Leaving High School: A Year Later

Today, I read a blog post about filling out a "Five Years Later" questionnaire for high school. It was highly entertaining, and I felt myself agreeing with most of what the blogger had to say about his high school experience. It got me thinking about my own high school experience.

I've been out of public education for about a year now, and even after slogging through a year of Portland State's errant nonsense, it was still better than high school. I got to take classes that interested me, and I got to ignore ones that didn't. This makes me wonder- why isn't high school more like college?

They claim to be preparing us for college, but I've found that's a load of nonsense. They make us take tests in the eighth grade to tell us what we should do with the rest of our lives. They want us to select some kind of "track" based on said indication. And that is a load of shit. They didn't even offer classes in Anthropology, and look what I'm studying now, fools. Even given this "track," we're all required to take a bunch of classes that mean nothing. I finished Health in one day online. I finished Technical Reading and Writing in not much more time than that. And yet, neither of these classes did me any good except for filling high school requirements.

Why can't requirements be broader- why can't they just say, three years of math, three years of science, four years of English, and then have a wide selection of classes from which we choose? Why can't creative writing fill an English requirement as easily as AP Literature? That's how it works in college. Why can't we take two biology classes instead of one biology and one chemistry? What difference does it make to some district official?

The way public high school works is counter to how a university works. If no one took a class here at the U because it looked uninteresting, then they would stop offering it. In public high school, we had to take certain classes whether we wanted to or not. If given the choice, I would not have taken Health. I doubt anyone would. This would motivate the district to build a better, restructured curriculum, not to stick with the same song and dance that we heard in junior high and elementary school. The body parts don't change; there is no point to beating us over the head with the circulatory system. Sports medicine, for example, should be a suitable substitute. We should've been able to take classes that interested us, not ones that make us hate learning. I'm lucky that my love of learning won out over my hatred of public school, because I know people who refuse to go to college for fear of the same boring beating they had in high school. That makes me sad, because I think this is why people would rather borrow lies and propaganda from talking heads than learn the facts on their own. I think people have been scared away from learning because they're only impression was the one given to them by public school, and that wasn't learning. It was testing, and repetition, and memorization. Public school has nothing to do with learning; it is a three-ring circus.

The aforementioned blogger lamented how useless his high school education was, and that his overall experience was quite poor. My own experience was equally forgettable, redeemed only by the teachers who showed a genuine interest in learning, and students' ability to learn. I don't miss high school in the least; I was told by some that I would, and they're wrong. I don't miss the other students, I don't miss the ridiculous requirements, and I certainly don't miss the stupidity of so much of it. If they wanted to genuinely prepare us for college, and not just fill some legal requirement, they would model the schools after universities. They would stop treating students like children and start treating them like independent young adults. High schoolers are immature little imps, and if they were made slightly more responsible for their own education, they might be able to get to college and not act like idiots.