The Simple and Obvious Solution to the "Fertility Crisis" - Abolish High School

We need to get rid of high school.

It is a waste of everyone's time. 90% of the students don't need anything high school school has to offer and would have a much higher quality of life if they went immediately to trade school at 14 and started working at 16. This entire population would end up getting married earlier and thus having more children.

The 10% brightest students who should go to high school and college and have intellectual jobs are also wasting their time in high school. If allowed to go at their natural pace these students will finish high school at age 13. When Harvard was founded the average freshman was 14 years old. This is why in the UK high school is still called "college." 

Right now, as a society, we make everyone's lives much harder and poorer than they need to be. There is no reason for people who belong in trades to be wasting their time in high school. They could be earning money starting at the age of 16 while they still live at home. They could save up a down payment on a house in those two years.

For the bright kids, we absolutely torture them by making them go so slowly through their education. And then we keep them in school until their late twenties ensuring terrible fertility for this demographic. 

I have known this for a while. I allowed Anders to go at his natural pace through school. He finished high school at 12 and started college at 13. But it is absolutely a miserable path to be this alone. Yes, he has a group of friends who he can chat with online who are also young and in college, but the actual college experience--attending online is horrific. He is dealing with it admirably, but when I watch him do his classes I am sad that he cannot be at an in-person college somewhere. 

That being said, in-person classes take a lot longer. It turns out that you do not need four years to complete a college degree if you are not wasting all kinds of time in clubs and whatnot. It will take Anders a year or two to complete his BA online. (Not clear on this yet. It may not be allowed. But currently it takes him 6-12 days to finish a class that is supposed to take an entire semester.)

Yes, he could do community college to get an in-person experience but that is the wrong peer group. Smart kids need:

a) the option to finish high school at 12 that doesn't require homeschooling

b) a college-level-boarding-school to attend from 13-17 that is specifically designed for the smarter, younger set. Note that this is actually who all the universities were for back in the 1700's.

We do a disservice to our entire country when we do not have the proper structures in place to maximize everyone's outcomes. Wasting young people's time is so inefficient and sad. 

High school was largely invented because boys aged 14-18 cause so many problems on a societal level. I read somewhere that most revolutions are started/fought by/encouraged by 16 year old boys, so keeping them in babysitting is of the utmost value to society. I am not suggesting that 14-18 year olds run freely on the streets. I am suggesting that they are in school, but those schools are trade schools. There could even be apprentice work for 16-18 year olds that is highly supervised. College-boarding-school for the intellectual set is also highly supervised.