Smart Kids Should Skip High School

That kid didn't build a clock, he put a clock in a suitcase, thought it didn't look like a bomb and brought it to school. What a smarty.

I'm finding often when I'm learning new skills I realize I had some of this education in school at some point. I think that's the entire point of early schooling, to learn real skills as an adult, of any random subject, really fast.

I went to one of the better public high schools in my district, so not one of the best schools in the country.

I learned quite a bit. Both the US history and European history teachers were very good, the calculus and differential equations courses were an excellent base for college physics and applied math, the computer class marked the start of my transition from an avid hobby programmer to a software developer, and drafting changed the way I understand a building.

As it happens, I'm still interested in history, math, science, programming, and building design, so perhaps I remember those best because I found them interesting. You were interested in getting high and competing with your friends, so perhaps that's why you remember that part best?

I half did this: after sophomore year, I left high school for what's now called Bard College at Simon's Rock, a college specifically for younger kids. tl;dr if you think you might be ready for college you should look at it. There are scholarships.

I have no regrets about that. It's as demanding as you want. About 2/3 of kids there get an associates' to transfer to another school after two years; those that stay all four do a B.A. thesis. Some folks who transferred reported being bored at their new schools, but I don't have much of a sample. :) I'd probably have had a slightly shinier-looking résumé if I'd gone on through high school, but there's more to life than that. For me the résumé thing is moot (the Rock actually helped; I got work through a teacher referring me to an alum), and plenty of classmates have done well in tech or law, become doctors, gone into research (including in hard sciences), etc. It produces a good number of high achievers for its small size and high acceptance rate, probably because kids interested in rushing into college are a sort of funny pool already. Occasionally bureaucracy requires some grad to take a GED exam because they left high school, but that's straightforward.

For high-school me, the focus on the liberal arts and the beliefs of folks there really contrasted with how I looked at the world at the time. Same would be true for a lot of folks here I figure. The tension from being exposed to something different was productive for me. Sounds icky I bet, but what you need to learn is not always the stuff you come in wanting to learn.

Anyhow, the site is https://simons-rock.edu/. Hope this is useful to folks.

The problem is that's a small and selective school that only accepts a few hundred people. It's hardly a solution for the entire country, much less world. While it lists an 89% acceptance rate, that's out of only 199 applicants and with a total student body size of 329 (in 2015). It's an "elite" school for "elite" kids to basically start college early. Possibly a model for other schools, but it alone doesn't scale to the rest of the population.

Full disclosure: I applied when in high school, remember getting the full tour and sample class, etc, but was rejected, imo because I pretty clearly didn't hit it off with the interviewer. It seemed like a very nice place though, if you can get in.

I'm not sure whether it happens "magically" or not, but the research is traditionally interpreted to suggest that classes of mixed ability do better on average.