i agree with a lot of your criticism and cynicism. i could see a good book being written on education with that point of view and level of sarcasm.
having attended the same school, i think the general curriculum is intended to avoid a mass population of idiots. it lacked the overall goal of pushing the kids as far as they can go. i do disagree with your opinion on social skills and homeschooling. no offense to those who where home-schooled but i can confidently say that i cant think of one person that was home-schooled that has productive social skills. they weren't just weird but lacked the ability to use their social skill in the real world to be successful. i can even identify the home-schoolers in my office before they tell me that they did home-school. granted, it might be the fact that most parents that home-school their kids are weird themselves and so instill the lack of social skills in their kids.
i am currently trying to gain a stronger opinion as to whether private school would have been so much better than our high school. i have no doubt it would have been a better curriculum and higher demands for the students but is it really worth paying more than you will for college to have your kids pick up the k-12 concepts? the only solution that i have accepted is that the parents attention, support, and demands of their children make all the difference. so in a school like ours, a good amount of those idiot students were being raised by former idiot students. it's a chain that is usually broken by few unusually mature students that want to break the mold or parents that realize their mistakes and push their kids to take a different path.

on that note i apologize for my run on sentences and lack of grammatical mastery.