I am currently a sophmore in high school, and I have noticed a disturbing trend. Remember the days of elementary school and you would tell your parents what you were doing in school, like learning about the difference between sugar and protein or how plants make oxygen? What did your parents say? Well mine would always say "wow, I didn't learn that until the ninth grade!" or "gee I didn't do that until grad school!" What I'm getting at is that the things that kids are expected to know nowadays are not necessarily what they need to know. And it is becoming worse and worse. For example, at my school the freshman science class my freshman year was "Foundations of science", which you could skip if you wanted to (and passed the test) and go into Biology, mostly a sophmore class. I got into biology. This year, my sophmore year, they administration got rid of Foundations, and now Biology is the freshman science class.
My english class is reading The Scarlet Letter, an accepted American Classic, a tale of the human heart and human nature going up against strict Puritan values. This is a book reserved for college guys, and they like that book. Nobody in my class doesn't hate it. Shoving this college reading material down our fifteen and sixteen year-old throats is not only unnatural, but it has ruined a book that I might have enjoyed, or at least understood, while in college.
This is seriously scary, the inflation of education. Everyone is trying to get ahead, but what's happenning is like the academic version of an arms race, where schools figure that they can get kids more prepared by teaching them more and more complex, adult stuff at a very adolescent age. We can't handle it.

A very concerned Finchplucker