Life by Choice

Why Dropping Out was my Best Option - 08.04.10

Statistics are usually fun, they tend to point out interesting things and trends. Browsing through the googlesphere, I found vastly different opinions and statistics all over the place. Here’s from the Taco Bell Foundation for Teens:

• Nearly 1/3 of public high school students fail to graduate with their class
• Dropouts are more likely to be: in poor health, unemployed, and living in poverty
• More than 8x as likely to be in prison
  
  (Here’s my favorite one though)-
  
• *Nearly all teens (95%) think that graduating from high school is critical to their future success

Back to that in a moment. On the other hand, there are also a fair share of links pointing out notable drop-outs. The first line of this page begins to capture the reasoning behind my decision and also lists remarkable drop-outs. For those of you who didn’t check: “Dropping out means leaving a group for either practical reasons, necessities, or disillusionment with the system from which the individual in question leaves.”
                     Source - Wikipedia

For me, it was all three and they were all interrelated. What is the purpose of high school, really - education? Social interaction? Preparation for secondary education? What is it exactly? Since the end of my freshman year, the education part of high school was simply a joke and I would have fit in well inside a college setting. The pacing and methods used are trivial, subjective, and very traditional. None of this is the fault of the students, yet we are the ones who are spoon-fed the crap 6-7 hours a day, 5 days a week. That’s 30+ hours that could have potentially been used for much better pursuits and endeavors. So practically, I was wasting my time education-wise, as even a source such as wikipedia would have a pretty good shot at teaching me the way high school does, and I’m talking honors, Advanced Placement, the whole bit.

My latter years in school I focused on two things: 1) social interaction and 2) credentials for entry into university. I’m a closet introvert by nature, and the reason why I like to be socially active stems from my curiosity in people. The credentials are self-explanatory as a high school diploma or its equivalent is just one of the hoops students have to jump through to access the beginning of their real education.

However, even these reasons were beginning to break down as I entered my final phase of disillusionment. Going back to the statistic I pointed out, it just goes to show how well the American Education System works (and doesn’t). They have effectively trained us to jump through hoops and travel in circles in order to join established society, otherwise we’ll become unproductive degenerates, right? Then a thought came to me that woke me up - Just who the hell decided I had to do this or that in order to be happy?

The school system in America has definitely done one thing well, and that is to brainwash the youth to think that Happiness is not subjective but a very specific destination only achieved through very exact means through a time-driven, mindless process.

From what I know about happiness is that by nature it’s fleeting and potentially very potent. The way emotions work in the brain is very interesting to observe. Think of the last time you were truly happy, or even completely distressed - did it not feel like it would never end? Yet it did, and it goes to show how even the most powerful emotions constantly shift. Happiness is not a place, but a continual journey.

Right now, on my own and making the choices about how I live, where I stay, what I do - this is the freedom that led to happiness for me. I encourage everyone who reads this to think about what truly makes them happy. Don’t take this post as an endorsement for dropping out of high school, because it is not. It was a personal decision that had multiple factors involved, but ultimately came down to finding my own happiness. For me it was travel, making connections, and writing ‘for a living’. I simply got rid of everything else that was keeping me from doing that, and that’s why High School wasn’t right for me.

On a side note, I still plan to attend university, and will talk in detail about this in another update, until then..

Set your own limitations.