I recently picked up my neice's high school alegbra book and the "mile wide inch deep" problem is plainly evident: way too much clutter and convolving of topics. When I helped her with some problems sets, it became apparent that the teacher had been drilling the students with rigid mechanized approaches to solving different types of problems. Actual THINKING about the problem at hand and gaining intuitive grasp of graphing and relationships seems to be completely ignored in the teaching. Very sad indeed.