I'm glad to see this article, because it questions what has become an unquestioned building block of American society. Attempts to trivialize it come, as I see it, from two sources: repression ("Who cares about high school? They're all in jail or barefoot and pregnant now." I care. Wow do I care) or ignorance ("What? High school was a great time! I miss those days!" Well, I might have been part of the 1%...)

The reason we can't ignore high school is simple: sexual maturity. We cannot transcend our origins. Delay of the responsibility of having/caring for children into late (or even early) 20's is a leaky abstraction. Pretending kids are kids until they graduate does not make it so.

And with sexual maturity comes...aggression. Especially because high school is like Silicon Valley on steroids: there's so much change going on that everyone's at risk of becoming "disrupted" when one girl hits puberty the right way or one dude makes varsity in $SPORT to everyone's surprise. With the presence of adults whose roles are less in flux (like the environments the home-schooling families in the article implied), things are less turbulent and reward aggression less. But there are none; the teachers exist for (and get fulfilled by and paid for and punished for doing other than) teaching, not enforcing discipline.

"Your "'use case' should be, there's a 22 year old college student living in the dorms. How will this software get him laid?" ~ Jamie Zawinski, Groupware Bad

Also, props to PG for independently coming to the conclusion that it's the "middle classes" of high school that have the most reason to be nervous[1].

[1]http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html