Then there’s the German way, which is to figure out by the time you’re 14 whether you’re going to be working with your mind, your craft skills, or your muscles, and spend your high school years preparing accordingly.
At least half the population does not need a high school education in order to survive in the modern world; they just need a trade that other people will pay up for. I had a man replace the water pump on my dishwasher today, and he is just as necessary to society as is my gen-ed college professor work; I respect his skill as much as he respects mine, even if he never solved a quadratic equation or wrote a paper summarizing three scholarly articles in APA 8.0.
I’ll bet his very basic math and language skills are still solid though. The USA has a problem where we have a significant number of 18-year-olds that can’t even write a sentence. My great-grandmother, on the other hand, was able to run a business, keep a daily diary, go to nursing school later in life, raise a household, etc. all with just an eighth-grade education. What a decline.