Escaping High School
7th July 2023
Lots of people are arguing about whether college is good, or whether it should be the default, or whether it should look different than it looks now, or whether it’s even a worthwhile institution in the first place. This is no doubt a worthy and important line of inquiry, and yet I am sometimes tempted to bonk such people in the face with the juicy, swollen, succulent, painfully ripe fruit hanging much lower right in front of them: high school.
As a bare minimum, high school is supposed to give kids somewhere to go while their parents are at work and keep them from ending up pregnant, in jail, or dead. Unlike college, which trades off against starting your career immediately, you have to go to high school (or the homeschool equivalent) regardless. And by the time you’re in your mid-teens, you’re probably as smart as you’re going to be – not as worldly or wise as you will be later, but the raw brainpower is mostly there. So you’ve got a four-year chunk during which you’re smart enough to learn anything a novice adult version of you could; don’t have to support yourself with a salary; and have access to a space with lots of peers and shared materials for free. This is absolutely tantalizing, and yet the default model of high school is something we sleepwalked into and thus are utterly wasting.
The thing we’ve landed on, at least in richer areas, is for high school to be used for getting most of its students into college and a few of them into elite colleges, which means teaching them enough to get high standardized test scores and offering them a wide slate of organized activities that they can join and then list on their applications. But if high school is supposed to prepare you for college, and college is supposed to prepare you for the real world, then it’s suspicious that high school looks so little like the real world. So at least one of three things is true: high school isn’t doing a good job of preparing you to get admitted to college; or college admissions officers aren’t doing a good job of picking students who will succeed in college; or college isn’t doing a good job of setting you up to succeed in real life. Regardless of which it is, the best strategy to set yourself on the path toward a successful, happy life as a teenager is to spend your high school years directly trying to create such a life. If this prepares you for college, great; if it doesn’t, then there’s probably something wrong with college.