Comment by 9rx
4 days ago
> The people who are on to bigger and better things are in fact vanishingly rare.
Dropouts are rare full stop, and those that do drop out overwhelmingly have life issues that causes them to drop out. The well rounded people who do okay in school aren't the ones dropping out, it is those with things like mental disabilities. It is not the act of dropping out that is impactful, it is the problems that lead to dropping out that continue after dropping out. It is a misconception that continuing in school would have cured what ailed them.
> A really healthy society, with really good schools, would provide a path for those who can't hack it.
You severely underestimate just how challenging life is for some people. If dyslexia was the biggest challenge to overcome, we'd have nothing to speak of. Some of these kids are, to be blunt, effectively vegetables. They are accepted into school for the sake of relieving the parents/primary caregivers, offering what is a babysitting service, but there is no academic value in them being there. They will not continue in school for prolonged periods of their life and there is no reason for them to.
I guess in your imagined "really healthy" society, all people are perfectly equal. That's impossible. But if we did somehow live in your made up world then we can say that we already have "really good schools". Nobody in our schools we have drops out without a good reason.
> Dropouts are rare full stop, ...
From a quick search, the State of Michigan has roughly an 8% dropout rate. Whatever your criteria for the term "rare", that is a huge number of kids.
If you are trying to run a really healthy society (vs. a Social Darwinism dystopia), then putting all the kids who don't do well in academic classroom settings on a "things like mental disabilities" - "effectively vegetables" spectrum seems extremely counterproductive.
> Whatever your criteria for the term "rare", that is a huge number of kids.
It is! When I go to the school to pick up my child, it is shocking how many have overtly visible challenges, never mind those who don't present to someone just casually walking in the door. It is rare, but rare is still a lot of people in large populations.
I live next door to Michigan and 3% of the students have their own personal assistant in school for the schools to be able to cope to their severe challenges, and, by accounts of family who work in that industry, that many more should have an assistant but there isn't a sufficient workforce to fill those roles. So that is around 6% of the students, give or take, right there who aren't really a good fit for being in schools. Used to be that they would have been dumped into institutions and never step foot in school, but that's not socially acceptable anymore.
Hey guys, I just wanted to butt in to clarify that I'm not mentally disabled or dyslexic. I'm basically neurotypical... well... more or less.
I dropped out simply because I found school insufferably boring and an almost complete waste of time. Some of my earliest memories are of myself thinking "oh man, it's still just Wednesday -- two more days to go until the weekend?!" (Fast forward to today, and I find myself looking forward to Monday!)
Just about everything else I found myself doing with my time -- including actual hard labor -- felt more rewarding and productive. (At least I was making money that I could use to buy 3dfx cards and RAM chips.) In truth, past phonics, don't think that I even learned anything in school; I was always ahead of the class just by reading books at home and at the library.
My parents shed many tears, but they came to terms with my dropping out, because I had exhibited depressive symptoms from about the age of 9 or 10, and those symptoms entirely vanished when I didn't have to go to school.
I'm sure that there are many others like me. Public school often tries to shove round pegs into square holes. There are better ways to learn, of that I'm certain.
3 replies →