Why Most High Schools Should Be Eliminated — and What Should Replace Them
Last spring, I sat across from a sixteen-year-old who was failing biology. Maya hadn’t turned in homework in weeks. She stared at the floor while I explained that her grade was slipping below a D. But I already knew she wasn’t lazy. She could explain her grandmother’s type 2 diabetes better than I could—how it runs in families, why her grandmother’s glucose numbers spiked after certain meals, what tests the doctor ordered and why. She’d been reading about it for months, not because someone told her to, but because her grandmother had just been diagnosed and Maya was scared.
“When am I ever going to use any of this?” she asked me, gesturing at the diagram of a cell on her desk.
I gave her the usual speech. Critical thinking. Graduation requirements. The kind of job she might want someday. She went quiet and nodded, and I knew I hadn’t convinced her, because I wasn’t convinced myself.
I’ve taught in high schools for twelve years. I’m supposed to make teenagers care about the curriculum, but more and more, I can’t find a good reason for most of it. Not the learning itself. I’m talking about the structure: the four years, the eight periods, the fifty-minute blocks, the way subjects are chopped into pieces and served cold. High school, as it exists, is not built for how teenagers actually develop. It’s built for another century. So here’s my hot take: most high schools should be eliminated.
Not the teachers. Not the safe places. Not the cafeteria food. Not the concerts and ball games. But the schedule, the age-based grade levels, the seat-time requirement, the whole architecture that says learning happens inside a building between eight and three, in courses, for credits.
Here’s what I see every day: teenagers who are ready for real work—real responsibility, real problem-solving, real stakes—being treated like children who can’t be trusted with anything more significant than a multiple-choice exam. The ones who adapt too well often become anxious or compliant. The ones who don’t adapt get labeled as unmotivated. Meanwhile, the same disinterested kid who won’t read a chapter on the Civil War will spend four hours at midnight teaching himself how to mix music, or troubleshooting his family’s router, or researching why his favorite basketball player’s stats dropped after an injury.
Ask any teacher. The learning that happens deeply is the learning attached to something concrete, something the student can hold up and say, “I made that” or “I did that.” Not something you do because the textbook says so.
Two weeks after my conversation with Maya, she told me she’d spent an evening putting together a huge spreadsheet comparing health insurance plans for her dad. She was frustrated—the terms are confusing and the website kept glitching—but she stuck with it. She showed me her color-coded comparison chart. She’d read eleven pages of a policy document just to understand the difference between a co-pay and a deductible.
That is what school should look like. Instead, she was failing my class because she didn’t turn in a worksheet about mitosis.
So what would actually replace high school? Not a longer school day. Not another online portal. For starters, I’d turn the high school building into something more like a community learning hub.
Students would arrive in the morning, meet with a coach, and talk through what they’re working on. Then they’d go out into the city: a clinic, a construction company, an architecture firm, a tech repair shop, a nonprofit, a theater group. They’d spend two or three hours with a mentor, doing real tasks that matter. Later, they’d come back for a small seminar where math, reading, and social science are taught through the questions that came up that day. The plumbing apprentice asks about water pressure, which leads to physics. The one organizing the garden project counts grams of seed per square foot and fights with decimals.
Not every teenager is ready for an apprenticeship. Some need focused instruction in basic reading or math. That’s fine. They’d spend mornings with a learning specialist, working through exactly where they’re stuck—not doing general “English 10” but getting real help with the specific skill they’re missing. Then afternoons, they’d do something they actually care about enough to make mistakes in.
We should also get rid of age cohorts. There’s no developmental reason a sixteen-year-old should be taking a course in exactly the same room as another sixteen-year-old, regardless of readiness. Competency-based progression would mean students move forward when they can demonstrate understanding—through projects, teaching, portfolios, or conversations. You don’t pass biology with a C while still not knowing what a gene is. And if you’re ready to move on in March, you don’t wait until June.
The mentorship piece is less complicated than people think. The person who teaches a teenager to stream a show, run a cash register, or restore an engine doesn’t need a teaching certificate. They need patience, a tolerance for sarcasm, and a willingness to explain their craft one step at a time. That person lives on every street. The school system’s job would be to coordinate it, train the mentors lightly, and make sure the student is also getting basic academics in a way that lines up with real work.
The biggest obstacle is not imagination. It’s liability insurance, busing, and adult fear. When I bring this up at parent nights, some people nod. Others ask, “But how will they get into college?” The truth is most colleges already accept students based on essays, portfolios, and recommendation letters. The ones that don’t are out of reach for most kids anyway. And for kids who don’t go to college, the current model leaves them with a diploma and no marketable skill. That’s a far worse failure.
I’m not saying we turn high school into vocational training only. We still need teenagers to learn how to think, how to argue with evidence, how to understand history, how to be citizens. But those skills don’t come from filling in bubbles. They come from what happens when a real problem refuses to offer a fake solution—when a student has to figure out why the water bill doubled, or why a historical monument in town has a controversial plaque, or how to keep a small business from shutting down.
I don’t know if Maya ever passed biology. I heard she left school mid-year and started working at a vet clinic. She’s auditing an online course in animal physiology now. She’s probably forgotten everything I taught that semester. She’ll remember how her dad’s insurance spreadsheet felt—how confusing it was, then how satisfying when she finally understood it well enough to explain it to him.
That’s the kind of learning we should be designing. Instead, we design last-minute test review packets for students who long ago stopped asking why any of it matters. And then we wonder why half of them don’t show up.
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