High school can be a challenging time and an exciting adventure depending on who you are and what your experience is.
There has been much argument about whether high school is worth it or not.
Here, you’ll discover ten good reasons it still is.
Even if that changes in the future, there are still reasons to stay and finish.
No, high school is not a waste of time.
Today, we still have a system that requires a high school diploma as a minimum requirement for employment and higher education, just to name a few.
In this present socio-economic system, it’s very inconvenient to not have a high school education.
Furthermore, students are coming out of high school with associate degrees and not just high school diplomas.
Soon, that will be considered to be worth only what a traditional high school diploma is today.
The bar keeps rising in good high schools and the students have to keep up with it.
Is High School A Waste Of Time? (10 Reasons It Is Not)
1. The First Taste Of Discipline
Discipline is an important skill to have.
Some people are born with that about them, and others learn it.
Focus is a byproduct of developing discipline.
Both are valuable assets the budding young adult needs to be successful.
High school is one of the most important times in a young person’s development.
Many lack the instilling of discipline at home.
This can be due to the rough schedules that parents have between work and home life.
It can also be due to the challenge of single parenting.
Co-parenting is also a modern challenge.
This happens when the parents live separately but parent the child as a team.
The child will spend a significant period with each parent, and the issue arises when one parent has a different idea about how to teach discipline than the other.
Confusion may set in.
In high school, the child will be charged with several responsibilities.
They can be homework, projects, and term papers.
This is tougher than other school years because it’s meant to prepare the student for college and then life.
There have always been arguments about the validity of what is taught.
However, the value is not so much in what’s being taught as in the discipline it takes to complete tasks.
The point is that life is going to present us all with challenges that we need the discipline to overcome with a positive result.
College is next and should take us to the next level of responsibility.
High school is a requirement to get into college.
You may drop out and get a General Education Diploma, more commonly known as a GED.
This is done outside of the high school atmosphere but will not allow you to develop the discipline you need for real-world success.
2. Proper Socialization
If you never go to high school or get a GED, you will miss a chance to develop some important people skills you need for success.
This is more than just your future professional success, but it’s the success you’ll have navigating key social situations.
There are introverts and extroverts.
In fact, as of late, there are a whole host of new personality types.
There are ways to navigate them all according to the professional psychology community, but one thing that most of them will agree on is that we need a firm base of socialization to start with and that should begin well before high school.
Many feel socially awkward in high school because, even though we have not even started dating yet, we are fast approaching the reproductive stage of life.
This means we automatically become hyper-aware of how we look, our voices change, and we start feeling things we never have before.
We start to understand things like what group we fit into—or that we don’t fit into any at all.
These things add a lot of pressure on top of the typical responsibilities we already have.
Many kids want to run and hide from this.
Bullying is a warped human way of asserting dominance over those who are perceived as weak, different, or more typically, a threat to our worldview.
That extends into life and adulthood.
It doesn’t change, and with the advent of social media, it surely doesn’t stop.
In this case, learning to navigate such situations in a healthy way makes the high school an important experience.
Apart from the negative socialization lessons, there are positive ones.
You can run for the student office or work for those who are in the office.
Much responsibility is imparted to those in these positions.
Otherwise, physical education, band, dance, and any other extracurricular activities will teach the young person how to use their intuition and develop a strategy.
3. The Art Of Teamwork And Collaboration
For all students, but especially for those who are uninterested in student office or sports, there are many group projects that teachers will assign both in the classroom and for at-home participation.
One of the most important skills to learn is the art of teamwork and collaboration.
In the workplace and outside of any corporate atmosphere, there’s a need to understand teamwork and collaboration.
For example, many today are uninterested in the corporate rate race, nine-to-five drama life just to accumulate things and wait for retirement to enjoy them.
However, what they sometimes fail to realize is you have to use the same skills to run a business.
Even with social media and online-only business, there will still have to be contact with people, even those you may pay to interact with clients for you, and that can get very expensive.
It’s quite unrealistic to think that living and working without proper contact with people is possible.
If you begin in the high school setting and navigate those issues successfully, you’ll be able to use those skills to navigate life thereafter.
4. Networking Skills
The people skills you learn aren’t always active, as the ones discussed in the other sections.
There are valuable passive skills to be learned and used in critical times as an adult.
While networking is an active skill, there are other passive, soft skills that you must learn to make networking successful.
The soft skill you could learn in high school is observation and recording.
That can be done in a few circumstances.
One can be science classes, especially ones that are a bit advanced and include research.
The other may be sports and politics, such as running for student office or being a part of a campaign.
The soft skills will culminate in the ability to read people—not in an invasive or creepy way but a quiet observation.
When you network, you want something from someone.
Whether you work for someone else or yourself, you’ll need to know how to approach others to meet your needs.
You can’t always just ask someone for that.
After all, you need to have something of value to offer that person who could be a potential client, right?
You do this by observing more and talking less.
This is not the time to be a go-getter and lunge in for the kill.
You must observe and know what you are looking for, which is your target client.
You’ll already know that by developing a business plan, and it is recommended that taking any business courses you can take in high school while you can do that for free will be a smart move.
Quiet observance before active networking is done by using an emotional maturity that you should be developing through trial and error in high school.
Therefore, it’s so important to find a group of people you feel comfortable with so you can practice this skill.
Another way is to talk to teachers and learn how to express what you need in a diplomatic way.
Learn the art of negotiation.
5. Exploring Yourself And Future Career
Most people don’t know what they want to do even in college.
You could begin to understand what you may or may not like in high school.
Electives are not the waste of time that people tend to think.
Electives are classes you are allowed to take for credit that is not required for graduation.
The number of credits is, but not the subject you take as an elective.
For example, cooking or Home Economics may open you up to working as a chef at a restaurant.
Cooking coupled with a business class could get you interested in buying your own restaurant.
Are you a simpler soul, but love food preparation?
Then maybe being a personal chef would be up your alley.
If you never try it, you’ll never know.
High school may not give you all the real-world experience in the classroom, but a work experience program might.
That’s when you finish classes early to go out and work a job that’s sponsored by the school and an asset to your future.
You will get a taste of what it’s like to be a working person and deal with real people and the difference between the world of high school and the world outside.
This is a very valuable experience.
If your high school doesn’t have such a program, start working part-time as soon as you can.
Even if your parents won’t let you work yet or you can’t commit to a strict schedule, see if you can volunteer.
Money is not the point here.
The point is to begin to socialize yourself and learn what being in the real world and making real decisions is about.
Then, compare the two worlds.
In the meantime, you may want to start a list of what you like and dislike about the experience.
The point of that is to feel out what you may like to do or study in college or even open a business of your own.
Remember, high school can help you do all those things.
We are no longer in the industrial revolution, where we were indoctrinated in schools to provide the country with a good workforce.
No, you can use the same information you learned in high school to become a success doing things the way you want to do them.
6. Getting Opportunities
Today, the workforce landscape is changing, seemingly by the second.
With all the variants that affect it, you need to give yourself the best opportunities.
Here, you’ll learn what a high school diploma will do for you in both the traditional and business environment.
Many people may believe that you don’t need a high school diploma when you own a business.
Indeed, you don’t as far as it is a requirement to own a business.
You do, as far as some of the opportunities that may arise.
You can actually miss opportunities for further training and degrees or certificates from reputable schools online and on hard campuses.
Many require your transcripts, too, and may not accept a GED.
If you want to work for someone else, even for a while just to learn the business you want to open, you’ll need the diploma to work for almost any company.
A GED may work in this case, but why risk the discrimination that you may not even be aware is happening.
There is competition out there, and companies can be brutal in their decisions.
It’s a good idea to work for a company that could give you the skills and the real-world experience to run a similar business or one with similar qualities.
Always take what a corporation can give you.
After all, they are getting a lot from you.
7. Higher Education And Vocation
A high school diploma makes you eligible for any form of higher education whether online or on hard campuses as we already mentioned in point six.
Let’s go deeper into that.
You already know that colleges and universities want you to have a diploma, but what if you aren’t the college type and you’re more a vocational type?
A high school diploma will also be required by any reputable vocational or technical school.
The idea is to not slam the door on the foot of opportunity.
The more you have behind you, the better.
We live in a digital age.
Millennials and Gen Z don’t have much if any memory of computers not being in existence.
However, we’ve learned a lot in the past few years.
We’ve learned that anything can happen.
We can lose the internet, or it can be controlled or changed.
Learning a vocation may be necessary at some point in your life.
There may be a time where competition is fiercer than ever.
Make sure you are prepared and just finish high school to get the best chance for success.
8. Societal Expectation
Today, we tend to be encouraged to do our own thing and not be worried about what others expect of us.
Still, things are changing, slow but sure.
Until then, we must do our best and arm ourselves with as much ammunition as possible to compete with.
Society expects that we’ve done certain things to get to certain places in life.
What we call society are our bosses and clients.
You should maybe change your perspective about high school from something that is a waste of time and a menace to something quite different: an insurance policy of sorts.
Even though high school won’t guarantee the same things for everyone, it does guarantee fewer issues when trying to get ahead.
When we show up, we must do so without neglecting the most basic of requirements.
There is a message that we send to the people about what we will deal with.
This is a good lead into point nine.
9. Commitment And Follow Through
Even though we are encouraged to do our own thing, we are still human beings.
That means we have certain expectations from our fellow humans.
When you are going for a job or you gain a reputation online, people will either require a high school diploma, or they will look into your history.
Most times, it’s not to be nosy and invade your privacy.
It’s to check your credentials, all of them, not just a high school diploma.
When you don’t have one, it can show a lack of commitment and follow-through.
You see, it’s not a reflection of the kind of person you may be.
Just remember that, especially today, your online presence and credentials are all that people will know of you.
They look at this in order to get a clear vision of who you are.
Can they trust you?
Are you best able to carry out their business needs?
Will you show up?
The perspective change in point eight is crucial to carry you through four years of high school mentally and emotionally.
You will, however, be better prepared than your peers.
You may even want to take on a leadership role with others and guide them through what you learned here.
Who knows?
That may be the start of a new career in peer counseling.
You may not think that a high school diploma can mean so much to important figures in your life, but it can.
The high school diploma shows that you at least know how to take responsibility enough to finish one of the most challenging and awkward times of your life.
10. A Level Of Knowledge
If you’ve learned anything from this article, it’s that a high school diploma will give you a level of knowledge that is basic, yet the most important you’ll need to start with.
It shows others that you have the basis for a hire, a higher education, or to open your own business.
Even if you home school children, a comparable credential or education can be had online.
You could enhance the education of a child at home all the way through school with online teaching programs that are accredited.
This gives them the opportunity to volunteer or work at the same time and compare the two worlds with you, their parents and teachers, and to learn from them.
The Bottom Line
The thing to remember is the time that high school takes place in a young person’s life.
It’s going to mold them for the future if they are guided to use the information the correct way.
That means understanding how to navigate situations and people in a real-world way while navigating the high school institutional matrix successfully.
An exceptional grade point average is great for college or university.
A decent grade point average is enough to get you through without too much hassle.
The important thing to remember is you don’t have to be at the genius level or burn yourself out trying to graduate.
You only need to use the information in this article to succeed and move on to greater things.
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Amy says
All high school seemed to be was a place for some people to be cruel and evil towards other people. For others it was a place to learn how to deal with being treated bad. I feel like I could have done a lot better if I could have just done all the academic work alone at home. I could have flourished. Instead, I spent so much time trying to make myself not seen or heard from all the bullies and evil people that it prevented me from learning the academics.
Justin says
School is a waste of time. I’m a medic now nothing in school taught me how to be one.
All i got from school was 8 years of being bullied and depression from it. Absolutely hated school, didn’t learn much at all as I didn’t care about it. They teach only one style and most kids don’t learn that way