The course load in Eng. or in Grad School - now that can be overwhelming to the point of exhaustion.
Allowing children to pick what they want to explore and modeling the education after exploration is part of the baseline for Montessori education.
But this:
" Imagine if you could have skipped all those English classes back then. Guess what? You would be learning it all right now!"
No, no way.
It's a total misunderstanding of education to contemplate this.
Education is not 'some facts and things you learn that you may use later'.
Education at HS level is much more fundamental than that, particularly English.
It's about communicating, developing ideas, writing. Not only is it essential, it takes quite a lot of time and effort, and it's hard to just 'pick up'.
I have an Angel investor friend who just set up his own basic website (simple is fine) and wrote his own little intro copy. It's atrocious. Basically, in four sentences in writing, he reveals his own lack of education to anyone who cares to read. I mean - it's not 'that that bad' - but it really is sub professional and embarrassing. He's otherwise very smart, very educated, but it turns out he can't string together a few tightly coherent sentences to make a point.
There's no 'going back'. Both of should have paid more attention in school.
I do agree with he cadence, I think that school days should be shorter, and there should be more music and sports, shop class and longer term projects.
"Decent" high school grades are seldom adequate to even meet acceptance requirements for "good" colleges, let alone actually compete with the straight-A students also applying to said colleges.
Not that this really does anything to address the broader point: that "get into college because you'll make more money" is one of many extrinsic motivators American schools seem to push in order to strangle intrinsic motivators.
See how stupid that sounds
Theoretically the courses are probably designed to allow most people to succeed.
High schoool English, Geography, History and Math is referenced as easy by many students. Typical student does not have a problem to pass that class.
English, Math, History and Geography at the high school level are fairly straight forward, and the subjects are important to a rounded character. They really are not hard.
Most of Grad school is utterly gruelling, there isn't time to sleep, students pulled in different directions, and studying mostly arcane subjects that really are not important to anyone.