Excerpt from Chapter 1 of College Without High School:
The Point Of Life Is Not School, It Is Adventure
Let’s begin this book with a bold proposition: You’re in high school, and it bores you to tears.
Maybe you’re frustrated by poor teaching or a melodramatic social scene. Maybe your eyes glaze over every time that you’re treated like a child (or worse, like cattle). Or maybe your teachers are fantastic, your school brims with extracurricular activities, but you nevertheless sense that the world is much bigger than high school - and you don’t want to spend another year in the holding chamber.
Let’s propose that one way or another, high school doesn’t challenge you. And thus, you’re bored.
Unlike other people, I’m not going to suggest tips for perking up, trying harder or accepting the reality of high school. I assume you’ve heard the argument that you simply need to change your attitude toward school. Mine is a different approach. If you’re genuinely bored, frustrated or disappointed by school, then I have only one suggestion: Stop wasting your time. Life is made of nothing more than time, and if you are bored, then you are wasting your time - and not really living.
What is the alternative to high school tedium? My answer is: adventure.
An adventure, specifically defined, is any challenge that requires a lot of learning in a small amount of time. Traveling cross-country to teach rock climbing at a summer camp is an adventure. Crafting an online marketing plan for your friend’s small business is an adventure. Spending three months on an organic farm in Italy to learn permaculture and the Italian language is an adventure. Walking into a physics professor’s office to get book recommendations, working nights as a veterinary assistant and volunteering at a disaster relief site are all adventures. And going to college, too, is an adventure.
Because the word adventure drums up many more images than what I’ve just described, let me also tell you what adventure is not. An adventure is not an escape - i.e., an excuse to give up something that you’ve chosen to start but not yet finished. Adventure doesn’t mean throwing yourself headlong into danger. And an adventure is not necessarily a physical challenge (like climbing Mount Everest); adventures come in many flavors, including social (introducing yourself to a hero), mental (writing a book) and spiritual (attempting a ten-day silent meditation retreat).
An adventure pushes your comfort zone, demands courage and requires determination. It’s centered around your interests, your dreams and your personality. And most importantly, it must be chosen by you - not your parents, not your teachers, but you. More on that part soon.
To cure the disease of high school boredom, you need adventure. But adventure cannot be boxed into after school activity slots or one-week winter breaks. Real adventures take time - the time currently taken by high school. The radical idea I’m proposing, in other words, is that you stop thinking of school as your full-time occupation. If school does not challenge you, then leave school and seek adventure.
Bored People Become Boring People
Leave school! Butterflies riot in your stomach. No matter how ready you are for the idea of leaving school, a little voice inside cries, Wait, don’t jump yet! This is the voice of eight+ years of schoolroom conditioning. It's the same voice that says dropouts become welfare-dependent drug-addicts! and maybe school will be better next year. I don’t want you to squash this cautionary voice (because jumping without looking is always a bad idea), but I do want you to consider what will happen if you let caution rule your life.
What you have to fear is this: If you let yourself be bored in high school, then you will let yourself be bored as an adult. What does a high schooler who slaves away at meaningless, disconnected problem sets every night become in later life? She becomes the adult who slaves away at a job she doesn’t enjoy, for less pay than she deserves, for a one-week vacation through which she would prefer to sleep. She does not spend the time she’d like with her children. And despite being a kind, compassionate and well-intentioned person, because she chooses to take orders instead of think for herself, she does not create the life that she wants. Boredom is powerlessness. If you let yourself become bored then you load the dice in the game of life against you.
I’m certainly not suggesting that all teens who work dutifully in high school meet the fate of an unhappy or disempowered adulthood. School works for some students (i.e., it challenges them in the adventure sense), and it doesn’t work for others. Most big, normal public and private schools work poorly for most students. Hence the very real threat of letting school shape you in a negative way.
Listen to the cautionary voice in your head, but weigh it evenly against the fate of allowing boredom to rule your life.
Homeschooling and Unschooling
To legally leave school, you’ll have to become a homeschooler in the eyes of your school district; this is your quickest and easiest ticket to freedom. But first let’s get our terms straight.
I don’t advocate becoming a homeschooler in the common misconception of the word. I don’t want you to stay home all day, follow the state-prescribed 10th grade curriculum and cut yourself off from the world because other people’s opinions are scary. This version of homeschooling, while it does exist, is practiced far less often than the media would have you believe. Homeschoolers are an eclectic group of educators with a wide range of learning and teaching styles. The flavor of homeschooling that best matches the adventuring lifestyle has its own name: unschooling. Unschooling is a philosophy that places the responsibility for learning and growing in the student’s hands. In this world, parents and teachers act as resources - not dictators.
Unschooling does not discredit formal learning (e.g. structured classes and curricula) as long as it is voluntarily chosen. Community college, four-year university, structured art class and a summer architecture intensive are examples of formal learning situations that an unschooler might openly embrace. High school-style classes - where students perceive themselves as captives and school personnel treat them as such - are not.