[rwallace]

The irony is that it's actually appallingly bad for capitalist society.

That is, it was good for capitalist society in the nineteenth century when what the economy needed was people who were literate enough to read an instruction manual but broken enough to spend all day everyday on an assembly line carrying out the same hand motion over and over again without going mad from boredom.

These days, the repetitive work has mostly been automated. The value in a modern economy is people who can think, make decisions, find creative solutions. But that requires leisure time, play, rest. So the economy is glutted with broken people desperate for jobs while it's hard to find a good manager, a good programmer or a good plumber for love or money.

[moonchrome]

I agree that schools are doing a poor job at educating for practical applications but most of that comes from rewarding for satisfying arbitrary metrics and norms that don't really correlate with real world skills. Students being motivated and competing isn't really a bad thing if they were actually learning useful things.

Historically education-performace correlation worked because it turns out that smart kids are generally good at most things so having higher barriers to entry meant higher education was a good filter for general competence and motivation.

Nowadays the "everyone gets to college" system made the filter much less reliable but still left expectations from all those kids that entered college that they will be treated as previously top percentile. Also it decreased the value of college networking as now you're less likely to meet the top percentile students of your generation.

I don't think schools were ever that good at educating for real world but they were a good signal. Leading students to believe that just by imitating the signal will lead to success is bound to leave a lot of kids disappointed.