The vast majority of states require that you be at least 17, and often 18, before you can choose to stop with said education. Everyone the military is willing to accept on other fronts has the literal years spent in school that you speak of. If there is a gap, it's only on the order of a few months, if that.

Everyone I know who did not complete high School got within a year or two. Paradoxically, it was the smartest people I know who dropped out. None of our reasons were academic. A combination of social and financial

So they’re inferior because they didn’t receive some paper? What if they dropped out of last class?

Granted the Army will have to work harder on average to train these people, but some learn better outside of the traditional classroom.

Did you serve in the military? I'm wondering what axiomatic knowledge taught in 12th or 11th grade, exactly, that you think military training depends on.

Axiomatic knowledge? Perhaps in maths and science. The rest is different in various countries, so surely cannot form some universal knowledge base.

And in maths/science, a typical high school or even non-technical medium-end college graduate has ~zero skills or knowledge, so that cannot be a factor either.

A high school diploma only signifies the individual was approved by the indoctrination of public education, unless you're the handful that had private or homeschooling which still doesn't mean much academically (see below).

Incidentally, in the US we have what's called the GED[1]. The GED can be taken at any time without any requirement for prior education, and passing the GED is equivalent to graduating high school.

So no, a high school education in the US does not represent "literally years of knowledge".[2]

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Educational_Developmen...

[2]: I'm a GED graduate, and I can tell you its contents are roughly equivalent to elementary schooling in most other countries. I can also tell you that is what a high school diploma represents in the US, academic wise, because they are the same. If you can calculate 1+1=2 and speak basic English, you are an American high school graduate.

Edit: also worth noting, is that I know of people who have graduated high school who probably could not pass a GED. It is definitely possible in the right school to coast your way to graduation, even if you would not meet the normal expectations. So in those cases, a GED would be superior to a diploma. All of this I think indicates that high school diploma is becoming somewhat meaningless

The problem is, if you aren’t there on graduation day, you don’t get that proof of paper saying you know what you know. So before you go and put people down without context in their lives, you should be aware that there are dozens of reasons why someone who aced high school - didn’t get a diploma.

A flat tyre, or the flu, on graduation day doesn’t mean the last X years of your life have been wasted and you don’t get a diploma…

I didn’t graduate from high school, and I completely disagree with you.

I learned more math as a teenager than most people ever do, learned two languages to fluency in my 20s, both in very different language families from my native one, and got into a nice software career in my 30s, first in Beijing and then in SF.

Why exactly am I “inferior”? Just because I didn’t choose to pursue the piece of paper that your world view dictates?

For people that didn’t graduate high school, being a moron typically was not a causal factor. Knowing how to write and do basic algebra is sufficient to bootstrap yourself to anywhere you want to go, and many people get an adequate foundation in that before they ever get to high school, never mind graduate.

I didn't graduate from high school. I ran business groups, founded startups, exited, accumulated patents, and am usually considered articulate and capable.

Yes, the distribution of people who didn't graduate from high school are different from those who did. But you can measure the things you actually care about. High school education (or other educational attainment) is just one signal of a person's capability.

Then there are folks like me. I dropped out of kindergarten. I didn't do any structured schooling until I was 16 when I passed a GED and ACT test then went to college for Computer Science and Physics. My GPA in college was 3.89 and I've been a highly competent software engineer for ~20 years. Nothing that I missed from high school has held me back in any significant way.

It really isn't years worth of useful knowledge, the military is capable of giving recruits the knowledge they need much more quickly, especially given the much more disciplined/controlled environment involved.

In a year you can teach kids who are a little behind enough to get them up to the min high school will teach them, but certainly not the most that high school will teach them if they want it.

Of course this overlooks what the minimum bar for a college is. At my college the lowest math they offered that wasn't considered remedial was calculus. That's a far cry from many community colleges where the lowest is alegebra. You definitely should have learned alegebra in high school and not knowing it definitely extends your timeline on certain disciplines.

k12 was created by industrialists who wanted obedient workers and well behaved citizens who won’t cause crime and instability in the ruling class’ assets.

School prepares workers, not the actual people changing the world.

Most high school grads will know more about how the mitochondria is the power of the cell, more so than know about taxes and personal finance. That’s by design.