Smart Kids Should Skip High School

Could I instead have had the curriculum at my own pace?

Really it should just be a national, fully open, stack. No expensive text books (there's a nice racket) / etc.

Not just high school, but all of it. If we need to have 'learning centers' where parents can warehouse their kids while going to work, lets just fund that with those results in mind, and have additional tutors (maybe other students for extra credit, based off of the realistic improvement rate in the grades of those tutored) for those who aren't advancing quickly enough.

Of course, full boarding that the kids can opt in to (for predictable meals and escape from abusive situations) could also help.

School education often has a leveling effect. It helps people below the average to get better and blocks people above average or brings them down by boring them, leading to avoidance of any real effort. As far as i know most nobel price winners are below IQ 150, because apart from being smart, they learned to work hard and not go through school with minimum effort.

I would guess Terry Tao was one of them?

In first grade was given a bunch of tests and determined I had a "grade 12 reading level" whatever that means. I was sent to one of those so-called child prodigy schools but had no interest in anything they were teaching me. Instead I would disassemble every electronic box in the school and hack around with it. They kicked me out of that school for doing nothing the entire time except taking apart electronics and returned me to the public system. First day, when we received our texts for the year I'd read through the entire text on the weekend and do all the exercises. Then I'd just slack off all year, usually only showing up to do the tests and weekly quizzes while spending the rest of my time hanging out with the other delinquents in my school who never went to class. This worked fine until about Grade 10, when I decided to not even bother reading the textbooks on the first weekend of school anymore and just didn't show up or do any work at all. I was solely interested in hanging out with the crazy STS chatboard goths and IRC hackers I befriended who all partied at this guy's warehouse downtown everyday, which I got away with for about 8 months until one day I forgot to intercept the mail and phone calls from my school and my parents discovered I wasn't even going anymore.

My routine was to get up and walk to school, attend homeroom to show I was actually there then just take off to go downtown to said hacker/drug dealer's warehouse. There was always a ton of people there it was a defacto hackspace and party house. I learned more hanging around those people for a few months than I did all of high school. When my parents gave me an ultimatum I decided to go squat with a bunch of street punks and just hang around the hackerspace all day.

I probably would've been satisfied going to some kind of engineering or compsci program after school if it had existed at the time. I liked hanging out with my friends in high school and was glad I still went to be social but it would've been great if school was only a few hours, and the rest of the day I could have pursued my interests in electrical engineering at a non institutionalized type environment. Hanging with my friends was fun in school between and after classes but everything else about it felt like prison. Somebody you don't elect hands you arbitrary rules to follow and you just end up feeling trapped. I'm sure plenty of other kids don't mind high school for a few hours a day but would much rather spend the bulk of their time learning something else they're actually interested in. I have no idea how this can be accomplished but a full day slogging through half a chapter in a textbook on a subject you have zero passion about isn't it.

Well this is a load of drivel. And all yall are agreeing with it because every single person on this forum considers themselves smart so you like agreeing with people who claim to be smart and know smart people stuff.

"so I took California’s GED test in June, 2012. It was dead easy."

If that's your basis for calling yourself smart then I'm not impressed. I took the GED high as a kite and got a perfect math score (know what's similar about both our statements? we both sound like jerks). The GED isn't a smartness metric, it's a soap bubble test so white people don't get stuck as fry chefs for their whole lives. It's _supposed_ to be easy as long as you understand the questions. Welcome to the upper class nimwit.

"People worry about Google and the instant availability of knowledge making people dumber, because we don’t have to memorize much anymore — Socrates felt the same anxiety when writing and reading were invented."

Your events are off by a few _millenia_.

"contrary to what teachers and school board members might want you to think, getting into college is easy if you’re intelligent and work hard to do interesting things"

False. Just false. I mean, I'm assuming you want to go to a top tier college, not community college. Top tier colleges are for expanding the upper tiers of the gentry class, while community colleges allow entry into the gentry class. To move to the upper tiers of the gentry, you need to have shown that you respect the institution of the gentry, ie. going to high school. Exceptions maybe exist for prodigies or minorities who built a clock once (because that's soooo amazing, who here _didn't_ build shit like that as a kid), but in general skipping high school to learn sewing and greenhaus building is an acceptable path to an Amish lifestyle, not differential equations and the Ivy League.

I thought it was generally acknowledged at this point that school isn't about education? School is about socialization, connections, and a prodding to at least have some depth of knowledge about a general corpus that it's accepted people should know about. No one actually expects you to be able to find x in real life, but everyone is familiar with the concept of finding x. I am an _astrophysicist_ and I use, at maximum, 5% of shit found in my physics texts through the year. _School is not about the shit in the books, that is not the point of school_, you're like an atheist telling a Catholic that Jesus was an asshole because evolution -- it's a valid point but it has nothing to do with the conjecture. School is an indoctrination procedure so we don't schism even further into our already highly segregated class based society, saying that it's a waste of time because class and homework are stupid is a correct statement, but misses the entire point.

Even anarchists believe in school.