The end of high school for teens?

High school is a place where teenagers should learn and start prepping for college along with getting ready to take the next step in life, but is high school really a path that should be mandatory? Is high school, to some people, a waste of time? Some people may say yes, but others may agree that with the generation we live in, high school is not doing any justice. It’s time to start looking at how much high school is really helping and making changes to the mandatory laws.

High school has been mandatory ever since compulsory education laws were put in place around 1852, originally put in place to improve literacy rates, this law has been in place ever since. Although, the United States has been sitting at the same literacy rate for the past 60 years, rising from 80% to 99% and sitting there. Now that we have a good literacy rate, people will pass it on to their children and then generation to generation.

With these laws these teenagers are forced to go to school, when they may have other problems going on in life such as family problems, personal problems, etc. This can cause a big problem for them in school, with all the due dates, assignments, peer pressure, and trying to find who they really are, they may not be fully focused on school, and that will hurt them in the long run with their grades. Stress, depression, anxiety, and mental illnesses can come along with this, which can be seen with the annual suicides from 10-24 year olds rising from 4.3k to 6.8k.

If teens are overwhelmed and have other stuff going on in life, we still force them to go to school when it can be degrading them more. But who cares what is going on in their personal lives right? As long as they go to high school they will be happy and have a good life, forget about what personal problems they have, they are still forced to go to school.

This is what needs to change, teens need to do what they feel will get them the farthest path in life and the most successful, school may not be the best thing for some teens, it may hurt them more than it is helping them, and we need to listen and start acting on what these teens actually want to do and not send them to sit in a building for 8 hours.