My high school experience compared to Gatto's claims

My high school was in a small town in Montana that held a total of 400 kids, grades 9-12. We were divided up into age groups, regular testing, the same 5 or 6 classes per day, 5 days a week, taught year after year.  But that was the "normal" and I never questioned it.   It was what it was. But if the design in teaching was more to create great thinkers and expounded on the individual instead of the mass, who knows what "creative juices" would have flowed from my head.  There was the occasional person that excelled, but if given the opportunity I think most everyone would have excelled in one way or another. It seemed that the smart kids were encouraged more than the regular students.

In my school all the students of different levels of society were together, dividing themselves up into different cliques.  If you weren't in the correct clique you were "unpopular".  Wanting to be  popular seemed to consume everyone's thinking.  But on the side of school learning, there was always the "smart" kids and then kids like me, barely passing and more interested in "goofing off" than "learning".  To me, since our family was more on the "poor" side of town, the idea of college was never an option.  I did get to go to a year of vocational education getting my "clerk typist certificate".  But why was college never an option? I ask myself that question and why wasn't I encouraged to do that?  I ended up believing that I could just get married and all my problems would be solved, which was on the mind of a lot of girls my age - except the college bound ones.

I don't have a lot of fond memories of high school, it was so long ago, my life has moved on.