1069

Meh.
I dropped out, and my dad never stopped reading to me, from birth onward.
He was like me (or at least, like me before I discovered the internet); never pulled his face out of a book. Whatever he happened to be reading, that's what he read to me. It was a way of both spending time with me and getting to do what he'd rather be doing, which was reading.
He read me The Shining when I was about four or five. I was scared to go into the bathroom alone forever, because of that part with the dead lady in the bathtub. He read me... damn, just everything. I was better read by the time i started kindergarten than most people ever are.
But i still dropped out.
And I read to my kids a lot too, although perhaps not quite that obsessively. And now my oldest son has dropped out, and my younger one probably will too, sooner or later.

I just don't think school is for everybody.

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UtahBill

Schools, as it is, in not for everybody....I bet you were bored out of your skull and lost interest. Happened to me, but I had no place to go except get drafted into the army (VIetnam era), so I stayed thru the last year, still had to do the GED thing, then joined the navy afterwards.
School counselors should be identifying those who need challenged, and then see that they are fully aware of how they are limiting their choices in life by dropping out.
I never saw a school counselor, not once all thru high school. It never occurred to me to seek their help, and they surely didn't know I needed to.
They SHOULD be making contact with all students at least twice a year, but in my school they only talked to those who were for sure going to college, helping them with applications, etc. and occasionally they dealt with a troublemaker or two....
The process of dropping out should be more difficult than getting a divorce....

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rhinefire

Keep in mind these numbers are "despite" lowering the academic standards to Neanderthal levels. After leaving school they become disgruntled and more disillusioned in to joing gangs, groups etc. Crime goes up, despot leaders, with a gift of oral persuasion urface and promise "A New America" to countless impoverished and the jobless and illeglal aliens. This is UNSOLVABLE and the proof is that it is occurring. How can any sub-rational young person today look out the window and see the solution to his or her status as thatof abandoning education? What do they see when they see 60 year old ditch diggers?Is it stupidity or laziness or isolation or what?!

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UtahBill

Yep....
lack of education is the most common self inflicted handicap there is.
But somehow it is society's fault?
If nothing else, those who quit school should have to sign a statement that they are aware of just how disadvantaged they will be in any battle of wits, that smarter people will take advantage of them, cheat them, lie to them, lead them astray, etc. and whatever money they have earned at their minimum wage jobs will be lost to these smarter people. High school dropouts should not be allowed to collect welfare unless they go night school and get their GED, at the LEAST....

Dutch321

Weird, a Democrat led state with an extremely high drop out rate.. Extremely perplexing.. I know how to solve it. Increase taxes and give those districts more money to waste.

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"Well, the trouble with our liberal friends is not that they are ignorant, but that they know so much that isn't so."- President Ronald Reagan