Why Most High Schools Should Be Eliminated: What Kids Actually Need Instead
I was standing by the copier with a stack of worksheets when a junior looked at me and said, “Do we actually have to do this? Is it graded?” I didn’t have a good answer. The worksheet was about the French Revolution. It wasn’t going to matter for anything she wanted to do with her life, and she knew it. I told her it was worth five points. She shrugged and walked off.
That moment stayed with me not because she was rude, but because she was right.
I’ve been teaching long enough to notice a pattern. The students who do well in high school are usually the ones who can tolerate meaningless work. They learn to ask “What do I need to do to get an A?” and then they do it. The students who can’t tolerate that work become problems. They skip class, they talk out of turn, they stop turning things in. We call them unmotivated. But a lot of them aren’t unmotivated. They’re bored out of their minds.
Last spring, a senior named Marcus spent two months failing my English class. He’d stopped doing all assignments but was rebuilding a motorcycle in his backyard every night after school. He could diagnose a fuel delivery problem in twenty minutes. He couldn’t write a five-paragraph essay about symbolism in Lord of the Flies. I remember sitting with him after class, trying to get him to care about a missing quiz. He looked at the ceiling and said, “I’m just waiting to be done.” That sentence broke something in me. He wasn’t waiting to learn. He was waiting for the sentence to end.
I started to think about what high school is actually for.
The structure hasn’t changed much since the late 1800s. Bells every forty-five minutes. Classes sorted by age, not by interest or readiness. A credit system based on seat time. The whole thing was designed for a time when we needed to build shift workers and factory managers. But we don’t have that system anymore. Adolescents, though, haven’t changed. They still need autonomy, real relationships with adults, the chance to work on things that feel meaningful. High school often gives them the opposite: compliance, surveillance, and worksheets worth five points.
I don’t mean every school, and I don’t mean every student. Some kids need the structure. Sports teams, band, theater, AP classes, the social scene—some young people genuinely thrive inside those walls. But when I say most high schools should be eliminated, I mean the default model: the comprehensive building where eight hundred teenagers are sorted into rooms by birthday and told to memorize things they won’t need for four years. That model is not working for a huge number of students. It just looks normal because it’s all we’ve known.
I started teaching completely certain that I could make it different. I made each unit engaging. I used discussions and projects, not just lectures. It worked for a while. But the system always pulled me back. The grading period ended. The schedule shifted. I had to give tests that were “common” across all sections. I had to produce data. I slowly realized that no matter how much I changed my classroom, I couldn’t change the fact that my students were spending six hours a day in a building that treated them like containers to be filled.
When I stopped fighting the system and started working around it, things got better.
I stopped assigning homework on Fridays. Instead, I used that time as an open workshop. Students could work on anything connected to the class—or sometimes connected to their own lives. One student made a short documentary about how parking spaces affect school climate. Another wrote a letter to the city council about a bus route that was running twenty minutes late every day. A girl who never spoke in class spent a month designing a proposal for a peer mentoring program. She had missed so much school the year before that she almost got held back. That project didn’t fix everything, but it gave her a reason to show up.
I also told my students, more often than I should have, that they didn’t have to do every assignment. That sounds strange for a teacher to say. But when I removed the penalty, I learned who was actually interested. I found that about a third of them wanted to know more about the subject. Another third wanted to know what the minimum requirement was. The rest just wanted to graduate. That’s not a failure on their part. It’s a signal. The curriculum wasn’t serving them.
Parents ask me all the time what they should do about a kid who hates school. My first answer is always the same: figure out what they actually like to do, and help them do more of it outside school. The key isn’t signing them up for “enrichment.” It’s finding one adult in the community who can teach them something real. A mechanic. A graphic designer. A nurse. A carpenter. One afternoon a week with someone who treats them like a real person instead of a student can do way more than a semester of career class.
If your teenager says “Why do I have to learn this?” don’t turn it into a lecture about responsibility. Try saying, “I don’t know why you have to learn it. Let’s find out.” Sometimes there’s a reason. Sometimes there isn’t. Children already know that a lot of what they’re taught is a checkmark. When we pretend otherwise, they stop trusting our judgment about what actually matters.
At home, another small shift helps: start treating the hours between eight and three not as a sacred block of productivity, but as one part of a bigger week. Allow a late start if your kid was up late making something. Encourage them to skip a homework assignment with low learning value in order to finish a personal project. I know not every family can do that. But even once a month makes a difference, because it sends a message: school exists for your development, not the other way around.
If I were designing the replacement, it wouldn’t look like a school at all. It would look like a network of small learning communities. Some would be in libraries, some in workshops, some on public transit routes so kids could move between them. Kids would learn math when they need it to solve a real problem. History would be learned through local stories and archives. English would be taught through writing that actually gets read by someone other than a teacher. Graduation would happen when a young person can prove they know how to learn something new, not when they’ve sat through four years of instruction.
I know that sounds far from the world we live in. But we can get closer. Every teacher reading this can give one less packet and one more open-ended question. Every parent can help their kid find one adult who works in a field they like. Every district can start by getting rid of the early start time and the freshman course in abstract algebra on the first try. Small changes, repeated enough, become the new normal.
I still have the stack of worksheets in my classroom, half gone. I haven’t thrown them out yet. Some days I think I should. Other days I remember that for some kids, filling them out is the safest part of their day. The problem isn’t the adults who want to help. It’s the structure that keeps insisting school has to look exactly like this.
Marcus graduated last June. I saw him loading a toolbox into a pickup truck in the parking lot. He said he was going to work at a motorcycle repair shop. He shook my hand and said, “I’ll probably never write an essay again.” I laughed. He’s probably right. But the weird part is, I felt proud of him. Not because high school shaped him. Because he got through it without letting it change who he was.
Maybe that’s the clearest way to say it. High schools are supposed to prepare kids for the future. But a lot of them just prepare kids to wait. That’s not enough anymore. I don’t know exactly what should replace it. I just know I’m tired of telling sixteen-year-olds that a worksheet is worth five points when we both know it isn’t worth anything.
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