[johndotsun]

My father has been a truck driver from the late eighties on.

He is from rural Mexico and became a naturalized citizen of the US in his early 50s a couple years ago. The extent of his formal education was through 6th grade which was the furthest offered in his area when he grew up; he has had no further contact with the educational system since then.

In the nearly three decades that he has been driving trucks he has routinely won driver of the year awards as well as other frequent commendations for excellent performance in all job aspects while not a single time receiving a reprimand for uncivil or unconstructive conduct in any situation. His previous job experience before entering trucking in the 80s was a bit of construction work followed by quite a few years of dairy work; not places where he would have frequently encountered and worked along side better educated people that would have given him the opportunity to pick up on their habits and means of operating.

I believe that his example shows that it is not necessary to go through eighth grade to learn these skills; I suspect that rather than eighth grade imparting superior skill towards functioning in society, it is instead a filter for those students that our one-size-fits-all school system fails to accommodate that then disposes those students outside of the system without any recourse or additional assistance which sets them up for a failed and miserable life in many cases.

For what it's worth I have worked jobs between high school and college where I met people that graduated high school but lacked the ability to anything as slightly complex as the activities that you described. Eighth grade and beyond did not seem to have much effect in imparting those skills to them.