Why I Think Most High Schools Should Be Eliminated (And What Could Replace Them)
The bell rang at 2:47, and I watched my tenth graders pour out of the room like water from a tilted glass. A few were already on their phones. One girl had been crying during independent reading, and I didn’t know why. Another kid had asked me at the start of class if his work from Monday could “still count,” even though it was Wednesday. I said yes. I always say yes. The rest of them had that flat, exhausted look that has nothing to do with sleep and everything to do with the slow grind of sitting in a building for seven hours, moving through six different subjects, none of which connect to each other.
I closed my laptop and thought: this is insane. Not the kids, not the work. The institution.
I’ve been teaching for eleven years. I’ve taught in a big suburban school and a small charter. I’ve taught struggling readers and honors kids. And the longer I do this, the more I think a really unpopular thing: most high schools should be eliminated.
Not the idea of learning. Not the teachers. Not the social aspect. But the building itself, the schedule, the whole architecture of sorting kids into grade levels and marching them from English to math to history in forty-five-minute chunks—that model is outdated, and it’s doing real damage.
Here’s what I see every day. A kid walks into my room at 7:55. He’s carrying a backpack that weighs as much as a small microwave. He hasn’t eaten breakfast because the bus comes too early. He sits down, and I’m supposed to get him excited about symbolism in a novel written a hundred years ago. He doesn’t care. Why would he? For the past eight hours of his life, he’s been told what to do, when to do it, and how long to do it for. Then he’ll go home and spend three hours doing more of it, most of it busywork.
We call it preparing them for the real world. But the real world doesn’t work like this anymore. Adults don’t sit in rows. Adults don’t get graded on homework. Adults don’t have to ask permission to use the restroom. We’re preparing kids for a workplace that no longer exists, and we’re doing it during the exact years when they need to figure out who they are, what they care about, and how to function as independent people.
I’ve seen the cost. It’s the kid who throws up in the parking lot before a final exam. It’s the quiet girl who stops turning in assignments because she’s too busy managing her parents’ divorce. It’s the boy who’s reading at a sixth-grade level but has been shuffled into ninth grade because of his age, so he acts out every period because he’s humiliated. The system tells him he’s behind. He tells himself he’s stupid. Neither is true, but both become fact.
When I say eliminate high schools, I don’t mean eliminate education. I mean dismantle the way we’ve packaged it. I mean stop treating adolescence as a waiting room for adulthood.
There are alternatives. They’re already out there. Some are small enough that everyone knows everyone’s name. Some let kids spend real time in workplaces—apprenticeships, internships, or just job shadowing—so they can feel useful and competent before they’re eighteen. Some operate on block schedules, where a student takes two or three subjects intensively instead of six shallow ones. Some use proficiency-based grading, where you move forward when you’ve actually learned something, not when the calendar says it’s June.
I’ve seen a tiny bit of this in my own classroom, and it works. Last year, I threw out the syllabus for one unit. I told my students they had a month to answer one question: “What’s a problem in your community that bothers you, and what could be done about it?” We spent two weeks just talking. Then they picked projects. One kid made a zine about food deserts. Another built a website for a local animal shelter. A girl who never spoke in class made a short documentary about her grandmother’s landlord.
Was it perfect? No. Some kids floundered. They kept asking me for a rubric. They wanted to know exactly how many points each part was worth. They’d been trained to think that way. But by the end, a few started working without me checking every step. That doesn’t happen in my regular unit on argumentative writing.
The obstacle isn’t the students. It’s the structure. Teachers know this. We joke about it in the lounge. We say things like “I’m not teaching the kids, I’m teaching the curriculum” or “This would great if I didn’t have to grade it.” We spend our prep time entering data into spreadsheets. We buy our own supplies. We watch kids get chewed up by the transcript game, and we tell them to hang in there, college will be different.
But what if high school were different?
I know what the pushback is. People will say kids need structure. They need boundaries. High school teaches discipline and responsibility. It’s the one place where they’re forced to do things they don’t want to do, and that builds character.
I get that. I really do. I have three kids of my own. I don’t want them to grow up thinking the whole world exists to entertain them. But there’s a difference between meaningful challenge and arbitrary compliance. Showing up to detention on time teaches punctuality. Showing up to a job you actually care about teaches responsibility. Sorting recycling into seven different bins teaches discipline. Sitting through a lecture on the quadratic formula while you’re still upset about a fight you had at lunch—that teaches nothing but how to pretend.
So what would I actually do?
For starters, I’d shrink the scale. A high school of 2,000 kids is a factory. No one can know all those students, and that’s the point. When you don’t know a kid, you can’t see their potential. You only see their behavior. Small schools—or schools within schools—give adolescents a chance to be seen. Not monitored. Seen.
I’d also rethink the day. Instead of starting at 7:30, maybe we start at 9:00. Teenagers have a biological clock that makes early mornings genuinely painful. I’ve had students fall asleep standing up. That’s not lazy behavior. It’s a sleep phase shift. We can’t just tell them to go to bed earlier. We can, however, stop fighting their biology and then blaming them for it.
And I’d make sure every student had some kind of adult mentor. Not a counselor with a caseload of 500. Just one grown-up who checks in on them every week, knows their name, asks about their life. That doesn’t require a lot of money. It requires scheduling and commitment.
None of this is revolutionary. But it’s not happening in most places. And I’m exhausted by the gap between what we know and what we do.
Right now, I’m sitting at my kitchen table with a stack of essays about Beowulf. It’s Sunday night. I’ll probably finish around eleven. In one essay, a kid wrote, “I don’t really care about this poem, but I tried hard because I need a good grade to get into the honors program.” That sentence told me everything. He wasn’t learning about epic heroes. He was learning how to perform compliance.
I marked it with a B-plus. He’ll get what he wants. I’ll get what I want. And somewhere out there, a thousand other teachers are doing the same thing, building the same lie.
I don’t have a neat answer. I’m not proposing we shut down every high school tomorrow. I’m just saying the model we’ve inherited is not sacred. It was created in the nineteenth century to meet industrial needs. We’ve kept the shape even though the needs are gone. The kids are still here, and they’re still watching us.
Maybe the best thing I can do this year is talk a little less about the curriculum and a little more about their lives. Maybe I can ask one kid what they’re actually worried about. Maybe I can hand back a B-plus and say, “Tell me what you really want to learn.”
I don’t know if that will save anyone. But it stops the lie for one more day. That feels like a place to start.
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