the back burner

What if getting a good job simply is your value system?

I'm still digesting Scott's article, but a quick reponse to your question is that there's a huge difference between his "mass university" and the universal high school that's being criticized elsewhere (by Ryan).
"Mass universities" may be a good thing; I haven't decided. But nobody has any doubts that the universal public high school we now have is thoroughly bad. An option worth considering, I believe, is that we forget about trying to model the universal high school that we now have on something like the mass university institutions that have developed in the last few decades.
Frankly, I'm a little disturbed by the alternative as Ryan formulates it. It seems a trifle harsh and suggests unwelcome racial judgments.
But perhaps the time has come to question the value (no pun intended) of universally trying to teach 16 year olds how to read Brave New World when they have no interest in doing so, and will adamantly resist the effort.
Heck, I run into enough problems in my German classroom with students for whom German was a bad choice, and who have to consistenly fail my class until they get to the end of the year and can opt out. What good does this kind of inflexibility serve? I cannot understand the sense in modeling so much of high school on "mass universities," but then fail to include the part where you don't have to go if you don't want to.
It seems as if the improvements Ryan suggests could be attained simply implementing ways of allowing students to opt out of traditional school to pursue specific interests (whether it be vocational training or training in the arts and sciences with more specificity and rigor). Programs like this have been springing up all over the place.

I don't think there's any racial overtones to my posts at all. There's plenty of suburban and rural high schools that should be drastically reduced in size as well.

The problem is that kids are just that: kids. Even the ones who will benefit from studying literature will tend to resist the endeavor, because people are basically lazy. But the basic premise should be that we carry the wounded but shoot the stragglers, i.e. provide opportunity, assistance, and discipline to those who will benefit from education, and refuse to waste valuable resources on those who never wanted an education in the first place.

I partially agree with your last paragraph, but I think the emphasis is backwards. Instead of letting kids opt out of a college track into more vocational studies, I think we should default to having kids pursue a vocation and have those interested in college opt into high school.

Whoops. I wrote the wrong domain in for the first link above (which now leads, unfortunately, to the Social Security Advisory Service). Should have typed ssas.org.

Rich, I think your points are excellent. You stated in your last paragraph more specifically what I was striving to express in my most recent post.

As far as the university/high school distinction goes: I think what made the article so interesting to me was that it made me consider how much and in what ways our universities (and univ. methods, structure, etc.) are predicated upon our high schools (and high school methods, structure, etc.).