I'll take this blog to both flesh out my point and express just how much I hate the structure of highschool.

First lets imagine a student interested a subject—lets say history. They love reading through history, finding historical trends, reading stories, and finding unique links between certain periods. Maybe they have a couple papers written out describing the unique parallels between the Roman empire & current day US—predicting failure modes in our current system. Altogether the students future seems extremely useful & promising.

Now lets design a system to completely break down this passion.

1. Let's waste their time. Let's literally take 8 hours out of their day, every single weekday. Which hours of the day? How about the morning ones, the ones where people commonly do their best work. What if they don't want to go? Let's make it government mandated!

   What about their time at home? Surely we can't stop them from working on history at home. Lets give them "homework" (~3 hours of work a day). But we can't let this homework be a creative outlet for them, that would be too much. Lets make them simple things, like problem sets, ten pages of notes, or even writing an essay in another language (which you have to take).

2. Let's break their sense of community. By telling them the only way they'll meet other people interested in history is in college. Of course the only way to get into college would be by checking the list—14 AP classes, 4.0 GPA, 1600 SAT, 36 ACT. If not someone else will check those boxes, someone else will get the community you want. Maybe you could lean into your passion—history?

3. Lets break their passion. This is the most evil, most deplorable part of highschool in my opinion. Lets make them hate history. How do we go about this? Its pretty complicated and well thought out, so hang with me here.

   First we need to convince them history is actually just memorizing facts. How could we get them to think this obvious lie? We'll repeat it to them. Every single day. For 181 days straight. We'll tell them their worth, how much they know "history", is by how many dates they can recite. How many people can they fill in the blank for, how many passages from the textbook can they memorize.

   Second, we need to prove to them that they hate history. How do we make them think such a thing? Give them homework. Take their passion that they once loved doing, and condense it down into a grotesque mind numbing activity. Every day have them memorize ten different dates, memorize a new chapter of history. Don't focus on the big ideas, make sure to have the homework focus on the "gotchas"—the exact spelling of the names, the specific type of product, June vs July.

   Last we need to make it hard to escape. The problem here is teachers. They might actually have a sense of passion for the subject, they might possibly show these students what real history looks like. How do we pull of the task? Rank teachers by how well their students do at memorizing dates. Perfect. That way teachers are obligated to throw out any passion they have for the subject, obligated to assign as much homework as possible, obligated to grade as harshly as possible—solely as long as more students get a 5 on an AP test.

Okay lets take a couple steps back. Do I regret my highschool experience? Surprisingly… I don't. I managed to do what I loved, meet communities outside of school, and explore my passions. In short, I was lucky.

Though, if we invest so much time and effort into an educational system, ideally people who follow their passions and do what they love should be the norm—not an anomaly. How do we change such a system is an entirely different blog in and of itself (I have some outlines here on my blog about education) but you can't deny the system is broken right now.

I'll keep my takes on the "what now" question pretty short for this (look above for more fleshed out takes):

• Charter/project focused schools are great but still fail in the way of mandatory classes + assigning students projects. Teachers are also still paid in metrics of how well their students do on standardized tests => leads to systemic issues.

• "Some highschools aren't as competitive => aren't that bad." My response here is mainly that the competitive highschools are at the current equilibrium given a majority of students want to go to college (limited seats mean inherent competition). Noncompetitive highschools will probably attract people who want to stand out => cause other students to start the rat race. We probably shouldn't be designing systems that work worse when there are more passionate people.

• IMO College admission rates aren't the whole problem. We probably need a structure that 1) gets people to their passions quicker and 2) allows them to up-skill fast. If this happens then ideally colleges would of course want better people and the system would adapt pretty fast.

• Private schools seem to work better because they have the resources to tailor an education to every single student—think having college professors teaching for highschoolers. This just isn't scalable with almost 50k-70k per year per student. I also don't know how they work for students who already want to specialize (ie. why waste a students time teaching the Bohr model of an atom when they're interested in Roman history—it's extremely hard to align student current interests with what you "want to teach them")

• I'm bearish on the classroom + curriculum method of education. It seems fundamentally problematic to distill peoples interests into curriculum that they must follow (contrary to interests at times), as well as trying to align to 30+ student interests.

• Colleges seem better initially because you get much more freedom with classes (checking for the classroom problem), but I think this mindset still plagues mandatory "intro series" classes.

This blog post is more of a rant/expressing just how much I hate the system as it is right now and I definitely think there should be more discussion into how to reform it! This takes a ton of inspiration from "A Mathematicians Lament"—I genuinely love this paper and think that it highlights a lot of the problems I find are crazy with todays educational system.