Smart . People like to tell me that I ' m smart , which I also find amusing . People usually use smart and educated interchangeably , and yet if being smart means one is educated . I am not , and quite far from itI think it ' s against the sidebar rules to argue with you but you ' re the one who pointed out that you will distract people with a different topic . You ' re smart or you wouldn ' t have been able to write that whole post . and you ' re educated or you wouldn ' t know the difference between smart and educated . You ' re just selling yourself short . Sure , we all do dumb things sometimes , but that is part of life . I could give you a book ' s worth of examples of dumb things I did this week alone . You know those nature shows where an animal falls into a pit and tries to jump out only to fail . But the animal tries again , over and over because it can ' t understand the situation , can ' t understand that there is no chance it could possibly ever make it ' s way out ? You sound like you ' re on the other end of the spectrum . Comments like the mind consumes itself . within itself show it . You analyze everything and overthink . You see how high you would have to jump to get out of the hole and then you give up because you think you can ' t . And sometimes you may be right but at other times you ' re just underestimating yourself . But you never realize it because you keep yourself from trying and finding out you were wrong about yourself . I don ' t know about how schools are there , but I grew up in Europe and the only way I made it through school is the way you described Just take the tests and don ' t waste your time listening to someone try teaching you stuff you already know . Here in the US we have an online school called the western governors college or something like that . wgu . edu . They allow you to test out of pretty much anything and give you full credit for classes you transfer in . You pay by the semester rather than for each class and one of my friends made it through in about a year . It sounded too good to be true but it ' s accredited and all . Maybe there are places like that in Canada too ?