The points made seem very vague and trivially true. For example: "Consider homeschooling and online school. Depending on your situation, these may be superior alternatives to regular high school for you." Yes, of course, for the "right situation" homeschooling is good. Kind of like how you shouldn't drink "too much" water or breath "too much" oxygen.
Try giving specific examples of the way the system is bad for them. For example, point out that most adults can't actually do algebra or calculus, and that these skills are almost never used even by professionals who CAN do them, such as engineers, on a regular basis.
However it is pretty easy to get students to admit that at least some of the classes they take are a waste of time. You could try getting them more concerned about having hundreds of hours of their lives wasted following instructions from an unambitious middle aged authority figure. Do we really want children learning from or respecting people who chose one of the easiest careers possible and conceded to be lower-middle class for the rest of their lives? Pfft. Although this point will probably receive a lot of pushback because "education" is a sacred cow and teachers should be worshipped because a few of them claim to have a "passion for teaching".
Instead of focusing on why high school is bad though, maybe you could get more mileage out of telling teenagers what they SHOULD be doing with their time. Most kids don't work out or eat properly because their parents don't have those values. Maybe since teenagers should practice being less biased, because certainly they don't get any sort of pressure to be rational. Suggesting that they get in the habit of googling the expert consensus on issues before they make up their mind COUGH politics COUGH is a step in the right direction.
Or maybe direct them to radical cultural outlets like RSDNation so they can get some perspective on the monogamous suburban middle class life they're planning on living.
Once you figure out what you want to do, high school and college just become tools that are very easy to optimize for your goals. But most high school kids are just going through the motions, passively expect to get , passively expect to marry , have kids when they're 27-30, etc. This is how a lot of people wind up unhappy. If I could tell a teenager anything, it would be for them to become 10,000x more strategic and independent.
... of course convincing someone to ACTUALLY become these things is very difficult.
point out that most adults can't actually do algebra or calculus, and that these skills are almost never used even by professionals who CAN do them, such as engineers, on a regular basis.
This is true, but this information outside of proper context could hurt them, so it should be emphasised that this is not a Fully General Counterargument against learning anything. It is okay to not learn something if you are learning something better instead. (Insert specific examples of things that are better, and things that might seem cool but are not actually bette...
A brief essay intended for high school students: any thoughts?
If you go to school, take the classes that people tell you to, do your homework, and engage in the extracurricular activities that your peers do, you'll be setting yourself up for an "okay" life. But you can do better than that.
The school system wasn't designed to help you achieve your goals. It wasn't designed to optimize student welfare in general: it was cobbled together by many different actors with many different goals, from politicians to teachers to parents to colleges. It often suffers from inadequate resources. Even if the school system were optimized on average, the one-size-fits-all approach it takes means that it wouldn't be optimized for people who differ in any relevant respect from average. Compared with what you can achieve by carefully thinking about what your goals are and how you can achieve them, following "the system" fares poorly.
By putting you in this situation, society has fouled you. Yes, as you suspect, a lot of the stuff you learn in your classes is crap. And yes, as you suspect, the college admissions process is largely a charade. But like many fouls, this one was unintentional. So just keep playing. Rebellion is almost as stupid as obedience. In either case you let yourself be defined by what they tell you to do. The best plan, I think, is to step onto an orthogonal vector. Don't just do what they tell you, and don't just refuse to. Instead treat school as a day job. As day jobs go, it's pretty sweet. You're done at 3 o'clock, and you can even work on your own stuff while you're there. — Paul Graham in What You'll Wish You'd Known
Some subjects are more important than others
High school can give an illusion of democracy between the different subjects you study: they all seem to get equal weight in class time and in grades, so you may believe that all subjects are equally important to study. This is not true even in general: some subjects are more important to study overall, and within each subject, some topics may be more important than what school seems to suggest.
Because the method of exposition and choice of topics in school is likely suboptimal, it generally makes sense to learn the important topics well ahead of time, and deal with the others as needed to do well on the courses.
It's important to choose your extracurriculars well
Many common extra-curricular activities (in particular, many school clubs) are not the most productive uses of time. If you go with the flow and sign up for the activities that the people around you are signing up for, you may sacrifice the opportunity to develop yourself and accomplish far more.
Consider alternatives to high school
Consider homeschooling and online school. Depending on your situation, these may be superior alternatives to regular high school for you.
This post is a modified version of a write-up for Cognito Mentoring.