Should Most High Schools Be Eliminated? A Teacher’s Perspective on What Teens Actually Need
Last spring, I sat in the back of my own classroom during a tenth-grade English period and watched Marcus draw shoes. Not just doodles. He was sketching a high-top with a kind of precision I can’t manage with a ruler. His binder was open to the assigned page, but it might as well have been blank. He was listening to me teach symbolism, I think. Or he wasn’t. It took him about ten minutes to realize I was standing next to him.
“What are you working on?” I asked.
He didn’t hide it. “Sneakers,” he said. “I’m designing a line. Kind of like retro but with recycled materials.”
“Does that have anything to do with the reading?”
He glanced at the title on the board. “Not really. But the book is about wanting something you think will make you happy. My shoes are about that too, sort of.”
I gave him an assignment modification on the spot. He could write an analysis of his own design process using the same narrative structure we’d been talking about. He did it. It wasn’t flawless, but it was real. Then the bell rang, and he headed off to chemistry, where he would almost certainly stare at a window and wait for it to be over.
That moment has stuck with me because it wasn’t a special moment. It was the everyday reality of an institution that can’t seem to decide whether it wants to educate teenagers or contain them. Marcus was not a troubled kid. He was not a behavior problem. He was simply a seventeen-year-old with a developing brain that desperately wanted to do interesting, meaningful, adult-ish things—and a school schedule determined to keep that brain seated and compliant for seven hours a day.
Here’s my hot take: Most high schools should be eliminated.
Not because we don’t need learning. We need more of it. Not because teenagers are broken. They’re the opposite. The problem is the container we put them in. The comprehensive high school, with its fifty-minute periods, its grade levels tied to age, its eight required courses, its giant cafeterias and parking lots—it was built for an economy that doesn’t exist anymore. It runs on the assumption that the most important thing a teenager can do is sit still, take notes, and prove they can tolerate boredom. But adolescence is not a waiting room. It’s the most intense identity-forming, connection-seeking, skill-acquiring phase of a person’s life. And most of that growth happens outside school, not inside it.
When I say eliminate most high schools, I mean stop treating the building as the default. I mean take the millions of dollars we spend on administrative layers, real-time bus routes, and standardized testing and redistribute it toward smaller learning communities, apprenticeships, public lab spaces, and mentorships. For some kids, a traditional school is exactly right. For a lot of kids, it’s a holding tank.
What would actually happen if we let go? I get a glimpse every time I watch a student come alive in an elective they chose, or during the last week of a unit where they finally get to build something. Last fall, one of my quieter students spent three weeks researching the historical accuracy of a video game, and then she stood up in front of the class and presented her findings like she was defending a thesis. She’s failed every multiple-choice test she’s taken this year. She just doesn’t care about those. But she cares about that game, and she can think deeply about it.
That’s not a deficiency. That’s a natural preference for work that matters to the worker.
The problem is that high school rarely leaves room for that. The schedule is a list of obligations, not opportunities. There’s no time to go deep. There’s no time to fix a mistake and try again. There’s no time to sit with a real question long enough to get frustrated, much less find an answer.
So what do we actually do about it, if we’re a parent or a teacher and we can’t blow up the system tomorrow?
We can start by changing the way we talk about time outside school. There’s a persistent idea that after-school hours should be filled with homework, structured activities, or rest because kids are “tired.” But many teenagers aren’t actually tired. They’re under-stimulated. They’ve been sitting in fluorescent light all day. They have enormous energy, just not for flashcards.
A small but meaningful shift: help your teenager find one thing they can do outside the building that feels like real work. A paid job, an apprenticeship, a regular volunteer shift with someone who’s an expert at something. Not an extracurricular that requires a permission slip and a parent coordinator. A real place where someone is counting on them to show up. That’s not always easy to arrange. But it can be simpler than it sounds. One of my students mentors a middle-school girl in robotics. Another works two Saturdays a month at a mechanic’s shop. Those are the experiences they talk about in class. Those are the ones where they learn how to talk to adults, manage responsibility, and handle failure—skills that no worksheet has ever taught.
Inside school, teachers can nudge the same direction without waiting for policy changes. We can make one unit every term project-based. We can grade for revision more than for first-draft performance. We can let students choose the format of their final assessment—essay, video, presentation, physical object. We can move desks around. It’s not revolutionary. But it starts to loosen the muscle of compliance.
And in the most basic terms, we can change what we ask when a kid gets home. Instead of “What did you learn in school today?”, try “What did you make today?” or “What do you have control over in that class?” If they can’t answer the second question, that’s important information. Parents don’t need to fix every problem. But they can start noticing which parts of the day make their kid shut down and which ones make them lean forward. Then, where possible, they can move one hour of their week to lean into the latter.
I’m not sure we’ll ever fully disband high schools. I’m not even sure we should. There’s something valuable about the social mix, the bands, the game nights, the shared experience of navigating a building with two thousand other people your age. But most high schools as they currently run—the ones where learning is a grade and grades are a currency and the currency is worthless outside the parking lot—those should be retired without a farewell.
Marcus is a junior now. He still draws shoes in my class, but he also has an internship at a local sneaker consignment store. He told me last week that he spent an hour explaining buyer trends to a customer and realized he actually knew what he was talking about. His English grade hasn’t changed. But he shows up early for the class, and he is, for the first time, annoyed when the bell rings.
That’s not a complete solution. It’s a workaround. Maybe that’s what we should be building more of—not bigger schools, not even necessarily better schools. Just more places where a teenager can do real things and discover that the person in the mirror is someone the world might actually need.
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