College: 25-30 hours per week of class time and homework, walks outdoors between classes, long, leisurely breaks throughout the day. Usually at most 3 early wake-up days a week, and often zero. Work almost never due the very next day. It was like a goddamn vacation, after high school.
(granted I attended a low-ranked university and I gather it's not that easy everywhere, but we were still covering material much faster and with far higher expectations for work than in high school, yet it was way the hell easier just because the conditions were more humane and there was far less wasted time—on the flip side, my high school wasn't in any way prestigious or notable either, yet still demanded all that time)
The point of most of that is not to teach you about whales (though whales are cool). It's to teach you:
* How to read and process written material.
* How to organize your thoughts and write grammatically correct sentences.
* The moral value that science is useful and nature is important to preserve.
It's the same reason they still teach cursive. Cursive matters fuck-all, but training fine motor skills in general is very useful and cursive is just a semi-arbitrary means to that end.
Sure there is redundancy in elementary education. But middle and high school kids missing out on a year of math can be fatal. Smart determined kids can make it up. But the vast majority will be completely lost.
It was really frustrating for everyone. I just wasn't in a position to basically teach them a few years of high school math from zero foundation.
And you'll see the same pattern in pretty much any of the books written over the years about the challenges the author faced in the first year of their MBA program.
Middle and high school is for everybody and college/University is for the smart 50% (or whatever).
It's natural that you cover more in less time in college/university because students that go there are already smarter than most.
If you try to apply the same standards to high school, you will push the dropout rate into 60 or more.
There is so much redundancy in elementary school education that you can take out a large chunk of it and still teach the same amount of information. School could be way, way denser than it is. Hell, even in high school, a full year would cover the same amount of material as a single semester of one of my college classes, and my college classes only met 3 times a week (for the same exact class length as my high school classes; or fewer than 3 times a week for longer class length).