I am surprised by the negative response this is getting.
High school caters to a very broad audience with it's general curriculum and IMO is one of the worst ways to teach kids. I can say without a doubt that I find applications for about 15 - 20% of everything I learned in highschool past grade 10 in my life, but I'd already been programming outside of school since I was 12 or 13. Most things will simply not apply to most students, but the system needs to cater to all of the possibilities. The only reason I graduated high school was with the hope that university would allow me to actually study things I was interested in, but that's simply not the case to meet the degree requirements. In the end, I dropped out of university and got a great paying job in a startup and have done a good deal of contracting work as well; I don't feel my future career prospects are at all hampered by my lack of education.
I agree that most high school students would not live their lives to their fullest potential if they dropped out, but for those that will, this is applicable. I am definitely an edge case, but I feel that is who he is address here, and I wish someone would have told me to drop out of high school and get an earlier start.
High school caters to a very broad audience with it's general curriculum and IMO is one of the worst ways to teach kids. I can say without a doubt that I find applications for about 15 - 20% of everything I learned in highschool past grade 10 in my life, but I'd already been programming outside of school since I was 12 or 13. Most things will simply not apply to most students, but the system needs to cater to all of the possibilities. The only reason I graduated high school was with the hope that university would allow me to actually study things I was interested in, but that's simply not the case to meet the degree requirements. In the end, I dropped out of university and got a great paying job in a startup and have done a good deal of contracting work as well; I don't feel my future career prospects are at all hampered by my lack of education.
I agree that most high school students would not live their lives to their fullest potential if they dropped out, but for those that will, this is applicable. I am definitely an edge case, but I feel that is who he is address here, and I wish someone would have told me to drop out of high school and get an earlier start.