To Those Who Want To Drop Out of School
chetansurpur.comI grew up in a small town, and after school many days I'd go read books at an alternative bookstore. I was able to give myself an autodidactic education in everything from feminism to anarchism to labour politics and more.
One day I decided to sample from the "education" section, an area which I'd been avoiding. As fate would have it, I started with The Teenage Liberation Handbook.
http://www.amazon.com/The-Teenage-Liberation-Handbook-Educat...
It was written by a disgruntled former English teacher and explained that the education system robbed children of their creativity to turn out a constant stream of factory workers that wouldn't talk or waste time. School was to keep kids out of gangs.
What really got me, however, was the idea that 75% of what we were doing was in fact "make work". We were in a glorified day care. The only reason they cared about truancy was because the school gets paid based on the number of classes we attend.
I was furious; basically I became a walking Rage Against The Machine song for about two years.
There are pictures.
I'm 35 now, and my only regret about dropping out of high school is that I didn't do it 2 years earlier. All of the people who told me that I was throwing my life away now come to me for life advice. I have started several companies and to date have never woken up in a ditch. I am not plagued with a sense of wonder about what I could have accomplished had I just written those last few exams.
I told my principle and the other students that I did not want the school to take credit for my future success. I was a bit of a shit, sure. But I wasn't entirely wrong, either.
These days, seeing kids like this gives me hope for the future:
I loved that book! It really managed to give a voice to the frustrations that I felt with my school, and how I was being taught. The on thing that I would like to emphasize though is that the book isn't advocating just dropping out of highschool, it is talking about replacing the school system's stifling attempts at education with teaching yourself what you want to learn. Make no mistake, you won't be getting out of work by dropping out, but you will be actually spending your time and effort on learning something important and helpful instead of wasting it on recieving a 'standardized' education that only exists to make sure that all the grunts have at least a base level of knowledge about 'stuff'. While it is much easier to just sit in school and be spoonfed information, it is ultimately a waste of your time. Your time would be better spent going out and learning about the stuff that interests you.
On the flipside I grew up and decided I was a bit too smart for school, dropped out and tried on my own. After spending a few years doing pointless, manual, hard work I decided I should go back to school.
After graduating my life has turned around. I have a great job with a great pay, and I have massive opertunities to further my knowledge.
Dropping out works for some people. But it certainly did not for me :P
Or, turn it the other way around, don't let bad schooling take years of the best period of your life.
I dropped out after 3-4'ish years of AI, and now I'm working on AI projects year round.
I think it's slightly patronising and playing it safe to say people should consider staying just because they might not ever get the chance to learn these things later in life. For one, that's their responsibility. The knowledge you pick up at a university can deprecate just as much (if its not already). If you don't continue to pick things up later in life, that's your own fault. Secondly, grades and bureaucracy, in my opinion, instil competition and stress in the areas where it doesn't matter. Universities should be concerned with obtaining knowledge.