[ahoyhere]

There's also a bias if you look at dropouts as a homogeneous group, because they aren't. It's just as ludicrous to predict the same outcome for someone like me, who was always way ahead and bored to death of school, and a poor kid from the city or country who couldn't read at grade level.

I doubt Tobi ever had reading comprehension problems and I bet he was passionate about his hobby leading up to his track switch.

As for me, I'm a high school drop out and everybody told me "You'll end up stacking shelves at 7-11!" because that's what dropouts do. They made the same mistake you are accusing us of making, when we talk about our own pasts. I knew several outstanding HS and college dropouts among my online friends at the time and they inspired me to stop wasting my life. I'm so glad they did.

[kostya-kow]

I completely agree with you. You expressed exactly what I was thinking.

I am 15, and I am planning to drop out of school.

It is extremely frustrating trying to persuade my parents that dropping out of school doesn't mean I am giving up on life, and that I am not a failure.

I cannot function in this artificial society that exists in schools, and I learn much better by myself. Finishing school would be complete waste of my time, for a stupid piece of paper. During this day and age, it is extremely easy to attain knowledge for free without attending any institutions. Currently, I have several dozen textbooks on my kindle, and I am taking 3 classes at Coursera.

My parents are trying to compare me to all the stupid kids that usually drop out, and I cannot comprehend their close-mindedness and ignorance.

Because of their stupidity and effort to "help" me, I may even end up homeless by the end of this year.

[vermasque]

Perhaps you need to work on persuading your parents about your intentions by describing a complete plan. Do you have a plan to get a job from the self-study through books and Coursera? Have you considered dropping out of school and getting a GED so that you still will have a piece of paper while spending more time on your personal projects? I have heard of this approach from an entrepreneur who was building a business around your age. Are you planning on applying to college after dropping out of high school? AP courses in middle/high school can be used to get college credits, saving a lot of money and time.

The "stupid piece of paper" is used by employers as another way to confirm that a person has skills they need. It's about reducing risk. Some companies might not be willing to hire someone who doesn't a piece of a paper from a respectable university. And you might want to work for these companies. There are always exceptions, but you will have to be exceptional in their eyes.

I'm not saying you shouldn't drop out. I definitely have issues with the schools and understand that time can be wasted for some students. Have a plan for how you will achieve success and understand that all decisions have trade-offs: benefits and costs. And consider how your plan might fail and how you will handle it.

[danielweber]

My parents are trying to compare me to all the stupid kids that usually drop out, and I cannot comprehend their close-mindedness and ignorance.

Until you _can_ comprehend them, you should not assume they are idiots.

[burkean]

> There are always exceptions, but you will have to be exceptional in their eyes.

This is spot-on. People take certain prejudices to their modelling high school dropouts. These are formed by the sheer repetition of observation. Dropping out is something Bad Students do. It's low status. Even an average student who drops out will have the story of their life coloured in terms of: 'he could have done _even_ better if he had stayed in school.'

So to get social approval for dropping out, you have to be exceptional. Such that their predictions of your future outside of mainstream education are so positive, that the 'low status drop out story' can't be made to stick to you. The balance of probabilities isn't enough to get social approval for your actions, the argument has to be overwhelming.

It's unfair, in a way, that there isn't a cultural idiom to support people who, for good reasons, don't want to learn through the high school track, but who aren't amazing individuals.

But in another sense, dropping out to learn faster is in itself to state that you are exceptional--that you have a iron-clad self-belief in your capacity for self-motivated learning. You shouldn't expect anyone to believe this about you; it's a trait that habitually we assign to people after they've been successful, not before. It's natural for people to model others as falling near the median, until they've demonstrated otherwise.

I''m less productive with fewer obligations. Most people are the same. You need to be _certain_ that you are naturally inclined towards setting useful goals and then following through. (I've wanted to write a novel for the past five years. All I have to show is a thin pile of abandoned drafts and margin-doodles.)

Soft skills matter. And removing one huge social component of your life without another to fill it has been, for me, a disaster. If you are 'neuro-typical', but still believe you will be more productive by removing 'wasted' social interaction from your life, you are wrong. If you are miserable, you can't sustain productivity. (And, not least, you might go crazy.) Even anti-social might sometimes be better than non-social.

This is HN, so I share a lot of beliefs about how lousy a state high school education can be. But culturally, we're not geared up as a society to support dropping out as a genuinely equal tract to education and employment. Be careful.

[kostya-kow]

Thank you. You words are great inspiration, and it encourages me to work even harder to achieve my goals.

I am definitely picking the harder path, but I believe that in the end it is the right decision.

[ahoyhere]

I think you're overstating the risk and need to be exceptional, actually. For the kinds of jobs we're talking about.

# of employers who asked why I didn't list any high school on my resume: 0. # of clients who asked where I went to school: 0. I may be exceptional now, but I wasn't always, and I still got good jobs.

I either put nothing about education at all on my resume, and explained that I left college because xyz, or jokingly put "The School of Hard Knocks" and that worked for me.

FWIW I have done everything from working for a local software dev co., to consulting for Pepsi, and I was employed as a consultant for Bear Stearns ("hired" by their staffing agency — it's a weird setup), with these (lack of) credentials. Never had a problem.

[hso9791]

If you do drop out, make your plan B now.

Priority one should be to be self-sufficient. It might be hard to get sufficient wages at that wage, and as a dropout, but this needs to happen.

If you end up in an unstructured environment, chances are you'll lose track of what you wanted to do. So - even if it's totally unrelated to what you want to do for the future - work like your life depends on it. It will give you a feeling of worth, and give you habits that will eventually make you the right man for the job that you want.

[sethrin]

So keep in mind that there are two sides to this: the beaten path is boring and frivolous because it's easy. The unbeaten path is hard, if for no other reason than because it's uncommonly trod. If you are finding it difficult to deal with other people's expectations of you now, you should probably not expect that to change immediately.

Learning is obviously not the point in any of this, so try to evaluate your situation without taking it into account. You're being asked to tolerate some awful people and jump through stupid hoops. Probably not for the last time.

I've been in this situation, whatever you choose will probably not matter as much as you think it will. This is much more dramatic and momentous to you now than it will be in ten years. You will get over your high school experience, whatever that is.

I've also, in an unrelated matter, been homeless. Try not to have to worry about where/when/how you're going to eat/sleep/bathe next. It's not the most fun or productive thing you could be doing. I do recommend being thankful that you live somewhere where this is remotely an option: being homeless in, e.g. Alaska would tend to be fatal. If you have any, go live with your relatives for a while. Just being in a different place can make a lot of difference.

The essential problem of your situation is that you're wanting to do something that statistically leads to worse outcomes, and with justifications that you can essentially only guess at. And it's not a terribly informed guess either; you're too young to have any kind of experience to bring to bear on this choice. Your parents aren't wrong, nor are they stupid.

They're also not right. You have as much information as anyone can about what you want to do, and what you're capable of doing. You'll probably fuck up a lot, and you'll probably recover from it. So relax. Try and have a sense of perspective about it all -- or a sense of humor. That will help with the fuckups, trust me.

Lastly, it's a terrible thing to try to raise a smart kid, I think I'd rather be in your shoes than your parents'. Go easy on them.

[barry-cotter]

Get a GED and apply to community college if the alternative is homelessness. Present it as a fait accompli. High school sucks ass but homelessness is worse. If you're not in the US, sorry I think you're pretty fucked unless they have something in the same line as community college.

[Livven]

Good luck. I'm 17 and finishing up high school now but was thinking about dropping out a year ago too. No one but me thought that was a good idea and in the end I guess I was just too undecided to really follow through, so yeah... btw I'd recommend you to read this essay, it describes the role and artificiality of school quite well, though it seems you're already familiar with it http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html

Anyway I wish you the best of luck in your self-learning. Here's hoping you'll be able to spend your time more productively than would have been possible otherwise!

[ahoyhere]

Get the book "The Teenage Liberation Handbook." It's a bit facile, but it's all about unschooling and how kids like you (and me, at the time) can and do succeed. Dig up the statistics on unschooled/homeschooled kids going to college. My parents were assuaged by the idea that many homeschoolers get into excellent colleges (meanwhile I never had a moment's intention of going to college; I had exposure to too many older friends in allegedly high-end university programs to think it was worth my time).

Your parents just want what's best for you but because they probably haven't investigated it, they believe the hype and durm and strang about dropouts.

Since you're the one who wants to do something "weird," the burden of proof is on you. (That's the position to take whenever you want to persuade anybody of anything.)