[quote=@Dinh AaronMk]
I hate how I feel the public school system failed me in life and just pushed me out the door with a half-hearted cocky grin and a flat smile on their faces because they couldn't truly invest enough in fulfilling their promises of getting anyone ready for college.

If anything, I learned that I didn't really like the Great Gatsby and I shouldn't have taken ceramics twice.
[/quote]

Ok, fun fact about me: Through a series of peculiar circumstances, I really didn't get any schooling between 5th grade and college. We moved to the boonies, my parents decided to homeschool, and my mother had something of a mental breakdown, so I was basically self educated during that time. And basically that just meant that I played video games, and went to the library from time to time. 

At sixteen, I got a GED and went to Community College. And honestly, aside from having to take a remedial math course my first semester, it wasn't difficult to transition at all. That was the thing that blew my mind: I just stumbled forward, thinking that I might have trouble but just sort of hoping that I wouldn't, but I picked right up as if I had been in school all along. I ended up transferring to a University and graduated with a 3.8 GPA.

The problem I did have was that I picked a stupid major. My family didn't have any Bachelor's degree graduates until myself, my father was convinced that any technical degree involving computers would be useless because of a bubble he perceived to be happening in that market, and I made the mistake of trusting college supervisors. So yeh, I was in a position to fuck that choice up, and I did. 

So anyway, all of that is to say that, at least in my case, you have an incomplete elementary school education competing with a high school education and matching it. What that says about the value of our High Schools is up for debate.