I would have dismissed the article out of hand had it not been written by Marty Nemko, an education consultant who has worked with the presidents of 15 universities.  Mr.  Nemko begins his piece with a statistic that absolutely floored me:

Among high-school students who graduated in the bottom 40 percent of their classes, and whose first institutions were four-year colleges, two-thirds had not earned diplomas eight and a half years later. That figure is from a study cited by Clifford Adelman, a former research analyst at the U.S. Department of Education and now a senior research associate at the Institute for Higher Education Policy.

How incredibly sad!  Imagine studying and borrowing for nearly a decade without anything to show for it but wasted time and debt.  Add to this the fact that holding a bachelors degree means less and less in today’s specialist market, and one begins to wonder whether or not all of the emphasis we put on formal secondary education is such a great idea.  I am not suggesting that high school education is all that an individual will ever need in order to be well equipped for life.  

To the contrary, I believe being knowledgeable in ones field will continue to become even more important than ever.  It is the mode of education that I'm questioning.  With more and more free learning material available online, including complete courses from such respected names as MIT and Stanford, the future of secondary education is in flux.  The form that education will take in the future is uncertain, but as is the case with most change in this information age, it will likely make education more dynamic and accessible, and that will change the world.