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At the end of last week, while scavenging for items to toss into Minding the Campus’s roundup section—that corner of the site where we flag education stories we don’t have time to expand into full essays but don’t want you to miss—I ran across a headline by The 74 that prompted an immediate reaction: “Is High School Necessary? Maybe Not — and Both Students & Districts Could Benefit.”

My first reaction was no. But not for the reasons the article goes on to explore.

In brief, the piece argues that if many students are already completing college-level work through early-college and dual-enrollment programs, it may make sense to let motivated teenagers enroll directly in community college rather than require four full years of traditional high school. The argument itself is competently made, and readers can—and should—go read it for themselves.

That proposal, however, is not what interested me. What caught my attention was the question: Is high school necessary?

Among certain educators, even posing that question would be treated as a provocation. It would land like farting in a crowded elevator—an instant offense—followed quickly by accusations of scheming to strip public education altogether. That reaction rests on an assumption: that high school, whatever its shortcomings, is still reliably delivering an education.

That assumption deserves scrutiny.

Just weeks earlier, this same publication ran an essay titled “Many Young Adults Barely Literate, Yet Earned a High School Diploma.” In it, Jessika Harkay shows that the United States is credentialing illiteracy. Drawing on federal data, she documents rising illiteracy among 16- to 24-year-olds, even as high school graduation rates continue to climb.

The problem, she explains, is not a lack of diplomas but a collapse in what those diplomas mean. Students are passed along without mastery. Expectations fall as they move through the system. And graduation now signals that a student showed up and sat in a classroom, not that learning took place.

When students graduate from high school without basic skills, the consequences downstream are evident. Students are arriving at college campuses unable to read demanding texts, write clearly, or keep up in introductory courses.

The scale of the problem is visible in remediation. About one in three college students must take remedial classes before earning credit, rising to nearly four in ten at two-year public colleges. Colleges and universities, in effect, now begin by reteaching what high school already certified as learned, leaving institutions to absorb the damage or lower standards.

Seen this way, the question “Is high school necessary?” starts to feel misplaced. Of course, students are required by law to attend high school. The real question is why.

If students can spend four years in a building, earn a diploma, and still reach adulthood unable to read demanding texts, write clearly, or do basic math, then high school functions less as a place of education and more as a holding pen for seat-warming teenagers.

Debates about whether motivated teenagers should bypass high school and go straight to college may be worth having. But they miss the more basic failure at the heart of the system.

High school exists to teach and test for general competency—to ensure that students can read demanding texts, write clearly, and handle basic mathematics. That is a real civic purpose. College, by contrast, is meant to be higher education, not remedial education. When large numbers of students arrive on campus unprepared for introductory coursework, it is a sign that high school has failed to do its job and college has been forced to compensate for it.

Requiring teenagers to surrender years of their lives to a system that does not reliably accomplish either task is not neutral or harmless. It is a waste of their time—one we have simply decided to tolerate.

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