While we should absolutely investigate the issue, it’s only one dimension of the education experience. Missing an education and/or the social learning of school can have negative effects that only show up later in adult life.

An uneducated 10 year old may be happy to avoid school all day, but a 30 year old who was never properly educated is most likely going to have a very bad time for the rest of their life.

I had a relatively smooth high school experience (minimal bullying, stable home life, "good" school, I'm straight and white and a guy and all that stuff) and it was still easily the worst four years of my life so far, and I'm nearing 40. Add in junior high and it's the worst six year of my life so far, all in a row, top six worst years. Elementary was pretty good, I guess.

Meanwhile, adults were telling me that was the best part of my life and always talking about how much harder adult life is, like all the misery of high school was just to prep us for much worse life as adults. Shit, if they'd been right I should have killed myself, truly. I still don't know how they managed to have such horrible lives that high school was the best they'd had. Even when I've been at points where I was working shit service jobs and had to watch the gauge on gas pumps really carefully to make sure I didn't overdraft—that was better than high school. Like, way better.

i only experienced one year in a US highschool, so i don't have much experience, but it wasn't that bad. in some aspects it was better than germany. (chemistry class was much better for example. most teachers were great, etc.)

so either you went to a really bad school and i went to a good one, or your work life was just that much better (which is great). for me both were about equivalent. work gave me a lot more freedom of course (because i simply took that freedom as a freelancer)

Even when I've been at points where I was working shit service jobs

ok, wow, you must have had a really bad school then or horrible peers. but even a job like that can be good when you have great workmates.

Super-early starts (I've never had a job with a start before 8:00AM—high school, though? 7:30; and, crucially, if I had a job with a start that early, I could look for a different job), crazy amounts of work with tight deadlines ("this thing I assigned you today is due tomorrow, hope you're not tired and hope nobody else assigned you a bunch of stuff today that's due tomorrow, you'll be doing it tonight or else"), ~7 hours a day that were basically the equivalent of sitting in a really boring meeting (I want to crawl up the wall and/or fall asleep after about two hours of that, in the working world, which fortunately almost never happens—it's every day in high school), extreme regimentation to the point of having to ask to go take a piss or maybe getting in trouble if you just want to stand up and stretch for a minute, little sunlight exposure which is awful in Winter, et c., et c.

ah yes. fortunately early starts are being debated as being a really bad idea, so that will hopefully go away for most students in the future. and i really like the "boring meeting" analogy. that makes so much sense. i didn't experience it like that, but i can totally see that happening, same with crazy homework which is really ridiculous. good point there. there is no homework at work. i found that aspect really liberating. except for deadlines. (but those make a cool wooshing sound when they pass by)

> (but those make a cool wooshing sound when they pass by)

That's another thing that's nicer about the working world: there's a lot more room for negotiation if too many tasks are piled on you, or if The World intervenes to prevent something from being done on time, or whatever. And true deadlines (as in: your work will be worthless and dropped in the trash bin if you miss it) are pretty rare. Plus if you work with people who aren't flexible about that kind of thing—you can find another job! Overall there's just a lot more communication and respect and people are way more understanding and laid back, which is weird because adults are supposed to be far more responsible than kids, but the expectations are totally reversed in my experience.

One of the weirdest things to me about high school vs. "real life" is that high school treats everything so very much more seriously and rigidly than most situations in real life that I've experienced. There are hell-jobs out there that are as bad or worse, I'm sure, but at least leaving a job like that on a timeframe of fewer than four years is totally possible.