There’s a long and successful tradition of self-taught learners (Ben Franklin, Kurt Vonnegut, Mark Twain, to name a few).
Great. Now name me some successful recent high-school dropouts.
School for me was a complete waste of time. There might have been some value to witnessing the barbarity and brokenness of it all but a dozen hours, not a dozen years, would have sufficed. It was a popularity contest that I failed every day and it got in the way of studying more interesting things.
If there was really nothing in the curriculum for you to learn (was mathematics really that easy for you?) maybe you should have focused on the popularity-contest side of things, since developing social skills is hugely useful for real life.
One of the girls is on the verge of being put on medication because she’s so unhappy. The drugs will make her ok with her malnourished, growth-stunting, environment. They’ll make her ok with jumping through inane hoop after hoop.
If you're being put on medication because you can't cope with high school, it's not a problem with high school. It's a problem with you, or maybe a problem with your doctor, but high school generally isn't that difficult an environment. You show up every day, you hang out with your friends, you go to classes, learn some stuff, you do some stupid crap that you're told to do, and you figure out a way to avoid doing some other stupid crap that you're told to do.
Your argument really only makes sense if you start from the presumption that the only acceptable answer is to finish school. Otherwise it is little more than proof-by-assertion.
Start instead with an open slate, and for any given "advantage" schooling may have, there's a set of alternatives that can do it better. For any given whole package, there's a strung-together set of those alternatives that can do it better. The only way for school to win out here is if you define it as the only possible winner from the get-go, to insist that the only acceptable goal is one that can be met only by this particular combination of compulsion and resources.
If you have to defend schooling without this "home field advantage", you will at the very least have to work a lot harder at it than a few quick paragraphs fired away for the purpose of tickling the school memetic program in the minds of the readers. Why not at the very least switch to home schooling for the last couple of years and slam the pedal to the metal instead of being forced into idle? College is a fine place to learn even those precious-but-unquantifiable "social skills". I'd even argue a better place, learning your social skills in the grotesquely artificial environment of a high school is of dubious value anyhow. (College is artificial too, but less so.)
And honestly, falling back to the refuge of the "social skills" argument makes me very suspicious anyhow. I had the same basic experience in high school as the original poster, I even thought perhaps I was weak in the social skills, but guess what? Yes, indeed, the fault did lie with my environment and I was just fine on the social front. School just wasn't the right place to find that out.
Start instead with an open slate, and for any given "advantage" schooling may have, there's a set of alternatives that can do it better. For any given whole package, there's a strung-together set of those alternatives that can do it better.
Even if that's so, you have to consider the probability that your typical, dumb and arrogant (or even your atypical, slightly-less-dumb and even more arrogant) high schooler is going to figure out what that set of alternatives is.
You also have to consider the cost of failure. The best-case scenario if you teach yourself isn't much better than high school, while the worst-case scenario is much worse.
The idea that you should drop out of high school appeals to three particular ways in which teenagers are dumb:
1. Short-term thinking (sticking something out for another year seems like an eternity)
2. The conviction that "I am special" (even if you are, you're less special than you think), and
3. The conviction that "if I'm not good at something it must be beneath me"
"Even if that's so, you have to consider the probability that your typical, dumb and arrogant (or even your atypical, slightly-less-dumb and even more arrogant) high schooler is going to figure out what that set of alternatives is."
No I don't. Your schooled teenager has almost zero input into their curriculum. It is a false dichotomy that the only alternative is to entirely put it in their hands.
"You also have to consider the cost of failure. The best-case scenario if you teach yourself isn't much better than high school, while the worst-case scenario is much worse."
I dispute that very strongly. I look at the schools-that-are, not the schools-that-ideally-exist. Part of the school memetic program is that they are already almost as wonderful as can be but it doesn't take very much examination of that idea to knock it down. We graduate an awful lot of illiterates, and if that's too extreme for you, the vast bulk of our college freshman require remedial math instruction. I have seen this remedial math instruction. It is very remedial. And very necessary.
I would also claim that the reason that teenagers think those three things is schooling. Of course they have short-term thinking. They've been carefully sealed away from all external reality. Their only future is next week's test, after which they can safely forget everything again. School creates that short-term mentality. I shouldn't even have to defend the claim that school breeds the idea that every student is really sooper special since that has been a core part of the curriculum for the past 30 years. And schools are wonderful at completely negating the value of effort by their ever-increasing focus on the lower end at the sacrifice of anybody who isn't on the lower end.
School created those faults in the first place. You want them cured, get them out of that environment.
> No I don't. Your schooled teenager has almost zero input into their curriculum. It is a false dichotomy that the only alternative is to entirely put it in their hands.
Where would you classify magnet programs? Mine let me max out on Advanced Placement classes (around 7 over 2 years, I think) and introduced me to FIRST Robotics, which led to a programming job while I was still in high school. (It was not the greatest or the highest-paying, and my output was probably what one might expect from the situation, but having it at all was great.) The effect was to get me into college with 44 credits under my belt, which is equivalent to over a year's worth of classes. I then ignored the freshman advisors' advice to take it easy the first semester in order to "adjust" so that I could follow through and actually graduate in 3 years. Obviously, my experience was not typical, but atypical students are the subject under discussion.
"The conviction that 'I am special' (even if you are, you're less special than you think)"
This applies to you as well, doesn't it? But then, the reasoning leads to infinite regression - you are not special, your advice is not special, no one's advice is special, therefore everyone can be ignored. In short, this bit of reasoning does not move the conversation forward.
If the phrase "You are not special" is suppose to imply "You not valuable" or "Your ideas are not valuable" then the same can be applied to everyone who posts here, in which case we must conclude that the conversation is trivial. That's fine, as far as it goes, but it is a fairly pointless road to travel. If no one here is special, then why do any of us bother to read Hacker News?
We could instead go the other direction - we could admit that the conversations on Hacker News are interesting precisely because the people who tend to show up here are interesting. Hacker News is a good place for the intellectually curious, and those who are thoughtful and who enjoy playing with new ideas. But then, to really engage the site, one would have to admit that some of the people on the site are really special, that, in fact, what makes Hacker News great is that it draws in so many people who are special.
Suggesting that the people here are not special leads to immediate irony.
If you're being put on medication because you can't cope with your job, it's not a problem with your job. It's a problem with you, or maybe a problem with your doctor, but your job generally isn't that difficult an environment. You show up every day, you hang out with your friends, you go to meetings, learn some stuff, you do some stupid crap that you're told to do, and you figure out a way to avoid doing some other stupid crap that you're told to do.
If you're being put on medication because you can't cope with prison, it's not a problem with prison. It's a problem with you, or maybe a problem with your doctor, but prison generally isn't that difficult an environment. You wake up every day, you hang out with your friends, you go to community service, learn some stuff, you do some stupid crap that you're told to do, and you figure out a way to avoid doing some other stupid crap that you're told to do.
Or maybe I should consider whether their job environment really is toxic? Maybe prison really is nasty? I don't know if I shoot the messenger.
Now name me some successful recent high-school dropouts.
Wrong question, I think. The correct question is "name some unsuccessful people who did not finish high school who might have been more successful if they had".
These people are not so easy to name-drop. Not because they don't exist -- there are certainly hundreds of thousands of such people for every famous name like Mark Twain or Ben Franklin. It's because of sampling bias.
If you drop out and don't become Mark Twain, nobody's going to write your biography. Indeed, you will find that a lot of people will stigmatize you.
> Great. Now name me some successful recent high-school dropouts.
I suppose I'll throw my hat into the ring. Dropped out during my sophomore year (with bad grades to boot). Now I'm going to a good college, I have a good job, and I have some hobbies I love that I'm pretty good at.
That said I wouldn't recommend dropping out to most people, it's way to easy to just drop out "because I want to play video games" or because "school is boring", you need to want to drop out because "school isn't intellectually challenging and I have things I want to push myself in".
Unless we take as given that the purpose of life is to become a household name, I don't see why that's a useful thing to measure. Jeff Bezos is not a household name, but I don't many people would turn down a career like his.
I did all right. I'm a high school dropout with two bachelor's degrees from Carnegie Mellon, a six-figure computer programming job and a similar disdain for the public education system.
I won't say dropping out of high school was the best thing I've ever done, but it saved me a year of boredom and staying would have done me no good. Dropping out was a much better idea than staying in.
They have an early admissions program, with the unspoken assumption that you'll use credits from CMU to get a high school diploma by some arrangement. It turns out that they never say this is required, and you never actually have to do it.
I couldn't graduate from my old high school in any case, even with the extra CMU classes, because I lack a one-semester class in US Government.
"If you're being put on medication because you can't cope with high school, it's not a problem with high school. It's a problem with you, or maybe a problem with your doctor, but high school generally isn't that difficult an environment. You show up every day, you hang out with your friends, you go to classes, learn some stuff, you do some stupid crap that you're told to do, and you figure out a way to avoid doing some other stupid crap that you're told to do."
While I believe that may have been your experience it clearly is not universal.
Concluding that anyone who needs something different from you is mentally ill or is receiving bad psychological advice is contemptible.
"If you're being put on medication because you can't cope with high school, it's not a problem with high school."
How do you justify that statement? If someone has a problem with their high school, then they have a problem with their high school. I would like to see the burden of justification put on the schools. They have the advantage of representing the status quo, but I would like to see them justify themselves without invoking that advantage. All things in this world are better when they can be justified from first principles, rather than from the dead weight of established practice.
> If there was really nothing in the curriculum for you to learn (was mathematics really that easy for you?) [...]
Mathematics in school is easy and boring. (Mathematics at university is a different kind of animal, and it's only connection to mathematics in school is the name.)
Comments
There’s a long and successful tradition of self-taught learners (Ben Franklin, Kurt Vonnegut, Mark Twain, to name a few).
Great. Now name me some successful recent high-school dropouts.
School for me was a complete waste of time. There might have been some value to witnessing the barbarity and brokenness of it all but a dozen hours, not a dozen years, would have sufficed. It was a popularity contest that I failed every day and it got in the way of studying more interesting things.
If there was really nothing in the curriculum for you to learn (was mathematics really that easy for you?) maybe you should have focused on the popularity-contest side of things, since developing social skills is hugely useful for real life.
One of the girls is on the verge of being put on medication because she’s so unhappy. The drugs will make her ok with her malnourished, growth-stunting, environment. They’ll make her ok with jumping through inane hoop after hoop.
If you're being put on medication because you can't cope with high school, it's not a problem with high school. It's a problem with you, or maybe a problem with your doctor, but high school generally isn't that difficult an environment. You show up every day, you hang out with your friends, you go to classes, learn some stuff, you do some stupid crap that you're told to do, and you figure out a way to avoid doing some other stupid crap that you're told to do.
Your argument really only makes sense if you start from the presumption that the only acceptable answer is to finish school. Otherwise it is little more than proof-by-assertion.
Start instead with an open slate, and for any given "advantage" schooling may have, there's a set of alternatives that can do it better. For any given whole package, there's a strung-together set of those alternatives that can do it better. The only way for school to win out here is if you define it as the only possible winner from the get-go, to insist that the only acceptable goal is one that can be met only by this particular combination of compulsion and resources.
If you have to defend schooling without this "home field advantage", you will at the very least have to work a lot harder at it than a few quick paragraphs fired away for the purpose of tickling the school memetic program in the minds of the readers. Why not at the very least switch to home schooling for the last couple of years and slam the pedal to the metal instead of being forced into idle? College is a fine place to learn even those precious-but-unquantifiable "social skills". I'd even argue a better place, learning your social skills in the grotesquely artificial environment of a high school is of dubious value anyhow. (College is artificial too, but less so.)
And honestly, falling back to the refuge of the "social skills" argument makes me very suspicious anyhow. I had the same basic experience in high school as the original poster, I even thought perhaps I was weak in the social skills, but guess what? Yes, indeed, the fault did lie with my environment and I was just fine on the social front. School just wasn't the right place to find that out.
Start instead with an open slate, and for any given "advantage" schooling may have, there's a set of alternatives that can do it better. For any given whole package, there's a strung-together set of those alternatives that can do it better.
Even if that's so, you have to consider the probability that your typical, dumb and arrogant (or even your atypical, slightly-less-dumb and even more arrogant) high schooler is going to figure out what that set of alternatives is.
You also have to consider the cost of failure. The best-case scenario if you teach yourself isn't much better than high school, while the worst-case scenario is much worse.
The idea that you should drop out of high school appeals to three particular ways in which teenagers are dumb:
1. Short-term thinking (sticking something out for another year seems like an eternity)
2. The conviction that "I am special" (even if you are, you're less special than you think), and
3. The conviction that "if I'm not good at something it must be beneath me"
I don't think they need any more encouragement.
"Even if that's so, you have to consider the probability that your typical, dumb and arrogant (or even your atypical, slightly-less-dumb and even more arrogant) high schooler is going to figure out what that set of alternatives is."
No I don't. Your schooled teenager has almost zero input into their curriculum. It is a false dichotomy that the only alternative is to entirely put it in their hands.
"You also have to consider the cost of failure. The best-case scenario if you teach yourself isn't much better than high school, while the worst-case scenario is much worse."
I dispute that very strongly. I look at the schools-that-are, not the schools-that-ideally-exist. Part of the school memetic program is that they are already almost as wonderful as can be but it doesn't take very much examination of that idea to knock it down. We graduate an awful lot of illiterates, and if that's too extreme for you, the vast bulk of our college freshman require remedial math instruction. I have seen this remedial math instruction. It is very remedial. And very necessary.
I would also claim that the reason that teenagers think those three things is schooling. Of course they have short-term thinking. They've been carefully sealed away from all external reality. Their only future is next week's test, after which they can safely forget everything again. School creates that short-term mentality. I shouldn't even have to defend the claim that school breeds the idea that every student is really sooper special since that has been a core part of the curriculum for the past 30 years. And schools are wonderful at completely negating the value of effort by their ever-increasing focus on the lower end at the sacrifice of anybody who isn't on the lower end.
School created those faults in the first place. You want them cured, get them out of that environment.
> No I don't. Your schooled teenager has almost zero input into their curriculum. It is a false dichotomy that the only alternative is to entirely put it in their hands.
Where would you classify magnet programs? Mine let me max out on Advanced Placement classes (around 7 over 2 years, I think) and introduced me to FIRST Robotics, which led to a programming job while I was still in high school. (It was not the greatest or the highest-paying, and my output was probably what one might expect from the situation, but having it at all was great.) The effect was to get me into college with 44 credits under my belt, which is equivalent to over a year's worth of classes. I then ignored the freshman advisors' advice to take it easy the first semester in order to "adjust" so that I could follow through and actually graduate in 3 years. Obviously, my experience was not typical, but atypical students are the subject under discussion.
You write:
"The conviction that 'I am special' (even if you are, you're less special than you think)"
This applies to you as well, doesn't it? But then, the reasoning leads to infinite regression - you are not special, your advice is not special, no one's advice is special, therefore everyone can be ignored. In short, this bit of reasoning does not move the conversation forward.
If the phrase "You are not special" is suppose to imply "You not valuable" or "Your ideas are not valuable" then the same can be applied to everyone who posts here, in which case we must conclude that the conversation is trivial. That's fine, as far as it goes, but it is a fairly pointless road to travel. If no one here is special, then why do any of us bother to read Hacker News?
We could instead go the other direction - we could admit that the conversations on Hacker News are interesting precisely because the people who tend to show up here are interesting. Hacker News is a good place for the intellectually curious, and those who are thoughtful and who enjoy playing with new ideas. But then, to really engage the site, one would have to admit that some of the people on the site are really special, that, in fact, what makes Hacker News great is that it draws in so many people who are special.
Suggesting that the people here are not special leads to immediate irony.
I can do that too:
If you're being put on medication because you can't cope with your job, it's not a problem with your job. It's a problem with you, or maybe a problem with your doctor, but your job generally isn't that difficult an environment. You show up every day, you hang out with your friends, you go to meetings, learn some stuff, you do some stupid crap that you're told to do, and you figure out a way to avoid doing some other stupid crap that you're told to do.
If you're being put on medication because you can't cope with prison, it's not a problem with prison. It's a problem with you, or maybe a problem with your doctor, but prison generally isn't that difficult an environment. You wake up every day, you hang out with your friends, you go to community service, learn some stuff, you do some stupid crap that you're told to do, and you figure out a way to avoid doing some other stupid crap that you're told to do.
Or maybe I should consider whether their job environment really is toxic? Maybe prison really is nasty? I don't know if I shoot the messenger.
Now name me some successful recent high-school dropouts.
Wrong question, I think. The correct question is "name some unsuccessful people who did not finish high school who might have been more successful if they had".
These people are not so easy to name-drop. Not because they don't exist -- there are certainly hundreds of thousands of such people for every famous name like Mark Twain or Ben Franklin. It's because of sampling bias.
If you drop out and don't become Mark Twain, nobody's going to write your biography. Indeed, you will find that a lot of people will stigmatize you.
> Great. Now name me some successful recent high-school dropouts.
I suppose I'll throw my hat into the ring. Dropped out during my sophomore year (with bad grades to boot). Now I'm going to a good college, I have a good job, and I have some hobbies I love that I'm pretty good at.
That said I wouldn't recommend dropping out to most people, it's way to easy to just drop out "because I want to play video games" or because "school is boring", you need to want to drop out because "school isn't intellectually challenging and I have things I want to push myself in".
First, congrats. But I think he meant household name successful. :-)
What?!?! You've never heard of kingkilr?
Touche!
Unless we take as given that the purpose of life is to become a household name, I don't see why that's a useful thing to measure. Jeff Bezos is not a household name, but I don't many people would turn down a career like his.
I did all right. I'm a high school dropout with two bachelor's degrees from Carnegie Mellon, a six-figure computer programming job and a similar disdain for the public education system.
I won't say dropping out of high school was the best thing I've ever done, but it saved me a year of boredom and staying would have done me no good. Dropping out was a much better idea than staying in.
If I may ask, how did you get into CMU without a hs diploma?
They have an early admissions program, with the unspoken assumption that you'll use credits from CMU to get a high school diploma by some arrangement. It turns out that they never say this is required, and you never actually have to do it.
I couldn't graduate from my old high school in any case, even with the extra CMU classes, because I lack a one-semester class in US Government.
I also had really good SAT scores.
Very cool of CMU, and gratz.
I dropped out, and then dropped back in... also at CMU, but no six figure salary (yet).
"Now name me some successful recent high-school dropouts."
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=successful+high+school+dropouts
Of people whose writing gets posted to this site on a regular basis, Philip Greenspun comes to mind.
"If you're being put on medication because you can't cope with high school, it's not a problem with high school. It's a problem with you, or maybe a problem with your doctor, but high school generally isn't that difficult an environment. You show up every day, you hang out with your friends, you go to classes, learn some stuff, you do some stupid crap that you're told to do, and you figure out a way to avoid doing some other stupid crap that you're told to do."
While I believe that may have been your experience it clearly is not universal.
Concluding that anyone who needs something different from you is mentally ill or is receiving bad psychological advice is contemptible.
Whoa. You write:
"If you're being put on medication because you can't cope with high school, it's not a problem with high school."
How do you justify that statement? If someone has a problem with their high school, then they have a problem with their high school. I would like to see the burden of justification put on the schools. They have the advantage of representing the status quo, but I would like to see them justify themselves without invoking that advantage. All things in this world are better when they can be justified from first principles, rather than from the dead weight of established practice.
Not 100% on this source's references, but it seems as though there are many people that have dropped out of high-school and managed to be successful.
http://www.school-survival.net/successful_dropouts.php
These are all popular examples only, so it doesn't match well for an overall statistic.
> If there was really nothing in the curriculum for you to learn (was mathematics really that easy for you?) [...]
Mathematics in school is easy and boring. (Mathematics at university is a different kind of animal, and it's only connection to mathematics in school is the name.)