Close all the Schools Part I: This Place Sucks

In response to the latest school massacre Mark Steyn makes a point we've made before:

More broadly, as I often note, in 1939 the average American had an Eighth Grade education. Eighth Grade America won the Second World War and went on to dominate the planet. Today's Twenty-Eighth Grade America prolongs education interminably but to little purpose, even for those of a scholarly bent. It's obvious to those of us who have children in high school that by junior year there are any number of boys in particular who have ceased learning and on whom the burdens of daily attendance and deferred adulthood are beginning to chafe. Instead of promising to send every child to college, we should be thinking of ways to telescope education and enable those of non-academic inclination to leave with a meaningful qualification at, say, sixteen.

Steyn is being too generous to the education establishment. After 8th grade an American has learned everything he needs know. Oh, there are some eggheads who want to go on and become physicists and doctors and such and bully for them. But once through 8th grade a Yank knows his US history, a bit of science, fractions and percentages. Pst, any young people reading this, I am 44 years old and have never in 25 years needed algebra for a single goddamn thing.

Our own public education ended in 8th grade. Oh sure we went to high school in the sense that we were in the building. But we got nothing, absolutely nothing from the classes we took. How many reading this will say the same? 

And Steyn is right that by junior year those kids, or we should say, young men are getting antsy. 'Why the hell am I sitting here learning about Jane Austin,' they ask themselves. I know I did.