Lesser of two evils (Score 2, Interesting)

I haven't read the rest of the comments yet and I'm sure something to this effect has already been said, but I recall pretty vividly being frustrated and bored by how aimless my education had gotten by the end of high school. My senior year, I suddenly found myself in an AP Calculus class which I had positively no interest in but had somehow ascended to by way of being pretty good at Algebra four years ago. I resolved to not learn Calculus under any circumstances, and eventually my guidance counselor called me into her office in mid-semester to inform me that they were just going to drop the class for me (long past the official course drop deadline) and I, cheerfully taking the whole thing to be a joke I'd gotten the better of at this point, agreed. A year later, I was roughly as frustrated with these "gen eds" I found myself stuck with, even as I naturally had no idea what I felt like studying. I'd just as soon call myself a pretty extreme example - and god knows the schools are trying hard enough to push college acceptance as the most important thing in the history of mankind for your average seventeen-year-old student (which I can reasonably say might as well be now that I'm no longer actively having to call the whole thing a crock on a day-to-day basis to maintain my high-school-dignity) - but this is a decent enough sign that things need to change. Problem is, of course, that I would never in a million years think a ninth-grader capable of making that kind of decision. (I ended up doubling in Cognitive Science and Film as an undergrad, at a university that had neither department. The degree is, quite fittingly, useless.)