Day 572 of 1000
This is the first in a series of posts on the benefits of skipping high school and going straight to college. The introductory post and index to all the other posts in the series is here. You can see their undergraduate results and post-graduate (PhD) chase here. I try to keep the results updated as they occur.
People send in questions and I try to answer them here: Answers to homeschool questions
I thought I would write a few posts on why we think skipping high school is a great idea. I will write about the positive reasons for skipping high school, how we did it, and the actually outcomes for our children. The bad of what passes for a traditional high school education these days seems to out weigh the good by a lot. Still, I do not plan to write much about the abject failure of the majority of traditional high schools in America–at least not in this series of posts.
We definitely made some mistakes on the way, but it has been fabulously gratifying. Sometimes we went too slow. Sometimes we tried to go too fast. We serendipitously lucked into activities and opportunities that moved us forward. We missed deadlines and made mistakes through laziness, incompetence, and ignorance that set us back. Most of all, though, we made a plan and then just plugged away at it for about a decade. The plugging got tedious at times, but we can honestly say it was worth it. Joy, gratification, and humility are the words all of us, kids and adults alike, would use to talk about the educational path we chose for our family.
I have written an outline for what I want to write and will keep a list of links on this page.
- Part 1: Introduction (this post)
- Part 2: Different paths for different kids
- Part 3: Kelly’s path from junior high to college
- Part 4: Christian’s path from junior high to college
- Part 5: Why we think it is silly not to go to community college
- Part 6: That supposedly thorny socialization question
- Part 7: Why not skip high school? Worldview preparation is essential
- Part 8: Kelly takes a mathematical proofs class at Big State U.
- Part 9: Christian takes Chemistry at Big State U.
- Part 10: A full load a big state University
- Part 11: The fact sheet (how we did)
- Addendum 1: Starting college by age 12 (not us)