Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thanks for the response, I appreciate it. I guess you get a wider perspective as you age, and I don't really have much of an idea about what I'll think later. Though I might disagree with you on specifics, I agree that it's important not to restrict yourself to a limited set of things. I guess I was slightly annoyed mainly due to the fact that a few of my school admins sound very similar, except they don't bother to…
No problem. For what it's worth, I realize that high school (especially public high school; I went to one, too) can be a brutally authoritarian place sometimes. I pretty much hated most of mine, for the same reason. That said, there are parts of high school that I'd give money to experience just one more time. And of all of the people I know, I don't think anyone has ever said that they wished they'd paid less attent…
I attended college prep high schools and was a 3.9+ GPA student, took many AP courses, etc. I ate the dog food. But at the end of the 11th grade I decided I was through, and left early for college en route to a PhD in CS. Looking back, I am disappointed at myself for being so focused on the main curriculum -- the only activities that I am proud of now were ones done outside of it.
I think the flaw in your argument is that you assume that ignoring school yields narrow mindedness. It does not have to be so. For example, in my spare time I developed a web site of a well-known physicist that was eventually reviewed by the Scientific American. I can understand how someone would consider that narrow, but it required me not only to read physics and hack HTML (this was the mid-90s), but also to write essays, develop design skills, and become comfortable holding my ground in discussions with people far my senior who wanted the site changed in one way or another. These were all invaluable skills that I learned, really internalized, only because I pursued something that I considered important. With the exception of one class, that never happened at school.
That being said, I agree that in order to get a PhD one needs a certain level of tolerance of inane work. But that tolerance should be extended only to activities that stand in the way of accomplishing some goal that is important to you. To people reading this board a high school diploma is irrelevant, so I think most schoolwork does not achieve any particular goal for them.