A bit about school from an excel­lent short essay by Jonathan Harris:

The class was a crash course in things that are usu­ally picked up slowly and by acci­dent, like lost coins, over the course of your life. This class was so mem­o­rable because it was so lit­tle like school, and so much like life. School is basi­cally a way of keep­ing peo­ple occu­pied — a the­atri­cal set piece designed to take up time and spit out con­sent­ing consumers.

Any adult knows that what he really knows he did not learn in school. The grad­ual accu­mu­la­tion of expe­ri­ence is really how we learn. But unlike school, life is unpre­dictable, so it would be dan­ger­ous to leave the teach­ing of life to life. Just think how much would get left out of the cur­ricu­lum, and how hard it would be to stan­dard­ize tests!