1) What I thought was important at the beginning of high school is not what I thought was important once I graduated. If the decision was left to me, I would have been wrong.
2) You can't pack social skills into less time.
High-school has always seemed to me a very artificial and unhealthy sort of social environment, where the social hierarchies and rules are defined by other high-schoolers, who don't have a lot of maturity or experience. Is this wrong? Is high-school in general a good social preparation for 'the real world', or is it a matter of finding the right group of people to hang out with?
And now most people (including you) also deny that the "kids" possess free will. I argue that this act is far more cruel than hiring someone to sail. And once again you take our society's ludicrous definition of "kid" as a given, as though it were an obvious law of nature that we turn from livestock into human beings instantly at age 18.