a sad reflection on a tendency towards introspection that must be commonplace in the education system (e.g. geography and history teaching)

Oh, it's true. The Cincinnati Enquirer recently published some history test that was given to college students and, if I remember correctly, most of them weren't able to pass it. Most couldn't even identify the decade in which the Civil War occured! History and geography are two of my favorite subjects, but most schools don't see these as fundamentally important to the educational process. My classmates were amazed that I knew on what island Napoleon was born. I can't see the students at my school scoring this poorly on a history test because I consider most of them fairly intelligent (middle class suburban school district) but I'm not sure.

Grade inflation is also definitely a problem. When 70% (I'm not sure of the actual percentage) of the students in your school are on the honor roll, there's a problem. And it doesn't seem right to me that we have students who haven't taken a single honors course in their entire 4 years in high school who are in the National Honor Society.