There was an article in the Washington Post yesterday about students who truncate their high school years to get into college faster . In my day, the purpose of high school was to ogle at girls and refine my razor-scarred wit at the expense of poor teachers (notably a BSCS Biology teacher who was so lazy that she divided up the last 12 chapters off the book amongst the students and made them teach each other). Learning was minimal to nonexistant and there was nothing ever taught in high school that couldn't have easily been learned in self-study. However, the daily act of getting up and going to school, interacting with other equally bored and/or clueless rhubarbs, and just being awake minute to minute, was instrumental in molding us into halfway independent beings.

There should be a minimum age limit for college. Kids are not necessarily ready for college just because they've finished all the books in the library. School systems don't really help this situation since they tend to advance overachievers (and reward those with AP credit), rather than broaden the breadth of their education. Instead of pushing a student into Algebra XII because "there's nothing left to learn in Algebra XI", why not let them devote their time to other interests and hobbies, or go deeper into the subject matter they just finished? It's at this point that the ball is in the parents' court, since the school systems can barely teach Johnny to read. (This is exemplified by one New York school system which started an anti-drug campaign with pencils that said "Too Cool to Do Drugs". Enterprising students quickly realized that sharpening the pencil changed the message to "Cool to Do Drugs", and finally "Do Drugs".)

I suppose at a higher level, this whole phenomenon just reflects America's drive to have successful kids who go to Harvard at 11, sell Google stock at 28, and support their parents into retirement.