orcishgamer: Okay, you're extrapolating a whole country on what a bunch of high school kids knew? We don't have a BAC here, high school is for fucking around, college is "serious" (or at least used to be), most high school kids are really dumb and judging a whole country on your sister's experience at a single high school in SoCal (which has a wide range of over and underprivileged areas) is rather foolish.
HGiles: High school is the time for Americans to work on social skills, making friends, etc. College is where (more) serious work/study gets done. So it's not surprising the some high schoolers in one school were ignorant.
That's enlightening.
You can't be a complete moron to graduate high school here (the math, literature and science classes are advanced enough to ensure that), but then the flipside is that an impressive number of students don't graduate (I don't have a firm stat, but I vaguely recall ~30% being mentioned when I was in high school).
On the bright side, if you do graduate, then you will have gotten something out of high school.