Some people have a learning style that is not compatible with public high school. This is true for both me and my kids. All of us had problems in school and were evaluated to see if we had learning disabilities. We all tested above the 98 percentile and were in AT/GATE programs. Also, we all tested out of high school via the CHSPE.

For me, it was a choice that I have never regretted (except for not going to the prom). It put me on a career track where I was years ahead of my peers.

For my kids, not so much. They had such bad experiences in high school that they are sour on higher education. I am still working on convincing them to finish a college degree, but I feel like a hypocrite because I did not get mine until age 50. Back when I was their age, I was lucky to work in jobs were nobody cared whether or not I had a degree. Today it's impossible to get a "professional" job without a degree.

Honestly sounds like you, and to a lesser extent your children, needed high school for non-academic reasons as much as most people need it for academic reasons. If you have problems in school and test in the top 2% of intelligence, you have problems in other areas that need to be addressed, and can be in a social classroom. Speaking from experience.

This is kind of rude. You are flat out saying that OP and their children likely have problems because they are both smart and don't go to school. Have you ever considered that school might be the problem? That maybe it doesn't work for everyone the same? Speaking from experience.

What you said may be true for many people in situations similar to mine, but I am pretty stable, well adjusted, and happy. Thus I have no "problems in other areas that need to be addressed." The main issue I had with high school was no escape from the tediousness of homework assignments for content that I had already mastered.

The CHSPE was a godsend to me. I fit right in at Jr. College and got along well with my teachers and classmates. The environment was different because my peers were (mostly) emotionally mature, and they wanted to be there. High school was like a prison in comparison.

I think you have to allow for the possibility that not all high schools have ’social classrooms’. Mine was filled with a bunch of children in adult bodies operating on hormones and hairspray. I hated it so much I didn’t want to be surrounded by it in college and decided to commute instead. I dropped out after three years.

I was also fortunate to find a career path that didn’t require a degree, and while my oldest child had no choice based on her career interests, I’m having the same struggle with my youngest who’s in her freshman year with an undecided major.

Yep, sort of like being in a bar full of drunk people and you're stone cold sober.

I get what you're saying. But other than my girlfriend, being a Muppet was my favourite part of high school. Screwed around so much. Learned how to be quick witted and fast on my toes.

Then came university and that all went away, seemingly forever.

"I don't need treatment!"

"Saying that you don't need treatment only further proves that you need treatment."

I hope you’re this insulting sometimes in person because it would be great if you got the kind of consequences that come of that kind of language.

TBH, if a person is in the top 2% of intelligence and don't finish basic post-school academia, then they are likely prevented from doing the types of jobs that appeal the most to them: new/novel research, high-level problem-solving, etc. Those individuals doing interesting stuff are almost always certified. Software Development is an anomaly.

So, sure, you can get hired as a web developer, or even some non-web development roles, but that's kinda pointless because if you could stand doing boring shit you'd finish the academia to at least a very basic level.

TL;DR: If you couldn't stand the uniformity of school, then the roles available to you without a formal education are going to be just as boring and unrewarding to you anyway.

You are probably correct, but there are always exceptions.

The last half of my career was spent doing cutting-edge research and development with some of the best and brightest people I have ever known -- about half of them with at least one PHD.

Sometimes ability can make up for lack of credentials, but it is rare.

> You are probably correct, but there are always exceptions.

That is why I hedged my assertion with "likely" :-)

Outliers always exist.

For the people who you categorise as “thinking they don’t need it but they do”, do they really? It’s not like the majority of the folks around you remember an aorta of anything they learned in HS. The only things they remember are probably the things that happened outside of it. Not saying it’s justified that they skip HS but I feel like there’s more thought needed.

> It’s not like the majority of the folks around you remember an aorta of anything they learned in HS

The ones who did (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aorta) biology might remember it :-)

I agree that most of higher education is wasteful signaling. But in my (admittedly limited) experience, the typical American high school dropout lacks functional literacy, numeracy and basic factual knowledge.

I don’t think trigonometry or foreign language is an essential skill for 99% of people. But explaining simple ideas in writing, or being able to compare the costs of a yearly vs monthly billing plan, or knowing how birth control works are pretty important life skills.

I don’t know that that’s true for most people; often the topics being taught aren’t as important as the skills you’re being taught/exposed to. Many people, especially Americans, never attend college. High school is the only chance before adulthood to socialize with your peers and learn what it means to interact with people of various upbringings. Anecdotally, my sibling graduated with a class of nine from a private Christian school and they are very far behind from a social and educational standpoint when compared to me, who graduated from a normal public high school with a few hundred of my peers. She also never read any of the books I was made to read in high school... I could not fathom the blank spot that has created for my sibling. Maybe I was fortunate to go to school before Common Core, or lucky I had more good teachers than bad but 20 years out from HS I might not remember everything I learned there, but the stuff I do remember helped mold how I think about things.

What I concluded, especially I took a few neuroscience courses, after was that the computer/database/memory model is not good to explain school and learning.

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My take:

You don't learn to remember what you learn. You learn to build roads, pretty much literally inside your brain (it constantly rewires).

It's more like unpaved paths before road building: First there is wilderness, then there is a lot of traffic, and increasingly that traffic concentrates on more and more clear paths.

The learning of "stuff" is creating paths. The things - ideas, knowledge, facts - that you learn are like the carts travelling the paths. They may be gone - but the paths remain.

So even after every single thing is forgotten - every single traveler and cart is no longer there - what remains is the paths. The wiring inside your brain changes in the learning process. You may not remember much of what traveled through your brain, what created the paths, but your brain nevertheless remains changed.

Even if you forget every single thing, the way you think and react will have changed forever.

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Using the metric "what I remember from my courses" is the wrong metric. Instead, it should be "how did my way of thinking change".

I took a lot (really a lot) of (mostly university level) courses long after university, in fields unrelated to my career and previous study. That's when I noticed far more clearly than ever before, despite very good success (I was even made TA a few times), the concrete things I was able to recall even just a year later was really small. Then I noticed it's the same with my core field really.

The concrete things we know is actually rather small. I forgot sooooo much. Only things I use regularly are available in a way that I could pass an exam (school or university). Still, I changed quite a bit, but it's all "meta". I now know the path I have to take instead of being lost. Even if I don't understand the concrete items e.g. in a medical paper (e.g. names of some genes or proteins), instead of feeling lost I have a "feeling" what it is about, and I can easily look it up and understand very quickly because I have a framework ready to receive what I read.

Our actual "memory" is pretty small, it's all about the paths. Literally, in the brain.

I pretty much dropped out of high school the last mandatory year by taking classes that didn't have exams and breezing through knowing I already had university entrance through a scholarship. But honestly I regret it often as I missed out on extra STEM learning that I ended up having to teach myself anyway. Going to university a year earlier wasn't an option so I feel I was let out early with no oversight, at a time when my brain was a sponge.

>school anyways really isn't much of a roadblock or time waster.

I think it is both. It also discourages to think. I had to re-learn most of the things becasue I was told BS in the school. The current school system is outdated because it was designed too long ago.