I was scoring at a post-highschool level on standardized tests in 8th grade, so I can say with confidence that I could have done fine (compared to public educat

I was scoring at a post-highschool level on standardized tests in 8th grade, so I can say with confidence that I could have done fine (compared to public education) with 8 years, but public education is garbage. It should be easily possible to learn what most people learn by the time they finish college with 12 years of schooling. The fact that colleges offer remedial math classes that basically amount to simple algebra and that professors still have to explain the difference between adjectives and adverbs proves the point that public school is a tremendous failure. Highschool graduates should not look confused when asked "What percent of 75 is 40?" nor when asked "If a refrigerator is running in a closed system, will the temperature decrease, increase or stay the same?", which I once overheard a group of about a half dozen college students discussing for literally almost half an hour and still coming up with the wrong answer (that it will stay the same). And this was at a private university. Programmers should not graduate college and be unable to write FizzBuzz, but they do. Education in the United States (and I'm fully aware many readers will not be from the US) is a joke. It is at least an order of magnitude behind where it should be. There's a Star Trek episode where a boy about 10 years old complains about calculus homework. I sincerely believe that could be a reality if we tried hard enough.