I can read a thick book on a hard subject(programming, philosophy, history), but could never finish a fucking chapter from a high-school text book, without falling asleep. Could it be that the textbooks are badly written?

I can spend days and weeks writing an essay on something that interests me, but i fucking hated writing 3 paragraph short essays in school. Could it be the topics, the format and especially the time constrain made me write badly?

If school taught me anything is that unless im working for myself on what i want, its better to just half ass everything, and not do your best, because all it takes is to not be your worst. It probably made me even less disciplined because my natural rebelliousness made me pride myself as an undisciplined misfit. I was proud of being lazy, stupid, stubborn, rebellious and all of that precisely because they wanted me to not be like that. Fuck school. It messed me up, and caused me great suffering with very little benefit, when at least in my case, there was a clearly better way of doing things.

This is so true. I realized this very thing myself in the second year in high school. I thought: what the hell am I doing trying to get good grades—from every subject?

I had been doing precisely that just because I could and with the eerie awareness of the fact that I would forget 95% of anything deemed uninteresting right after the course. When it came to subjects tangential to my interests, I realized that I was certainly not going to learn something in school that I couldn't learn by myself.

If I ever needed to cross check which European country invaded which other European country in the 1600's, how to translate "dear girl, I want to marry you for the rest of my life" to German should the opportunity arrive, or desperately need to exercise in some molecular calculations, then I was convinced that I would still have the chance to learn that stuff.

Except for the subjects of my interest, I then dropped all my effort to the very, very minimal level and as a result my grades dropped slightly. It was probably the 20% of effort, 80% of results scheme in action. In some subjects that I had decided to completely ignore, like religion courses (yes, we had those in Finland...), I let my grades drop to the minimum that was required to avoid flunking and was actually pretty proud of that result.

I graduated with good grades in everything I cared about. My high school diploma then exhibited real value for the period of a mere month until it claimed its purpose and I got accepted to the university. I've never needed it after that.

And, by the way, except for mathematics, 99% of what I learned in high school I have never ever needed since. I'm 32 now and I'm glad my teenage realization turned out to be correct.

One thing that school is good for is exposing you to ideas that are normally outside your sphere of interest, thus attempting to give you a balanced view of the world.

Granted, they're not completely successful at this but I think a lot of that has to do with our immaturity and privileged upbringing as much as it has to do with boring subjects.

"Why do I have to learn this", "I'll never use this", etc etc. The catch cries of a generation of students who have never had to fight for an education and don't have the awareness of how tough life can be to be grateful for the chance to gain one.

That is mostly caused by the school systems. Our parents go to their job, and we go to schools.

We are forced into an artificial society of children, and with teachers as authorities. So, we learn what other children like, missing altogether the wisdom and experience(if there are any) of the adults.

So children become very shallow in their taste and what they think is cool.

Or are/were they exhibiting the shallow results-driven sentiment reflected in statements like "99% of what I learned in high school I have never ever needed since."?

Holy Crap! They're some inefficient brakes!

Much of what passes for education much more closely matches the former than the latter.

- A 9th grade dropout.

Surviving prison develops grit. Therefore it is beneficial to go to prison.

Counting the grains of sand on the beach develops grit. Therefore, it is beneficial to count the grains of sand on a beach.

Point: not all activities that develop grit are beneficial. The implication of the grit argument is that any tedious activity has some benefit - if not for anything else, then at least for the development of 'grit' itself. Which is a ridiculous argument; some tedious activities are tedious because they are pointless. A better lesson to learn is to spend your time wisely - on activities that are tedious for a reason.

So is school tedious for a reason? The answer is no, not really - but to prove that to you would likely take some time. I recommend you read up on John Taylor Gatto, which the speaker references above. See: http://www.cantrip.org/againstschool.html and http://www.cantrip.org/gatto.html

There certainly are lazy people claiming to be smarter than those with good grades.

But in my experience, the students with perfect grades are far more likely to excel at school than at anything else.

When I started teaching at NYU, I ran into a lot of these students. They typically rocked my calculus 1-2 classes; they took calculus in high school but wanted to maintain a 4.0 GPA so they took it again in college.

Even in school, past a certain point, it doesn't serve them well. In Calc 3 or Linear Algebra (two more advanced classes I've taught), you must think for yourself to pass, rather than just applying the differentiation algorithm. That's when the 4.0's get pwned.

It gets even worse when I interview them for a job and ask them an open ended question: "Looking at XXX data, how can you estimate YYY? What other data would be useful?"

Many of them are reasonably smart. But they've spent years preparing themselves for schooling, not for actually building things. I'll take the kid with lower grades + open source project any day .

"Go through these menus to achieve x" won't help you when some joker breaks explorer and forces you to work with the command line.

Either way, I'm glad I went the Linux admin route. The instructor for the classes was about as quirky as you'd expect a Linux admin teacher to be, and all four quarters were a load of fun.

If any of my grade school classes had been like that, I wouldn't have hated it so much.

I get your larger point, that a sour-grapes excuse of "Well, school was booooring" doesn't necessarily indicate a successful individual - but just because losers also hate the system doesn't mean the system actually works for any real purpose.

You gain grit by doing things that need to be done, hopefully in pursuit of some greater goal (more than likely, just getting paid). Not by for-the-hell-of-it forced work. That just turns you off everything.

School sucks; but I think it is a bit of a dirty hack to keep kids minds on something for a few years. It needs a major revamp and broadening of the curriculum (so that those who do want to think independently can do their own thing).

But otherwise we risk a next-generation of total dropouts with no education and no life skills (it's bad enough anyway).

Yep; that's what society has come to. The fix is going to take more than just a few years.

People are naturally curious. School kills curiosity.

Top pupils quit their post-school projects because they don't have teachers standing over them offering gold stars and punishments. They're so resigned to extrinsic motivation that it takes years to rediscover the creative, inner self: the guy that, without setting any goals, enjoyed lego and learning to speak english.

Life doesn't suck, and we shouldn't deliberately make the lives of children boring and tedious.

Unlearning that lesson in the real world is how I learned grit.

But for some people it's just too easy and boring, and they can just coast through. So it doesn't even teach grit and discipline to them.