There are two ways to sort it out: teach people how to learn first, and teach them how a (small) variety of professions that are in demand work.
Only then, specialization. Current Chinese model is to identify talents early then force specialize and reject people even at advanced stages, leaving them with nothing. Western model used to be more general even a century back, but is going now more the same way.
People are passed without working knowledge of estimation and arithmetics even, have no idea about basic politics and more.
It is superior in employing talent but leaves many broken people ultimately resulting in social costs.
Short name: rat race.
Old factory model provided identical education, relatively broad, to everyone (zero help if you got stuck) - and provided single vocational education on top. (Including research vocations.)
Yet more ancient one started with a trade education based on propinquity; rather than scouting and filtering.
This is less true in the USA than any other country I know of. The "college entrance exam" is not nearly as decisive or as prepared for as in other countries and most of the curriculum has nothing to do with it.
The SAT & ACT are also mostly limited to the humanities and math (and science for the ACT), with an optional writing section. China requires Math, Chinese, a foreign language, and any three of Physics, Chemistry, Biology, Geography, Politics, and History. With the SAT all those elective subjects are separate exams and most people do not take them.
Perhaps if we allowed kids to move away from that idea of the "big college entrance exam" or similar we could dive into the deeper stuff like...what do YOU want to be when you get older, what problems do YOU want to try to solve and so on. If someone wants to work on video games then start pushing them down that path as soon as possible...get them to learn coding, media design, computer graphics and so on.