in the program I did, mainly because of being all stuck together in 9th grade and how Everyone ended up taking classes at the uni (oftentimes together, since there's a lot of overlap in undergrad programs).
Yea, camaraderie would have been nice. Only 2 kids from my high school participated in the program. For financial reasons, I had to fully commit to college and couldn't do part time. Anyway, cool, I really liked the program and think it is a good option for some kids.
Lots of states have programs where you can go to college and earn highschool credit (duel credit). Alternatively, drop out, get a GED and go to college. This hard commits you to finishing college but I have a few friends that did it. I did the dual credit thing and avoided paying for a few years of college (state covered books and tuition). Be careful though, lots of kids aren't really ready to leave all their friends they have known for 10+ years. If you go to college at 16 you miss onboarding and the "college experience". In many ways you are alone. It fit me but not everyone.
It depends on where you live, but kids are not forced to attend in places where homeschooling is allowed.
A homeschooling option where I live is you attend classes at a local community college. Once you have completed enough credits you get a GED diploma and an associates degree.
I did 2 years in high school then did an GED program through my community college. I had 2 years of college done by the time my peers were graduating high school.
What if your kids want to date? Practically speaking, how are they going to meet people outside a high school environment? Might seem trivial but it's a formative set of years for learning courtship rituals. High school imparts a lot of non academic experience that are, I think, pretty important.
Sincere question: can they work? Does anywhere hire high-school aged kids for work that isn’t non-trivial/grunt work?
If the goal is to not waste their time I can’t imagine working a casual job is more stimulating than being in a classroom. Maybe a year working casually would inspire them back to school the next year?
You learn real world skills, the value of a dollar, work ethic, business processes, and get to build relationships and network with people of varied ages, unlike school.
Not really about wasting their time, its about wasting their time at school and the likely drugs theyll take up if it continues long enough.
I saw a lot of kids go on to higher education only to mostly waste it. They were there because their parents made them, not because they wanted to be there.
I worked for a year before going to uni, after that, I really wanted to be there. Working sucked. I wanted a better job. When I hit uni, I was extremely motivated to learn.
I had a buddy that too the GED at 16 then went and got accepted to University when he was 17. He was home schooled and one smart cookie but he turned out alright.
I’ve been thinking a lot about how to help my kids skip high school, but I don’t quite know how to do it.
As the author, I don’t think that it should be banned, but I agree that kids should not be forced to attend. If anything, merely removing the mandate might make the experience of those who stay a lot better. For me a lot of the stress came from the hostility and bullying that the kids who did not want to be there inflicted on anyone who dared to show interest in class, ask questions, or, gasp, pass classes.
Has anyone found an alternative path for their kids to avoid high school, and if so how did it go?