I believe I was the person who made the "retarded monkey" remark that you made reference to.
Of course, alot of people say that, but I'll elaborate on what I meant anyway. Do you know what you have to do to pass high school? Show up most of the time, turn in homework when you feel like it, and put logical sounding answers on the test.
Senior year, I didn't even open a book and I never got less than a B. Maybe it's different where you are, as the quality of education differs from state to state, but I bet you never had to legitimately worry about whether or not you could pass a class unless you spent an entire semester ignoring the class.
High school is a joke. I realize that saying "United States high schools are a joke" gives all the Europeans here something to jack off about, so I will say it this in the plainest terms possible. High school is a joke.
The reason that what you learn is almost entirely irrelevant to your future is this: high school universally teaches what to think whereas college will teach you how to think.
I had one good class in high school and it was this: AP World History. Since such a topic is far too broad to simply be taught as every important thing that happened ever, the teacher only taught us that certain events set contexts for certain regions of the world (the founding of Islam, the Colombian Exchange, Zheng He's Voyage, the industrial revolution) in which we could evaluate the importance of events that occurred within those contexts. In short, it wasn't a class that was so much about history as it was a class about how to think historically.
That is what all college classes are like. As a longtime lurker on the escapist, I gather that the vast majority of people here are at the least intelligent enough that to have taken facts given by high school teachers and sort them into contexts by themselves, the very basis of understanding.
However, scientifically minded people cannot approach a historical problem scientifically any more than a mathematically minded person can approach an ethical problem mathematically, it simply doesn't work. That is the fundamental failing of high school education, is that it does not teach you the methods of problem-solving, only a problem's ultimate solution.
That is why college courses are arranged in the way they are, a broad base that teaches the fundamentals of approaching problems that will, collectively, be applicable to most situations, and focusing more tightly on the methods of approaching problems most encountered in a person's given profession.
