Why the Traditional High School Model Is Failing Our Teens (And What to Do Instead)
The worksheet asked them to identify the major exports of ancient Rome. I watched a kid in the third row, Marcus, spend seven minutes trying to find a pen that worked, then another four minutes drawing a small, intricate dragon in the margin of his notebook. He wasn’t being defiant. He was just completely disconnected. The clock above the whiteboard read 10:47 a.m. The bell would ring at 11:32. The entire class, myself included, was essentially serving a sentence.
Teaching high school for the last decade has slowly eroded my belief in the institution itself. It’s not the kids, and it’s not the subject matter. It’s the packaging. We force teenagers—people on the cusp of hormonal chaos and existential questioning—into a windowless building for seven hours a day, schedule their bodies into 48-minute blocks, and ask them to memorize the quadratic formula, the date of the Treaty of Ghent, and the chemical symbol for silver, all before lunch.
My hot take, which I don’t say loudly at staff meetings, is this: Most high schools should be eliminated. Not education. Not learning. Just the high school model—the age-graded, subject-siloed, compliance-driven factory that we’ve inherited. We built it in the 1900s to prepare kids for assembly lines, and we’re still running it, even though the assembly lines are gone.
I saw the absurdity of it most clearly during our unit on The Catcher in the Rye. We were in the middle of a discussion about Holden’s alienation when a girl named Priya raised her hand and said, “Why are we talking about a fictional kid’s bad weekend when our own weekends are actually happening right now?” The class laughed. But she was making a real point about relevance—which our curriculum often lacks.
That afternoon, I organized a half-day field trip to the county courthouse to watch a local trial. The kids weren’t allowed to bring phones. They shuffled into the gallery; the judge, a tired woman with a thick docket, gave them a five-minute spiel about due process. The students were silent. For the first time all week, they were listening to the actual, unscripted drama of real life. The defendant. The attorneys. The victim impact statement. When the bailiff stood up and yelled “All rise!” I watched Marcus—the same kid who drew dragons—jump to his feet, fully alert. He looked nine years old and completely present.
That moment confirmed something. Teenagers are hungry for reality. The high school model gives them abstractions. The problem isn’t that learning is inherently boring; it’s that the packaging is suffocating. The bells, the hall passes, the constant surveillance, the zero-tolerance policies for gum chewing—it treats seventeen-year-olds like they’re in prison, or in pre-school.
In our school, we have a “cell phone policy” that is essentially a police sketch of a Cold War prison. Phones are confiscated if seen in class. Every teacher has a “phone cubby” for students to place their devices in. And every administrator wonders why students are sneaking them back. We have created a world with zero autonomy, zero privacy, and zero trust, and then we wonder why they’re anxious.
If I could redesign high school—not in the grand, “disruption” sense that Silicon Valley consultants love to preach about, but in a practical, gritty way—I would start by eliminating the daily schedule. Not the idea of a schedule, but the bell. The bell is the heartbeat of the academic institution. It is also the sound of interruption. We have 48 minutes of instruction, but by the time everyone settles, transitions, gets their laptop open, it’s really 22 minutes of work. Then it ends, regardless of whether we’re in the middle of a crucial conversation about civil rights or Hamlet’s soliloquy. We are teaching students to think in sound bites.
For the last two years, I’ve experimented with a modified block schedule in my own classroom. On “Deep Work Wednesdays,” we meet for 110 minutes. No phones, no bathroom breaks, no clean-up. The kids write poetry, or they read quietly, or—in one instance—they had a sustained argument about the ethics of affirmative action that lasted the entire period. We didn’t come to a consensus. We didn’t cover the next chapter. But the argument mattered because it was alive. It taught them more about rhetoric than any grammar packet I could have assigned.
Beyond the schedule, the biggest issue is this weird idea that all seventeen-year-olds should have the same experience. In my third year, I had a student, David, who knew he wanted to be a mechanic. He could rebuild a clutch in an afternoon. He was failing my English class because he couldn’t be bothered to annotate a poem about nature. But he could troubleshoot a fuel injection system faster than a technician with twenty years of experience. School made him feel stupid. But he wasn’t stupid—he was a master at a specialized skill.
We have a “college for all” mantra, but the reality is that many kids would thrive in an apprenticeship, a trade school, or a structured internship environment. A high school that eliminated “the general designation” of classes and instead focused on vocational certs, community service, and hands-on problem-solving would serve David far better than my current classroom ever will.
Does this mean I think we should burn every high school to the ground tomorrow? No. That’s not practical. And honestly, for many families, high school serves a necessary role: it provides free childcare, a meal plan (however unappetizing), and a social safety net. A lot of parents rely on the building just to be able to go to work.
But I think we can start making changes that are less about the debate in the legislature and more about the environment in our own homes and classrooms.
Here’s what I would tell parents right now, without the admin-approved talking points:
Start asking your teen what they’re doing, not what they’re learning. The distinction matters. “What did you do in biology today?” might get a “nothing.” But “Did you actually touch anything real, or did you just look at a slide?” gets a more honest answer. Authentic work is tactile, messy, and often takes longer than a class period.
Look for ways to give them unstructured time that involves adult responsibility. It doesn’t have to be a formal “program.” Let your 16-year-old cook dinner on Tuesday nights. Let them manage the grocery budget for the week. Have them drive your elderly neighbor to the pharmacy. They need to feel competent, not just compliant.
When your child says they hate school, listen for the specific complaint. Are they bored? Are they drowning? Or are they lonely? Boredom usually means the material isn’t meaningful. Drowning means the pace is too fast. Loneliness is a different animal. But treating “bored—just suck it up” isn’t enough. I ask my own son, “Is the work easy and stupid, or hard and pointless?” If it’s easy and stupid, they need a challenge. If it’s hard and pointless, they need a reason.
In the classroom, I’ve stopped assigning homework that serves the district’s grading calendar. I grade the work, not the compliance. The kid who chews gum, listens to his AirPods, and writes a killer essay about nature versus nurture? I give him an A. The organization isn’t the point. The thinking is.
I don’t know if we’ll ever fully dismantle the education system. It’s a giant, gray naval ship that steers very slowly. But I know that the next time I see Marcus drawing a dragon in the margin, I’m going to stop the class. I’m going to ask him to share what he’s drawing. Maybe we’ll talk about Ares or Mars, or maybe we’ll just talk about dragons. It won’t cover the required curriculum, and the administrators might wonder why I’m not teaching the lesson plan.
But I’m starting to think that’s my job now. Not to teach them what to think about, but to remind them that they can think. The dragon was an act of resistance against the institutional time. And in a room that’s organized by bells and stamps and detentions, resistance might be the only real learning happening.
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