If you are mediocre which sets the standards
There is no such thing as mediocre, its a standard the emerges from the school desks and testing standards.
Many people know for fact testing is unrealistic.
That said you are getting ahead of yourself which is the reason why this topic is hard to talk about with people.
See first try not think of yourself as person who is in the school system, who passed the test and got education. Try to look back objectively on your school days, and try to look at it from pragmatic point of view? Did school increase my chances? If so how?
Did school teach me something that is marketable and if so how? How much effort did the skill cost me in time and focus etc. These are questions outside of opinion.
They are questions directly linked to you, and only you can objectively answer them.
I did this analysis with myself. Don't look at what others tell you, simply analyses your direct experiences, and where you learned the most and where you learned nothing, and where you got benefits and where you lost time. Your experiences is unique to you.
to testing for what kids can do again.
Like you never knew that guy who winged the testing and did well, but was dumb as bag of bricks, yet you studied and knew it and still got a bad grade. Testing does not reflect the sum of your intellect or knowledge. I could run circles around my teacher in biology, but she still found a way to give me an F grade simply, because I was too dense to repeat some five words in some order on a test.
Those at the top do not care if you work at McDonalds as long as they get the best people working for them which means you need to separate all the rest.
I did not mind working at McDonalds, but it sucked balls at certain point. I don't think I can blame my schooling for working at McDonalds. It was my choice.
See I don't have a problem either way.
See I don't try to insert my ego in to every analysis.
Ego is full of emotions that try to paint things unrealistically.
Yes when I was in school my ego was in the game, but I am too old and too smart to let ego tell me how to analysis something. That does not mean that my ego has no pertinent information. My ego is part of the equation, because my ego is part of education I got.
Many people assume when I complain about school system think that I complain because I got bad grades or that I never applied myself.
The problem is that is ego analysis.
Retrospective analysis can be done without ego, simply using questions like : How many habits I learned and how much did I get out of education, and what know how in school has actually benefited me in real life.
It would probably be different for you and me.
Because you have a very different and unique psychological profile from me.
I also differentiate between learning something of my volition on my own time and learning something in school.
I for example don't count homework as school work.
That is because I think homework is just school failing at its job.
I do not however count homework as part of learning of my volition, but many things I learned of my volition were many fold more effective than actual homework.
So you see I did actually think about this thoroughly.
The reasons I did so is because I wanted to figure out how to learn more effectively in real life outside of school, and how to benefit from what I learned in school.
My personal analysis was that I suck at learning in school environment, due to the way I think and pay attention to, but my experience in learning also taught me that I am capable of learning faster than most people in some areas, where non conventional means exist. I learned to write at home, I learned to count at home, and I learned to read at home, I learned most of what I know today by my own volition and at home. Now I don't blame school system for it. I simply took this objective fact of life. 90 percent of things that I know now do not come from school, but I spent most of my early life learning in school.
There are reasons for this like not paying attention, or being to dense to listen to or being undisciplined etc. That does not however change my conclusion that school sucks. It just so happens to be true for me. Its lot easier for me to pick up things now and learn them many times faster alone than in school.
I don't judge this as bad or good, I judge it as fact of life.
Whether someone goes to college and spends 5 years learning or goes to say trade school and does handy work either way that is career choice that is almost predefined by circumstances rather than actual analysis.
What is important to ask is where can one capitalize now?