Abolish High School (2015)
Well, I agree with the title, and some of the reasoning, but it doesn&#x27;t go far enough. I think school in general is stupid. It&#x27;s an extreme view, I know.<p>I think <i>education</i> is good. But that&#x27;s not what school is. Everything a kid learns in 13 years could he learned in 5, and then they leave missing very important skills. Many kids that graduate high school then choose to take on 5 to 6 figures in debt as their first financial decision of their lives, out of this weird pressure to know what they want to spend the rest of their lives doing, which they&#x27;re somehow expected to know after spending 13 of the previous 18 years of their lives having to ask permission to take a shit. In my opinion, school turns people, most of whom have amazing potential, into losers.<p>The major motivation to have a mandatory school system is to take productive adults who would spend a decade caring for 2 or 3 children and put them to work and outsource the rearing of their children to one professional child raiser per 30 or so kids. Very economical. But it is hell on our kids, and hell on our civics.<p>5 years. That&#x27;s all it takes to learn what you need to know in school. Reading, writing, some literature, arithmetic geometry and algebra, basic physics, chemistry and biology, some domestic history and civics and some world history, then toss in a bit about how to handle finances and you&#x27;re done. 5 years. And that&#x27;s much more than we are requited to know within the 13 we spend right now.<p>And we can teach our own kids. And we should. If I can&#x27;t be trusted to teach my kid what I learned in school, what does that say about the school I went to?