| This is, to be perfectly blunt, utter nonsense of the highest degree. - You can't make something interesting when your time is controlled minute-by-minute. If you were stuck in India for the next four years, you could find some way to make it interesting because you have freedom. You simply can't make, say, prison interesting if it's not already, because everything is so rigidly controlled. - High school is NOT there to socialize you; it's there to keep you in one place all day so that your parents don't have to babysit you (see http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html, http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/). High school society bears very little resemblance to adult societies in the real world. For one thing, you can't pack up and leave if you don't like it. For another, your friends are chosen by accidents of age and geography, and not by you. For yet another, adults (some adults, anyway) spend the day doing things; most of the work that high schoolers do is simply thrown in the garbage at the end of the year. - High school can't possibly be a filter for anything, because everyone is forced to attend; the "filter" isn't a filter if it lets everyone (or nearly everyone) through. Prep schools are filters for colleges, but they filter based on how much money your parents make and not based on how smart you are. - The vast, vast majority of adults, by the time they're 25, have forgotten 90% (or more) of the stuff they've supposedly "learned" in high school; it necessarily follows that most of the "learning" is a complete waste of time, as you can't possibly make use of information if you don't know what it is. - Why in Cthulhu's name should anyone want to act like a high school student? Most high school students accomplish nothing of any importance. Most high school students will do incredibly dangerous and stupid stunts if their friends ask them to. Most high school students waste enormous amounts of time on stuff that is neither fun nor important. See http://bygpub.com/books/tg2rw/chap3excerpt.htm for more on this. |
'For another, your friends are chosen by accidents of age and geography, and not by you.'
this seems patently false to me, you hang out with the people who energize and care about you whether you are 16 or 25...
I mean, yes it's true that high school is boring and has many flaws, but it really doesn't take up that much time, and you can get a lot out of it. Classes can be boring and stifling, but I would argue that going to college without at least calculus isn't the best idea if you plan to have a lot of time to learn all the cool math you want/need.
Also, as some previous posters mentioned, until you're kicking everyone's ass and winning math/programming competitions, I don't think it's fair to say that school is too easy