Really wish I had seen this article 15 years ago. My high school required 4 years of English, and 3 years of all other subjects in order to graduate. Well, I had every credit I needed to graduate after my junior year, except for that year 4 of English, which required me to go back to high school for my senior year. I was pretty checked out that year, since I viewed my whole senior year as a holding pattern before going to college. I couldn't agree more with your assessment of school. Learning and education are critical for everyone, but that's not synonymous with more school. There's nothing high school or college could have taught me that an extra year of experience on the job couldn't have. I started my career at 22, but the prospect of starting at 21 or even 20 is really intriguing. I think there are plenty of young adults out there who could handle it. I love the idea of speedrunning school, and I'd be interested in seeing more resources out there for the next generation of bright young kids who want to get on with their non-school lives as soon as possible. Great post.
I was in grad school before I realized that I was an extremely inadequate student. I'd gotten As and Bs my whole life by putting in the absolute minimum. I applied for an assistantship to continue grad studies but had moved by the time I got the notification that I was accepted. At that point, I realized I'd dodged a bullet. I was completely unprepared to teach freshmen. Most of the teachers who would have had a vote in whether I should be chosen had taught me. They should have known that I was smart (maybe?) but that I had nothing to offer anyone else. This was the turning point for me regarding what I thought about the value and usefulness of college. School is where a lot of the smart kids go to waste their time, get rewarded for showing up, and learn to be lazy. The system is irreparably broken.
If school optimizes for metrics that are independent of (or even trade off against) genuine, intrinsically motivated, applied learning, we have a problem.
This accidentally bipolar strategy worked for me, but it splits your cognition, and taught me that kids are forced to un/consciously decide whether to:
a) Conform for social esteem and security, trusting the system into adulthood; or
b) Develop an independent capacity for pursuing academic and professional pursuits.
I see disagreeable, open autodidact/entrepreneur types make it out with their integrity, but they're the exception. This might be ok if the system worked by default, but the bigger problem is that the school -> labor pipeline itself is breaking + the internet is shifting where status comes from. Even the Harvard brand is corroding from culture war attacks and it running like a real estate venture selling pay-to-play degrees.
So the credential, the main value prop of school, is losing meaning. But we don't have a standard alternative. Kids are still being funnelled into a pyramid scheme that won't pay out, and they're footing the bill in energy, time and debt.
I learned more from escaping than I did from my teachers: the ability to solve problems created by the very systems that claimed to serve me. Also saw the banality of bureaucratic evil, developed risk tolerance and my argumentative capacities...
Jack and I have different degrees of cynicism here, but I believe in the age of AI and autodidacts the best schooling advice for kids is to teach them how to get out.
I can tell you, from the secondary school perspective, that the testing metric is a *constantly* moving target. This is how they have avoided responsibility for the past 50 years.
Colleges and universities have a vast array of reference points to choose from and all the "top ten schools in (fillintheblankhere)" listicles that allow them to claim value-add and promote themselves are nothing but lies, damned lies, and statistics. Most are adult daycare, but they don't see that they are because they are also adult daycare in their hiring practices as well. And you can't expect the immature to admit that they are just taking money from people a little less mature than they are and giving nothing in return.
This is interesting and depressing. I completely agree that school should be structured more flexibly in order to accommodate people with different skillsets and intelligences, but I completely disagree that making it as "quick and easy" as possible is an advisable approach. Clearly, this strategy worked out well for you, and you do well in pointing out that your success may not be repeatable for everyone else.
However, your approach seems to be anti-education, basically saying that there is no value in a school other than the piece of paper which guarantees your fundamental qualifications (I notice now that your comment below says as much). This is a reasonable stance, I guess, but it doesn't promise a better future - especially when that piece of paper doesn't do as much as it used to.
For what it's worth, I think that the social and emotional development that comes with staying in school is incredibly important. I get the sense that the "Speedrun" works best for students who are incredibly smart and generally unchallenged in their classes. I'd imagine that, in a lot of cases, it's tempting to dive into coursework and overload their time to get through and get out, rather than having to deal with the much more arduous task of socializing. There's value in sticking around and figuring out how to work with and make friends with people who think differently (in my opinion, at least).
Finally, I've been out of school for 5 years, and life has gotten a lot harder since then. I've been fortunate enough to work interesting, fairly creative jobs, and it's still often stressful and exhausting. School is a societal structure for people to enjoy being young - to spend time focusing on their own development and not have much responsibility beyond that. I respect your perspective, but I wouldn't personally recommend to anyone who has the option that they find a way to enter the workforce even sooner.
Fascinating article. And I'm thinking along similar lines as you are in your comment. One thing that occurs to me is that, even more so today than when I was in school (I'm 69), what the author has done is distinguish herself overwhelmingly for a few of the possible ways of subsequently proceeding through life, whether via employment or entrepreneurship. But she has potentially handicapped herself for very, very many more, for the reasons you mention, among others. And I think that many, perhaps most, of the life paths for which she has distinctively given herself advantages can be even more productively approached by just not pursuing college degrees at all. I had a high school classmate who did much the same as what this article described (at least the H.S. and parts of the bachelor's degree part), way back then, and she seems to have done very well for herself subsequently. But I think this fits only a very special person, with a very special set of personal traits, so it's really "niche-y". It requires much "more" from the student's makeup than the author calls out. For instance, the long-ago H.S. classmate I'm thinking of was almost supernaturally mature for her (teen) years, and socially speaking, already uber-well-developed. I don't think every student who reads this and is attracted to the prospect(s) will actually have the personal makeup to pull it off, and I am almost certain that some who can pull it off (up to and including getting the Master's degree) will not then be able to transition well to a satisfying and productive career. But some surely will, and, "hats off!" to them.
Really wish I had seen this article 15 years ago. My high school required 4 years of English, and 3 years of all other subjects in order to graduate. Well, I had every credit I needed to graduate after my junior year, except for that year 4 of English, which required me to go back to high school for my senior year. I was pretty checked out that year, since I viewed my whole senior year as a holding pattern before going to college. I couldn't agree more with your assessment of school. Learning and education are critical for everyone, but that's not synonymous with more school. There's nothing high school or college could have taught me that an extra year of experience on the job couldn't have. I started my career at 22, but the prospect of starting at 21 or even 20 is really intriguing. I think there are plenty of young adults out there who could handle it. I love the idea of speedrunning school, and I'd be interested in seeing more resources out there for the next generation of bright young kids who want to get on with their non-school lives as soon as possible. Great post.
I was in grad school before I realized that I was an extremely inadequate student. I'd gotten As and Bs my whole life by putting in the absolute minimum. I applied for an assistantship to continue grad studies but had moved by the time I got the notification that I was accepted. At that point, I realized I'd dodged a bullet. I was completely unprepared to teach freshmen. Most of the teachers who would have had a vote in whether I should be chosen had taught me. They should have known that I was smart (maybe?) but that I had nothing to offer anyone else. This was the turning point for me regarding what I thought about the value and usefulness of college. School is where a lot of the smart kids go to waste their time, get rewarded for showing up, and learn to be lazy. The system is irreparably broken.
If school optimizes for metrics that are independent of (or even trade off against) genuine, intrinsically motivated, applied learning, we have a problem.
This accidentally bipolar strategy worked for me, but it splits your cognition, and taught me that kids are forced to un/consciously decide whether to:
a) Conform for social esteem and security, trusting the system into adulthood; or
b) Develop an independent capacity for pursuing academic and professional pursuits.
I see disagreeable, open autodidact/entrepreneur types make it out with their integrity, but they're the exception. This might be ok if the system worked by default, but the bigger problem is that the school -> labor pipeline itself is breaking + the internet is shifting where status comes from. Even the Harvard brand is corroding from culture war attacks and it running like a real estate venture selling pay-to-play degrees.
So the credential, the main value prop of school, is losing meaning. But we don't have a standard alternative. Kids are still being funnelled into a pyramid scheme that won't pay out, and they're footing the bill in energy, time and debt.
I learned more from escaping than I did from my teachers: the ability to solve problems created by the very systems that claimed to serve me. Also saw the banality of bureaucratic evil, developed risk tolerance and my argumentative capacities...
Jack and I have different degrees of cynicism here, but I believe in the age of AI and autodidacts the best schooling advice for kids is to teach them how to get out.
I can tell you, from the secondary school perspective, that the testing metric is a *constantly* moving target. This is how they have avoided responsibility for the past 50 years.
Colleges and universities have a vast array of reference points to choose from and all the "top ten schools in (fillintheblankhere)" listicles that allow them to claim value-add and promote themselves are nothing but lies, damned lies, and statistics. Most are adult daycare, but they don't see that they are because they are also adult daycare in their hiring practices as well. And you can't expect the immature to admit that they are just taking money from people a little less mature than they are and giving nothing in return.
This is interesting and depressing. I completely agree that school should be structured more flexibly in order to accommodate people with different skillsets and intelligences, but I completely disagree that making it as "quick and easy" as possible is an advisable approach. Clearly, this strategy worked out well for you, and you do well in pointing out that your success may not be repeatable for everyone else.
However, your approach seems to be anti-education, basically saying that there is no value in a school other than the piece of paper which guarantees your fundamental qualifications (I notice now that your comment below says as much). This is a reasonable stance, I guess, but it doesn't promise a better future - especially when that piece of paper doesn't do as much as it used to.
For what it's worth, I think that the social and emotional development that comes with staying in school is incredibly important. I get the sense that the "Speedrun" works best for students who are incredibly smart and generally unchallenged in their classes. I'd imagine that, in a lot of cases, it's tempting to dive into coursework and overload their time to get through and get out, rather than having to deal with the much more arduous task of socializing. There's value in sticking around and figuring out how to work with and make friends with people who think differently (in my opinion, at least).
Finally, I've been out of school for 5 years, and life has gotten a lot harder since then. I've been fortunate enough to work interesting, fairly creative jobs, and it's still often stressful and exhausting. School is a societal structure for people to enjoy being young - to spend time focusing on their own development and not have much responsibility beyond that. I respect your perspective, but I wouldn't personally recommend to anyone who has the option that they find a way to enter the workforce even sooner.
Fascinating article. And I'm thinking along similar lines as you are in your comment. One thing that occurs to me is that, even more so today than when I was in school (I'm 69), what the author has done is distinguish herself overwhelmingly for a few of the possible ways of subsequently proceeding through life, whether via employment or entrepreneurship. But she has potentially handicapped herself for very, very many more, for the reasons you mention, among others. And I think that many, perhaps most, of the life paths for which she has distinctively given herself advantages can be even more productively approached by just not pursuing college degrees at all. I had a high school classmate who did much the same as what this article described (at least the H.S. and parts of the bachelor's degree part), way back then, and she seems to have done very well for herself subsequently. But I think this fits only a very special person, with a very special set of personal traits, so it's really "niche-y". It requires much "more" from the student's makeup than the author calls out. For instance, the long-ago H.S. classmate I'm thinking of was almost supernaturally mature for her (teen) years, and socially speaking, already uber-well-developed. I don't think every student who reads this and is attracted to the prospect(s) will actually have the personal makeup to pull it off, and I am almost certain that some who can pull it off (up to and including getting the Master's degree) will not then be able to transition well to a satisfying and productive career. But some surely will, and, "hats off!" to them.