I was pretty much this kid, or close to it, and to this day that statement is still one of the most valuable, harshest truths to me. So just challenge the kid to make it both work, run the company and finish high-school. If the kid is this smart he can do way better than running some VPS hosting company in the long run.

edit: I'm not from the US, but biscarg's comment sounds like it would be pretty good for the kid.

In response, here are some "deals" that my friends cut with their teachers:

Friend 1: Instead of doing ~50 easy/medium difficulty math problems per night, he would do 3 difficult ones instead from the section.

Friend 2: He would not have to any homework for AP Physics class as long as he got an A on the previous exam.

AP Bio Teacher: Had an official rule where any student who got a 90% or higher on the previous week's exam wouldn't have to do any of the assignments for the week (though many would do the assignments anyways to learn the material).

These are some things he could look into.

I was in a very similar position as you and looking back what got me those breaks were the teachers that liked me, that liked what they saw in me and who wanted to support me.

Everything I got, I was granted. Just like in real life.

I may not have the "best" social skills, but I will say many of the teachers do like me.

they want him to conform to a system that was never designed for him

What's actually super interesting about the kid's comment is that while clearly written by a clever kid, he specifically never states that he is too smart for this, and that seems intentional.

It seems very much that the kid recognizes that the system is flawed, and not that he is too extraordinary for the system, so in my opinion, trying to appeal to him in the: "If you were that smart you would've just finished it next to all your other stuff." sort of manner will be of no effect.

Now, I don't even know if I think he should stick around through school, I likely would not have, but if that's what you want to argue to him, I'd suggest that the best way to do that is through showing him how non specialized education is helpful all through life, which I argue will be very difficult, because we have an educational system that stresses specialization over a more liberal education, and I think he recognizes that.

HOWEVER, just about universally they highly highly value their own kids getting college degrees. It is one of the most important things they believe they can give their kids. So while they skipped parts of the traditional educational system, their experience after 30 years of life has convinced them that their own kids ought to have it.

Schooling at the level you're at now is designed to be well-rounded, and I suspect you would be doing yourself a future disservice if you chose to completely reject it in favour of your current narrow interests.

he would be much better served reading broadly; historic fiction, science/nature periodicals, the classics etc

teachers like Tyler DeWitt are vastly underrepresented in the school system.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BVwWN0kjbms&list=FLj3EXpr...

I'd suggest following hkmurakami's advice and figure out a way to bend the system to your will. It's a much more valuable lesson in the longrun.

Don't get me wrong.. for most kids, I'd suggest going ahead and sticking around HS and finishing. But it's not very long after high-school when your high-school "credentials" become totally insignificant.

and just to give that statements some context, I've been in a position to make the initial decision on hiring at three of the last four companies I've worked for

"If you were that smart you would've just finished it next to all your other stuff."

It's not about being that smart, it's about the best use of your time. You could be the smartest person in the world, but doing hundreds of single-variable derivatives isn't going to teach you as much as moving on to multivariate calc (if you're capable of moving on).

School in the US locks you into a specific speed. If you learn more, you're punished with busywork below your current level, if you learn less, you get left behind.

The quote I'd prefer to hear your friend say is "If you were that smart why didn't you test out?" or "If you were that smart why didn't you just finish everything in a couple months?" But these are impossibilities in the current system.

The school system is akin to having a giant pile of rocks.

Which is a better use of your time if you're capable of building a crane:

A) You can either carry them one by one to where they need to go (finish hs)

B) You can build a crane that moves them faster (drop out and pursue more).

Agreed, but it still requires at least 35 hours a week of sitting in class.

The core of that argument, like this one, is that the fundamental assumptions about what the activity is providing are incorrect, and that leads to poor reasoning about the problem.

In my case the young man had made assumptions about signalling his body gave him with regard to being hungry or not as a signal of quality and/or acceptability. In the author's case the young man has conflated the value of education with the value of earning a living.

I agree with others here that if he is "that smart" he should be able to just finish up the high school curriculum and get that out of the way. I'd certainly consider home schooling him, since his business is so successful he should be able to hire himself an individual tutor, get the basics covered, get certified, and then get his degree. These folks typically deal with kids of movie stars or executives who are travelling a lot but they are out there.

If the kid is smart, and you want to reason with them, do it at the company level which he has so much of his identity invested in.

What is his gross margin? EIBTA? Net income? What are the strengths, weaknesse, opportunities, and threats for his business? What happens if Notch decides to cut off folks like him? What's the next step in his life? And the one after that. When he's dead what does his obituary say, "Man he ran the best Minecraft servers." ? He has shown that he can create a business, that is great, but does he have the stones to make bigger businesses? Or is he strictly small time, the 21st century equivalent of the guy who owns and runs the gas station on the corner his whole life? Who are his heroes? His anti-heroes?

Clearly he has had success in his goals, but he doesn't know what he doesn't know. The goal of an education is to give you the tools to attack the problem of developing knowledge when you are confronted with a lack and a need to know. Its artificial in the education system (do you really need to know about ancient history?) but the tools and techniques are widely applicable.

My eldest child is pretty smart, she basically tested out of the public high school curriculum at age 12, however most of that was due to a voracious and wide ranging reading habit fed out of a pretty strong curiosity drive. College taught her to discipline her efforts toward a specific goal. Sort of like Luke Skywalker learning that even if the force is strong in you, being unable to apply it effectively makes you weak.

The primary difference between the "we're all here together" college and doing it remotely, is the exposure to other people having similar/different challenges and meeting them around you. Since folks are rarely good at everything having people around who are good at things you aren't good at lets you learn from them, and they from you. People deal with stress, and failure, and challenge in different ways. In a college community you get to see how others do that and decide if its going to work for you. That stuff you can't get remotely and that is unfortunate.

you act like he hasn't already learned linux administration/networking/programming on his own

It reads as if you have equated skill acquisition with knowledge acquisition, can you say more about what leads you to believe those are equivalent?

if you don't think there is a metric ton of domain specific knowledge represented in what he's already doing then you may not be as familiar with the topics as you think you are or are not remembering what it took to attain that familiarity.

but i am also privy to other areas of knowledge aqusition that might identify this minor more than i fear i have already

i guess that's the difference between people that inherited knowledge (without any need of it) instead of having to arrive at it (because they were feeding themselves and their kids with it).

that kind of explains why, of the over 200 interviews i've conducted, some of the college educated "programmers" i came across seemed knowledgeable; until i made them write code that is.

thanks for solving that conundrum.

There are many problems with how kids are taught in school. However, it's arrogant to think that you won't benefit from further instruction at 15 - regardless of how well you think you're doing.

I've known many smart autodidacts, but they're often unaware of their weaknesses. They tend to be less 'well rounded' than those with academically trained minds.

And I would agree that I'm not the best writer, but are there not people who are far worse at constructing a proper sentence that have graduated high-school AND college?

I don't think that I won't benefit from further instruction. What I'm saying is it's MORE beneficial to focus my efforts in more practical learning. I WANT to learn, but I don't want to learn stuff that will waste my time. I have nothing wrong with the subject, the problem is that we're not seeing how to apply it. I can learn math all I want through doing complex programming and creation of algorithms, however, sitting in class isn't getting me the same practical knowledge that that would.

No. Not because "practical learning" is bad - indeed, it's as great as you say - but because the "practical learning" that you can find for yourself is available forever. Especially if you're naturally good at it. At this point, or at any other point in your life, all you need is Ramen noodles, a cheap laptop, a solid Internet connection and a credit card.

Indeed, self-administered practical learning just gets easier with time, because you can move around and buy hardware and rent machine shops and own your own garage.

But there are things you can't easily replicate outside school, or that are a lot easier to enjoy if you have credentials and go through channels. My personal favorite example is: Science labs. Colleges have real science labs! Which are really fun for practical learning! And which you can use as a student. I mean, I won't go so far as to argue that you should spend twelve years doing a Ph.D. and a postdoc just to get your hands on the femtosecond-pulsed UV lasers, the bounteous supplies of liquid nitrogen, the fully-equipped biochemistry labs, the cell-culture hoods and incubators, the specially-bred laboratory mice, they mysterious bottles of colorful liquids, the nanotechnology laboratory, the electron microscopes, or the particle accelerators. But I did. And I don't regret any of that!

Yeah, I don't "use" my little pile of academic credentials at the moment. But there is more to life than just being "useful". Otherwise nobody would ever bother to, say, play Minecraft.

I can learn math all I want through doing complex programming and creation of algorithms...

So, are you one of those geniuses who has already aced the U.S. Mathematical Olympiad and then gotten bored with it? I have to ask, because such people exist, and if you are one I can't help you. But otherwise: Please tell me you've taken a serious high-school mathematics competition and been bored by it, because otherwise I'm not yet convinced that you know what you're missing. There is a lot of math that is not encompassed by "complex programming" or "creation of algorithms". A whole lot. More than I can understand. Not to mention the physics. Physics! In the hands of the right teacher, who is admittedly not easy to find, it's really a lot of fun.

Your situation is fascinating. You are simultaneously me (although substitute software exploit development for Minecraft hosting and subtract a lot of dollars) at Jesuit school in the '90s and, from what I can see coming, my son (now 13).

Can I offer you some more advice?

* Find some honest, worldly adults, preferably some affiliated with colleges, to lock down the advice you're getting about going GED instead of finishing school. I'm finding it jarring and disquieting; on the one hand, if the people advocating GEDs are wrong, you could be making your life much more annoying by complicating your entrance into college; on the other hand, if they're right, sticking out school is actually going to make college harder because your grades are going to suck.

* Read fiction, and get a book on writing (check out _Style: Towards Clarity And Grace_ --- it approaches writing the way K&R approaches C), and take writing seriously. You write like a very smart teenager; you don't edit, and you choose puffy words, but you also write like someone who doesn't hate writing. The world cares very much about this. Writing clearly and confidently will get you a long way in your career. You won't find many successful adults who will tell you otherwise. Participate in forums and, when you do, try to be mindful of how you're writing; there's no better way to learn than to practice, and no easier way to practice than to yell at people (gracefully) on forums.

* If you're serious today about a future in technology, learn to code. I know a lot of people who dropped out of college early for careers in systems/networking who never learned to program, and it hamstrung them later in life. High school won't teach you anything about programming, but the first few semesters of a good college CS program are a forcing function that does. Don't settle for PHP! If you're already doing this, congratulations, and keep on it. Software development is the fissile core of the whole industry.

* I'm probably the 1000th person to tell you this, but that's because it's very true: you will not necessarily want the same things when you're 30 as you do now at 15. The world is full of talented technologists now working as doctors, lawyers, accountants, and teachers. Screwing up college doesn't close many doors in technology, but it does almost everywhere else. As you get older, your degrees of freedom diminish, and obstacles you create for yourself now can become forbidding later. Keep the doors open.

Let us know how all this goes!

I was a lot like you (I'm addressing this post at the person the whole thread is about, not Thomas) for the second half of high school. I had a lot of fun hacking on various projects, was quite sure that CS was my future, and thought my classes--though I did find parts of most of them interesting--were mostly wasting my time. I talked about wanting to quit, and if I had a successful project that started bringing money in the door, I might have.

One trick is that I did care very much about my grades. So after some wavering about whether I wanted to go to college or push it off indefinitely, I decided to go to Stanford. And for reasons that I can't entirely explain, I signed up for a program where I spent freshman year reading a sizable portion of the important Western writers of the past 2500 years. And I realized that I actually really like the humanities when done well.

But I was still pretty set on a career in tech startups, took mainly CS aside from that program, and flirted with dropping out a couple times.

Now it's my junior year, and I've slowly realized that there are a lot more options out there that interest me. I gained an appreciation for the academic side of CS. And I realized that I really do like and care about thinking and writing about social issues, philosophy, and some other things.

I've pretty much determined that my dream job is professor because it would let me do everything I like doing (innovate technically, communicate, teach people, mentor people). However, I'm also probably not going to go down that track because of the hazing (grad school + difficulty of finding academic jobs afterward) and inflexibility (in the good case, you probably only have one great job offer in one place, and you'll pretty much be there for life), but if you had asked me freshman year, I would have said I had no interest in research.

I'm also not sure that I want to stay in tech forever. There are a lot of interesting problems, one person's contributions can be meaningful in some settings, and it's very flexible and well-compensated. However, a lot of what people are doing is pretty boring to me on most levels (most companies don't need innovative technology, and even most of the ones that are innovating aren't particularly doing anything for society that I care about). After a decade or two, there's a good chance I'll want to do something more interdisciplinary and with more social value. I definitely am not convinced startups are the thing for me; the vast majority of startups just seem banal at this point, though there are some gems.

This also ties into the fact that I expect the world to change a lot in my lifetime. Tech is important to me now, but as the world changes, that could change too, and the more freedom I have to do that, the happier I'll be.

I've learned a lot about what there is in the world and what I care about in the last five years thanks to being in school. And I have a great foundation that will make it easier for me to follow my interests as they develop.

As a side note, college has been an extremely important time for me as a person. I felt pretty adult as a senior in high school, and in many ways, I was; I was far more responsible and better at avoiding stupid decisions than most of my classmates. But I still had a lot of growing up to do, especially socially. I don't think college is necessarily the optimal environment for that development, but it's a very good one. Make sure that you have friends about your age, whom you frequently see in person, and spend significant time with. Get close to some of them.

Finally, writing well is extremely important and useful no matter what you do. It is worth the investment, and the earlier you invest, the more it will pay off.

I'd also like to note that I currently can program well in the following languages: PHP, JavaScript, Java, C#, Python, Lua, etc... and I most certainly enjoy doing so.

Thank you for your input.

he's solving real world problems in those languages!

I am not saying this is the best choice for you, but if you want to skip all the useless parts of high school, this is another option.

[1]: www.simons-rock.edu

1. What is the parents net worth?

2. Is the child a US Citizen?

3. What is the skin color/race/nationality of the child?

4. How much money does the child have in cash. What's his net worth?

5. Is his employment at this gig guaranteed for at least 5 years and is this gig going to continue his salary for 5 years?

6. Does he show any signs of burn-out? He may be wildly successful for a few years, then commit suicide because he didn't get stock options?

7. Does the child have stock options in the company and the right to liquidate the company and if so how much would get get in return?

8. Committed any felonies or gotten into trouble in younger years?

9. Does he have a drivers license?

10. Is there a Charismatic cult leader that hypnotized him into a delusional state to plant these seeds who stand to make a fortune from his quitting school?

11. What is the REAL reason for hating school?

12. Did the child write this letter or hire one of his employees to do it?

13. Are there any bullies in school that are hassling him that are prompting this? Can he get along with his peers?

14. Does he have successful mentors who will see his development through to age 18 or so?

15. Is his relationship with his parents solid? So that if he were to get into an accident and become mentally disabled that they would take care of him?

Who can predict the future of this decision? If I was the father, I'd compromise, I'd say: "If your next year in high school is Straight A's, we'll let you quit". If he wants it that bad, and he's a doozer, he'll make it happen.