In highschool, I learned that the world was designed to work for a category of people that were just plain dumb by comparison to people like myself. This would be a continual point of frustration and their rates of learning would always be a minute fraction of those like myself.
I learned that practical education through vocational programs was far superior in actually teaching useful skills and principles, and that most people were completely incapable of taking the abstract concepts they were shown in textbooks and applying them in the real world without someone there to hold their hand.
It's a wonder we managed to figure out fire, to be quite honest. I doubt many people could re-discover today if their life depended on it.
There are useful things to learn in Highschool. The thing is that you'll have to look beyond what you're being fed at the rate of the lowest common denominator. The best things I learned in HighSchool was that I would be far more effective at learning, myself, than if I waited around for the school to present information to me.
Which means you only need college for concepts that you need a bit more structure to learn, and/or for certification that you know these things (and if you don't need certification - you don't need to waste money on a degree program).
The biggest mistake people make in education is trying to enter the workforce with a useless degree. Going for an MBA is nice, and all, if you've been working in an industry for a few years and are looking at going to the Corporate level. Otherwise - it's useless for a highschool student to pursue.
Of course - for purpose of getting into a job - a technical/vocational certificate can be just as powerful these days as a degree. The problem with degree holders is that they often lack the practical end of their fields and have expenses that require them to start at wages 30% higher than a vocational student.... who has the practical training without the student loan factoring into his wage requirements.
The vocational student is the more sure bet. If all else fails - you know he was already trained in the tasks you are hiring him for and you're not forking out 30% more for a book-smart guy who needs someone to hold his hand on the floor.
I'm not going to sugar-coat it for you and say that it's all a good thing. Public schools suck and half the time you're smarter than the teacher. Not like you need one - they're prescribed a list of topics they must teach you and given a schedule. You can literally replace teachers in school with computers. There's no reason why a degree should be required to be a teacher, these days.
Unless you're talking about private schools or the few remaining bastions of intelligence where teachers are actually given autonomy. (I'm being harsh - there are a lot of good teachers out there that are being inhibited by the system).
Most of the stuff you needed to know to function in life were all learned before second grade.
The rest is (attempting) beating it into the heads of people who would have died of stupidity a thousand years ago and re-hashing the details for those who do not immediately recognize the iterative implications of fundamental concepts (IE - addition builds to multiplication builds to exponents and logarithms).
The process is horribly inefficient. Science has been turned on its head at least twice since you started school - and the curriculum has yet to really respond, I would imagine (and there are still gradeschool teachers 'doing it wrong'). There is just as much dogma being taught at the grade school level as there is valuable material (I recall a daily planner printed for grade school students that was populated with 'interesting facts' that were, in reality, nothing more than urban legends or wives' tales).
Kids would often be better off stripping out half of the curriculum that has them dressing up as European settlers for Thanksgiving and letting them loose with legos. Then they'd probably do better when it came time for Geometry and algebra (which should be taught as one subject to begin with).
But I'm rambling at this point. I'm just an egotistical prick who is bitter because he was the only one in his class who understood the implications of the electron cloud model and began developing a concept of quantum mechanics on his own (before realizing that it was re-inventing the wheel).
Then everyone wonders why I never bothered with the homework.
