I grew up in a small town, and after school many days I'd go read books at an alternative bookstore. I was able to give myself an autodidactic education in everything from feminism to anarchism to labour politics and more.

One day I decided to sample from the "education" section, an area which I'd been avoiding. As fate would have it, I started with The Teenage Liberation Handbook.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Teenage-Liberation-Handbook-Educat...

It was written by a disgruntled former English teacher and explained that the education system robbed children of their creativity to turn out a constant stream of factory workers that wouldn't talk or waste time. School was to keep kids out of gangs.

What really got me, however, was the idea that 75% of what we were doing was in fact "make work". We were in a glorified day care. The only reason they cared about truancy was because the school gets paid based on the number of classes we attend.

I was furious; basically I became a walking Rage Against The Machine song for about two years.

There are pictures.

I'm 35 now, and my only regret about dropping out of high school is that I didn't do it 2 years earlier. All of the people who told me that I was throwing my life away now come to me for life advice. I have started several companies and to date have never woken up in a ditch. I am not plagued with a sense of wonder about what I could have accomplished had I just written those last few exams.

I told my principle and the other students that I did not want the school to take credit for my future success. I was a bit of a shit, sure. But I wasn't entirely wrong, either.

These days, seeing kids like this gives me hope for the future:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h11u3vtcpaY

See also Grace Llewellyn's Teenage Liberation Handbook:

http://www.amazon.com/Teenage-Liberation-Handbook-School-Edu...

I recommend taking a look at a book called The Teenage Liberation Handbook: How to Quit School and Get a Real Life and Education by Grace Llewellyn. (http://www.amazon.com/Teenage-Liberation-Handbook-School-Edu...)

The assumption of school is that you don't want to learn and so you need to be forced to. For all I know this may in fact be true for most kids, and so school is necessary for them. However if you are self-motivated to learn then school is massively inefficient.

There is no need for you to waste the next two years. You can, if you wish, undertake a self-learning program (home school yourself). While it is true that there are things that will get by staying in school, it does not mean that you cannot also get these things outside of school, especially with a little planning. You will still get into a good college, have friends, develop your social skills, keep your future options open, and so on. The book I mentioned explains how.