Gochi, please forgive my difficulty in understanding your point. You decry high school's efficacy in preparing students for college as "BS" (I'm assuming you mean bull feces, not Bachelor of Science). From what I recall, "most of what [you] learned from the pre-reqs was simply a repitition of high school science with slightly higher difficulty." So was this understanding of high school science something you learned during high school which prepared you for college when you learned it a tad more in depth, or were you precociously imbued with this understanding of high school level science before you hit puberty?
I agree that SOME of "college is memorizing bs which you will never use actively during your lifespan," but that's not ALL college is. Regarding your two reasons for high schoolers not to go into optometry directly: your first reason has no substance, it says nothing about high school diplomas being sufficient/insufficient to go into optometry. Your second reason is that because "pharm/dent/med/vet/pod/aud/therp," has the system of pre-reqs/undegraduate degree requirements, OD programs have the same requirements. I disagree. I think OD programs have prerequisite and undergraduate degree requirements because the optometry and optometry programs have developed from a artisan trade to a licensed primary vision care profession and that these requirements were slowly added as the demands of licensing/breadth of education advanced. And speaking of advancing, it seems that America/Canada's "******ed" education system has done quite well in producing fine health professionals. Just because some countries graduate doctors and optometrists in half the time as North American schools do, doesn't mean that they accomplish the same education in that amount of time. There's a reason optometry grew from a 2 week certificate, to a 1 year program, to a bachelors degree, to the doctorate degree it is currently, and that is because of our advancing knowledge about the visual system.
Perhaps you are trying to be the devils advocate, so I will concede the point that there are a select few people who do have the acumen to make it through college without a high school education--and, that there are also a select few who can get by in optometry school without a college education. I'm going to venture and guess that there are very few people who think that we should breed ODs--or MDs/DDSs/PharmDs/DPMs/AUDs/etc. for that matter--from anyone who can just get by.
Optometry schools are not going to remove the pre-req requirements because they like to gauge how well the student will do academically and want to make sure that students have the background necessary to handle the material.
The question you proposed in response to Carlton Banks's has an obvious answer. Of course we have faith in the licensing of ODs and should say that we will hire any OD so long as they have passed the boards and licensing. It is NOT, however, the topic at hand. The topic is whether or not high school students should be allowed to apply directly to optometry school, and I suppose to be fair to the geniuses who already know high school science and can study slightly harder to compensate for the moderately more difficult college curriculum they will have missed out on, OD schools could accept applications from them. Who wouldn't want to be colleagues with Doogie Howser (not relevant)? Does a college education (or pre-requisites) make a difference in readiness and likelihood to complete the OD program? Ask the admissions committee.