Parents Allow Their Child to Quit High School for Guitar Hero
August 18, 2008 – 8:12 am by Nick
Blake Peebles, a 16-year-old from North Carolina, has won several local Guitar Hero competitions. He set his sights to go pro. His parents allowed him to drop out of his North Carolina high school to pursue a professional gaming career.
The story has spread across the Internet. The forums are full of users commenting on the Peebles’ bad parenting. Blake convinced his parents to employ an in-home tutors to help him continue his education but Guitar Hero remains his number one priority. He has banked $25,000 over his short career but only $1000 since quitting school.
Professional videogame players do have a pro league. The MLG has 125 players signed to management deals. Top players earn $80,000 a year, whereas average gamers receive $20,000. Blake is gambling on the future of the sport.
Blake honed his skills by playing against other top ranked players online. His Xbox 360 gamertag, “Dreminem,” shows him raked somewhere in the top 20 players in the country for “Guitar Hero III.” Even though he wields the plastic guitar like a rock god, he has never picked up a real guitar.
The most overlooked aspect of this story is the stigma homeschooling in the MSM. Anything outside modern school system is always looked at as breading and encouraging extreme ideologies. Brendan has written an excellent article on homeschooling. Hopefully, Blake is saving his prize money for college.
3 Responses to “Parents Allow Their Child to Quit High School for Guitar Hero”
I don’t understand how people make money for playing video games? Who is paying them to do this?
These parents are crazy.
By Liz on Aug 18, 2008
I am learning more about homeschooling and can definitely see situations where it can be a good option - but to faciliate playing guitar hero all day, hardly seems like it’s one of them?
By danielle b on Aug 18, 2008
This story made http://detentionslip.org! Voted #1 for weird headlines in education.
By hall monitor on Aug 19, 2008