I am of the opposite inclination. My experience of the American schooling system was that it harmed my development more than it helped, and the best thing I did for myself was to compress the time I spent in it. This post is a guide for kids who want to do the same.
Looking back, I’ve only ever lived and learned outside the classroom; While I had intimate familiarity with the college admissions game as early as elementary school, by late freshman year of high school I’d lost all motivation to play it. I grew deeply tired of the endless hoop-jumping, and instead began deriving a mischievous kind of pleasure from my ability to wriggle out of and manipulate the academic bureaucracy around me.
So I committed myself to two distinct goals:
- Look good on paper (without becoming a slave to it), such that I could separately…
- …Live an unusual and illegible life.
To look good on paper while minimizing the schooling burden on myself, I approached my education deliberately, gamed the system, and graduated early. Most people treat school as a conveyor belt operating at a preset pace, but I soon discovered how many of the formal timelines and requirements in school are really suggestions that can be modified and maneuvered out of when they don’t serve your interests. I also witnessed how frequently admin and teachers can obstruct your ambitions with ignorance, apathy, or active hostility—which helped me quickly shed any sense of dependency I had on the structures around me. As a little kid in a big system it’s far too easy to forget that school should work for you as an individual, not the other way around.