This is just cynical and wrong. School is about ideological indoctrination and conditioning the political subject via propaganda during childhood development away from the prying eyes of disobedient parents. Read your Plato and Dewey.
You have few really distorted, cynical perceptions and biased ideas about school.
First you're projecting your personal experience in your (I guess crap) school in a crap educational system to the norm. It's not.
Second, jobs having higher educational standards is a reflection of the booming of educated youngs, not the other way around.
Third, skilled uneducated professionals (e.g. plumbers, cooks, electricians, mechanics) make much more than graduates on average, it's a night and day difference, comes also debt free and you can start compounding much earlier. If money is your goal an education is actually not necessarily needed if not dangerous.
No, I am not projecting. I went to good schools and had positive experiences in school. It's still an arbiter of competence. Its still failed to hold up even a vestigial "ideal".
And no, the stats say that tradespeople are massively underpaid on avg compared to BS holders. Ofc, no one believes this here since HNs demographics are highly clustered in the bay area where trades people basically just tell you how hard you're going to bend over for them...
The US does not have a good education system and you're projecting US system to the norm.
I'm European, know our school systems in various countries and it has no resemblance to the ideas you have about education and we don't really have such gatekeeping at college at all.
Third, about trades, I've never lived in SF, but I lived in italy/poland/switzerland and even 6 months at OSU in columbus and I've seen that all the time: skilled tradesmen in all these places make MUCH more than average graduate. There's no comparison. I'm 100% sure the average decent carpenter or electrician makes more than a stem graduate in Italy or Switzerland.
> would you rather be stupid? think of all the things you would have wished to know before you die.
If someone takes the approach that school is required for learning, then they'll stop learning after finishing university (as most people do) and within a decade they'll be stupid compared to someone who believed learning is a personal thing and kept learning after their formal schooling had ended.
Look at Paris Hilton. Do you think she cares about subjects she doesn't know whilenshe gets chauffered around on her rolls Royce, eating meals made by a personal chef, in her Beverly hills home?
The answer is no. A life of material richness vs being poor and highly educated. Ask a postdoc this question and I bet the majority would take lifetime wealth to having to slave away in a lab.
No, even ideally it's still wrong. Educators are the arbiters of competence. It's their subjective opinions of you (marked with grades) that literally decide if you eat lobster thermidor or if you eat raman through your life.
The greeks had an ideal. It's been so corrupted by the modern system that even the ideal is dead.
> It's their subjective opinions of you (marked with grades) that literally decide if you eat lobster thermidor or if you eat raman through your life.
I don’t think so? Maybe in some rare edge cases. If you were born to a rich family even with midling grades you will remain rich. If you were born to a poor family even with excelent grades you likely won’t raise above middle class, and that if you are lucky. If you were born into a middle class family and you are lucky enough to avoid catastrophies you will likely stay okay, but not lobster termidor every day rich.
Honestly it is much more likely that if they give you great grades and put the idea into your head that you should be a poet or a philosopher or similar that they send you down the ramen path.
It's about maximizing your college admissions chances, which then leads to better jobs.
Id rather be stupid and rich than "educated" and poor.