"But abolishing high school would not just benefit those who are at the bottom of its hierarchies."

"Part of the shared legacy of high school is bemused stories about people who were treated as demigods at seventeen and never recovered. A doctor I hang out with tells me that former classmates who were more socially successful in high school than he was seem baffled that he, a quiet youth who made little impression, could be more professionally successful, as though the qualities that made them popular should have effortlessly floated them through life. It’s easy to laugh, but there is a real human cost...  I’ve learned from doctors that you don’t have to have a cure before you make a diagnosis. Talk of abolishing high school is just my way of wondering whether so many teenagers have to suffer so much. How much of that suffering is built into a system that is, however ubiquitous, not inevitable? 'Every time I drive past a high school, I can feel the oppression. I can feel all those trapped souls who just want to be outside,' a woman recalling her own experience wrote to me recently. 'I always say aloud, "You poor souls."'"

From a Harper's Magazine article by Rebecca Solnit called "Abolish High School." You'll need a subscription to read the whole thing, but I wanted to alert you to its existence. The proposal in the title doesn't seem to be more than a rhetorical device, or the attack would be obvious: Isn't the cure worse than the disease? She anticipates that with "you don’t have to have a cure before you make a diagnosis."