> would you go into the time machine and like, not go to school, as a young person?
Kind of, yeah. I'm not saying school is 100% useless, but I like to think I would have been better off with maybe 80% of the curriculum cut out.
I could have put all that time to much better use developing knowledge and skills in those things that I had an innate interest in, let alone spent more time being active, around others, and outside - not sitting down at a desk.
But society disagrees, so there's little choice but to conform.
I realized what the GP said when I was 13. I was either bored working on subjects I liked because I knew them or bored working on subjects I didn't like and had no interest in. I was an angsty teenager who could not handle this, so I dropped out.
At 18 I got my GED, after doing no studying, and that got me into a local college. After my first year I transferred to a less than Ivy League college in my state.
I had no support, and therefore did not use this opportunity to do great things, but I still ended up pretty much where I would have had I not dropped out. I look back on that time as my pre-working early retirement that allowed me to figure out what was important to me.
There are other types of schooling which are more tailored to the individual. You won’t find them in a public school though, with one teacher schooling 25-30 kids. It’s just not possible to cater to every individual‘s needs in that context.
The only way to get more individual schooling is to have well-off parents who send you to a school with smaller classes, and ideally with a more relaxed schedule, like Montessori (I personally find them a little cult-like, there are other approaches too). Or, get born in Finland or Sweden, they invest heavily into their public education system, and it shows.
I‘m not fetishizing. There is lots of hard evidence that at least the Swedish model is superior to what eg Central European countries have. Our country sends delegations to Sweden to analyze what they are doing better, and maybe get inspired by that. Sorry for throwing Finland into the mix, I probably misremembered.
Apologies, I didn't mean to say you were fetishizing, just that there's a lot of Scandinavia fetishizing on HN (and everywhere else for that matter) in general, haha
You should have a look what public schooling looks like in most other countries, you‘d be surprised how good you had it. The fact that you dreaded school proves nothing.
Telling people not to go to school is bad life advice.
> I was [in school and thriving]
I don't, would you go into the time machine and like, not go to school, as a young person?