Why I Believe Most High Schools Should Be Eliminated (And What Should Replace Them)
It’s 7:55 on a Tuesday, and I’m standing by my classroom door with a stack of worksheets. The fluorescent lights are humming. A kid named Marcus walks in wearing a hoodie and headphones. He doesn’t look angry. He just looks done. He sits at his desk, opens his notebook, and stares at the word “theme” written on the whiteboard from yesterday. We’re supposed to be analyzing Lord of the Flies. He hasn’t read it. I asked him about it after class last week, and he shrugged and said, “I read a few pages. I just can’t get into it.”
I know Marcus. He’s not lazy. He can spend three hours in his garage rebuilding a lawnmower engine, and he’ll explain every part to you with a kind of patient enthusiasm that most adults don’t have. He wants to run his own small-engine repair shop someday. But right now, he’s failing English because he won’t read a novel about stranded boys, and he’s failing math because the algebra problems in the book have no connection to anything he’s ever touched.
I’ve started to think that the problem isn’t Marcus. The problem is the entire building he’s sitting in.
I know this sounds like a hot take. You read headlines like “Most High Schools Should Be Eliminated” and you imagine someone who hates teachers, or someone who wants to yank kids out of school and chain them to a workbench. That’s not what I mean. I’m a classroom teacher. I’ve spent fifteen years inside these hallways. I believe in education. I just don’t believe most high schools, as they are currently designed, deserve to survive.
The system hasn’t changed much since the late 1800s, when we built schools to prepare young people for factory jobs. We organize students by birth date. We ring bells every 45 minutes. We shuffle kids through eight disconnected subjects. We grade them on how well they sit still and memorize material on our schedule. None of that reflects how learning actually happens, and it certainly doesn’t reflect how adults work, think, or solve problems. The only place in modern life where you’re told to stop what you’re doing every 45 minutes and switch to a completely different topic is, well, high school.
People say the system is broken, but I don’t think it’s broken. It’s working exactly as intended. It’s just that the intention is obsolete.
Last spring, I tried something small. I got rid of my Friday afternoon lesson plans and gave my students an open block to work on any project they wanted. I wasn’t trying to be revolutionary. I was just tired of fighting them for attention. The first week was chaos. Some kids didn’t know what to do with the freedom. A girl named Destiny eventually said she wanted to clean up the overgrown courtyard because it bothered her that nobody could sit outside. I helped her write an email to the facilities manager. She got permission. She recruited two friends. They spent every Friday for a month weeding, mulching, planting herbs. She learned more about soil pH, perennials, budgeting, and persuasive communication than she’d learned in any science or language arts class all year.
A group of boys built a simple bookshelf for our classroom library. They had to measure, cut, account for the warping in the wood, and adjust when the shelf tilted. That’s practical geometry. They didn’t call it math. They called it “making the shelf not be crooked.”
Was it perfect? No. Some kids still spent Friday afternoons half-listening to music and doodling. But enough of them came alive that I couldn’t ignore it. These were the same kids who “didn’t do well” in traditional classes. They weren’t incapable of focus. They just needed a reason to focus.
The truth is, most high schools are built around seat time, not skill or curiosity. You need to sit in a classroom for 180 days. You need to take notes for 45 minutes. You need to read the book the teacher assigns, even if it’s not speaking to you. The system values compliance more than engagement. That might have been acceptable when a high school diploma was the gateway to a decent factory job. But now, by the time kids graduate, they’re expected to have critical thinking skills, emotional intelligence, entrepreneurial instincts, and a polished résumé. You can’t get those by filling out worksheets.
So what would I actually do?
I wouldn’t abolish every high school building tomorrow. There are a handful of schools doing meaningful work, usually with project-based learning, strong community ties, or flexible scheduling. But for the majority, I’d drastically shrink the traditional school day. Instead of sitting in six classes from eight to three, students might spend two or three hours in small, seminar-style classes that meet fewer times per week and focus on discussion, writing, and problem-solving. The rest of their day could be spent at local businesses, nonprofits, farms, labs, or apprenticeships. They’d be doing real work with real adults who are not their parents and not their teachers. That’s how human beings have learned for most of history. It’s how we learn any skill that matters, from cooking to carpentry to leadership. You watch. You try. You mess up. You try again.
I know what the opposition is. What about math? What about the fundamentals? The truth is, students can learn math in context. My friend teaches at a small program where students run a weekly food stall at a farmer’s market. They calculate profit margins, ingredient costs, and projected sales. That’s algebra and arithmetic, and it’s real. They don’t call it a worksheet. They call it a spreadsheet.
What about adolescents who aren’t ready to work at a job? Not every eighth-grader is. But not every high school student is the same, either. We pretend they are, and that’s the problem. One student would thrive in an early college program. Another needs to spend two years working with a master electrician. Another just needs a flexible schedule so they can take care of a younger sibling in the afternoon. Our current model forces all of them into the same building with the same age cohort, and we tell them the answer to their future is a forty-minute lesson on the quadratic formula.
I’ve seen the alternative work up close. My cousin’s daughter left high school early. She took the GED, enrolled at a community college, and started volunteering at a veterinary clinic. It wasn’t an easy path. Her parents got a lot of sideways glances from relatives. But within a year, she was assisting with surgical prep, reading medical charts, and earning money as a kennel technician. She still complains about her biology textbook. But she talks about medicine with a kind of familiarity and confidence that no 16-year-old I know has ever gotten from a lecture.
I’m not saying every kid should drop out. That would be irresponsible. I’m saying we’ve arranged our priorities backward. We force students to sit in classrooms until we’re satisfied they’ve received enough decontextualized information, and only then, after graduation, do we allow them to do something meaningful. That’s too late for a lot of kids. By the time they’re juniors, they’ve already decided school isn’t for them. We lose them in ninth grade, and then we blame their poor attitude.
Maybe the first step is simpler than we think. Let a student spend one day a week doing real work in a field they care about. Let a teacher coach a small group of students through a long-term project instead of managing five classes of thirty. Let kids move through subjects at their own pace, with online tools and mentors, rather than according to a bell schedule. Start high school at nine or ten in the morning. It costs almost nothing to change the start time, and the research on adolescent sleep is so clear it’s almost embarrassing.
I still stand by my classroom door every morning. Marcus still walks past me, hood up, shoulders rounded. Yesterday I stopped him and said, “If you didn’t have to be here, where would you be right now?” He looked at me like it was a trick question. Then he said, “At my neighbor’s shop. He’s rebuilding a Ford Ranger. I helped him with the brakes last weekend.”
We stood there for a moment. I told him to bring me a picture of the truck if he wanted. He actually did. We talked about it for about ten minutes before the bell rang, and he didn’t seem combative. He seemed awake.
There’s a kid buried in there somewhere. I just don’t think we need to keep building schools to keep him asleep.
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