Ugh. Why is it that self-professed "nerds" are always so blatantly anti-intellectual? It's such short-sighted nonsense; nothing but pandering to the immaturity of every 16-year-old throughout history who day-dreamed his way through the classes that he didn't like, and justified it by whining: "when am I gonna have to use this?"

You know what? Sometimes you have to learn things that you don't think you'll "use in real life". Sometimes you have to learn how to read and write, and make persuasive arguments to something other than a machine. Sometimes you have to eat your vegetables. Sometimes you have to go to bed early, brush your teeth, and pay your bills. Life is full of hardships. Deal with it.

To all the high school kids who are reading this and thinking about dropping out, with visions of startups dancing in your heads: don't. Just don't. If you're truly the brilliant, self-guided whiz-kid that you imagine yourself to be, you'll dispatch with the homework quickly (it's easy, right?), and use the rest of your prodigious free time for more enjoyable tasks. If I could do it, so can you.

Ah, 11th grade. That's the year I both failed English (with an A average in classwork and a B on exams, because of an F in homework) and taught myself enough Perl to create a sample-based text-to-speech system inspired by Evolution Control Committee's "Rocked by Rape".

Call me crazy, but I still think being able to make Dan Rather say "wild and wooly Nazi war criminals hooked on drugs and drinking binges bug out on fire" is more important and valuable than any essay I could have written about symbolism in Huckleberry Finn.

When I saw this, my first reaction was "Randall is stalking me." I'm in 11th grade. It's Ruby, not Perl, and regular, not just a weekend, but it's basically my life. All the school work I have leaves me not enough hacking time. I wish I could get sucked into a startup so I'd have a reason to drop out.

the problem is that our school system wastes WAAAAY too much time. Why? Because they need to coddle to the slow and dimwitted, instead of hurting their feelings and sending them to remedial classes.

They could probably teach the K12 material in half the time if they tried.

Putting it in a poorly-drawn web cartoon doesn't automatically make a trivial observation funny. Isn't this the topic of, like, 438973489 blog posts and essays?

Wow. I'm in the UK, and the main reaction I'm getting from reading all these comments is "Wow, is US education really that bad?"

Seriously, High School is 1300 hours of 'busy work'? Or just memorising lists of facts?

The equivalent period of my education in the UK could in no way be described in this way.

It's not really this bad, is it? It's just people dissing studying things they don't want to study, right?

Obligatory Paul Graham essay link, which I think I added the last time this same cartoon was submitted to HN:

http://paulgraham.com/hs.html

save two years off your life by taking the GED and attending community college for credit if your parents will let you. when your friends are graduating high school and becoming freshmen at universities, you'll be a transferring junior. the lower division stuff at college is what high school courses should be.

Currently in 11th grade. Can highly relate. I've been working on a few startups for a couple years, exited a few things (not for a lot), working in PHP and now Rails, and it's far more exciting than hs.

http://markbao.com (old, somewhat crappy stuff there, new stuff http://files.markbao.com/newstuff.jpg)

I'm not thinking about dropping out, though. The risk is too great to just drop out and work on startups. I'm trying to make the most out of my little time left as a teenager socially and educationally (albeit the subject matter is relatively less useful than I'd like), go to college with a business focus (if I can get in with my low-ball GPA), and see where it goes from there.

I'm mostly in the startup game now to make connections, understand a foundation of startup business and entrepreneurship, and then move on in the future with that knowledge as an advantage.

For any other high school people on HN: there are three laws to follow when you're attending a strict-time institution like HS:

  - Bust your ass.
  - Manage your time correctly.
  - Being under 18 doesn't make you special if you don't do special things. i.e.,
    have credentials and work to back yourself up, and forget about age for a bit.

In fact, school gives you an interesting time constraint and advantage. 37signals, who used to be a consultancy, had just 10 hours a week to work on Basecamp. And you know what they did? They busted their ass. And what came out of it was how to use time efficiently, embracing constraints. (Source http://www.37signals.com/svn/archives2/constraints_breed_bre...)

And with the last one, don't get arrogant because "ZOMG, I CODED AN APP, @web2personality WRITE ABOUT ME BECAUSE IM UNDER 18." You're not special if you're under 18. You've developed an application, and you've developed coding skills a few years before people generally do. What separates you from the general young entrepreneur press and YOU is a few years. Don't kid yourself into thinking you're all special because you can code @app, because in the long run, without actual skills and knowledge you're hurting yourself. There are some people who put on the façade of "Wow, you're a high school entrepreneur, that's so awesome. So what do you do?" but see through that and it's not really genuine most of the time. It took me a bit of time to figure out that nobody really gives much of a shit, so learn that. That's what I've noticed and stand by–your mileage may vary.

(I'm always glad to meet new high school entrepreneurs and people in general. My contact details are in my profile.)

If it hadn't been for that weekend I spent messing with perl in 11th grade, I wouldn't have gotten into ycombinator

Thinking back over my entire secondary education this is what I learned:

History: Very little stuck.

English: I guess I got a lot of practice writing. But at no point did we ever discuss useful things like how to write clearly and effectively. Instead we spent 5 years deconstructing literature, a process which consists of skimming over half the text and then making up flowery rubbish.

Geography: Simple physical geography. Weather, volcanoes etc

Science: Actually quite a lot. My science teachers seem to have done a fairly good job.

Maths: Nothing. Whilst I passed all my exams I didn't really understand anything and left school incapable of constructing simple proofs. I now have a masters in maths so its not like I didn't have the ability either, but most of my first year at university was spent correcting misconceptions I had gained at school.

Computing: After 7 years of school I knew roughly how a computer worked but still couldn't write a simple program.

Now that doesn't strike me as 7 years worth of education. Most of the counter-arguments on this page seem to come down to the necessity of learning things you don't want to learn. The problem is that I didn't. I, like most people, cannot be made to learn something by fear of examination. It has to be made interesting or useful otherwise I will memorise it, write it down in an exam and promptly forget it.

The problem with school education is that it's just not very efficient. I don't think that there's some grand conspiracy to keep the downtrodden masses in their place. It's just that our theories and methods of education are out of date and ineffective. Schools have worked more or less the same way since the 17th century.

Even in university I went to lectures where I spent 4 hours every morning for 6 days a week imitating a human photocopier. Mass lectures don't make sense in the modern age. It would be far more effective to just video the top lecturers and let the rest spend their time actually talking to the students, rather than at them.

I could rant as well about education being taken over by exams. How often at school did you practice working in groups, collaborating on joint essays, learning to function in a team? I would guess almost never. Because it makes it too difficult to grade an individuals contribution. Did you ever do original research or experiments? Were you given free rein to choose projects? Did you ever see an exam question that made you stop and think? It sometimes seems like the entire education system is built around the fear of cheating.

I know its easy to sit around and complain. Its certainly a popular thing to do in geek circles. But we have to recognise that there is a problem in order to fix it.

Progress is being made, slowly. The rise of open courseware means that educational materials are no longer being treated as commodities that universities have to protect and keep secret. Once its out in the open artificial selection will take hold and material will begin to improve. The best lecturers now have audiences of tens of thousands rather than just a single room.

On a completely unrelated note: I thought Perl was a girl, haha.

(I actually build a AIM bot in Perl when I was in High School, so don't judge me -- I can be nerdy too)

My 11th grade:

Coding at night Sleeping at school :p

Hoeworks? I thought they dont give any after 8th grade..

before we all argue this with our own experiences, we need to first put the "human variability" into account...

This is so true. In fact, I'd wager that my perl skills are ultimately the most valuable component of my resume. I learned perl in 10th grade by hacking on AIM robots, messing around with the Net::AIM module I found on CPAN.

Then I got a job [still in 10th grade] writing a robot for some woman in Canada. This was fundamentally a huge thing, because it opened my eyes to the possibility that I, despite my lack of formal credentials, could generate income based on my skillset.

Honestly I haven't touched perl in years, and now most of my hacking is in PHP/JavaScript, and honestly I'm happy that I don't have to deal with perl anymore...but it definitely gives me some cred.

Llama book 4 lyfe!

Not HN material