people are abdicating the responsibility for their education to the government and to schools. (usually there is no difference between the two since they are one and the same). That's not the right attitude to have.
Some of the most brilliant people in the world never had a day of "formal" schooling in their life. Instead, they read, they experimented, they discussed and debated with others.
Somehow the culture corrupted to teach us that the only way to learn something and to recieve an education is to go through years of formal education in a publically run school. They lie and say you can't be educated unless you have have spend Tens of thousands of dollars and have a piece of paper saying you have. So people spend the money to get the paper, which becomes their goal rather than actually learning things.
I can tell you that the 3 years I spend in law school totally opened my eyes to the huge waste of time it was. For centuries lawyers would apprentice themselves to other lawyers and learn the law through experience. Law school, teaches the basics the 1st years and the next two years is basically just the school milking people for money. It's a way to prevent poor people from becoming lawyers by pricing them out of the market. Even after 3 years of law school, you can show up your first day at work, after passing the bar, and have to learn the law completely differently. You actually have to do work. They dont teach you to be a lawyer, they teach you case law, which is all good when you use it, but it's just a fraction of what lawyers actually do.
I am confident other professions are exactly the same way. You work your way through the "formal" schooling, only to get out into the market and find that it's not prepared you in the least to do the job you were working so hard to get.
I can also tell you that going to formal schooling make you intelligent, or demonstrate that you've learned anything. I remember my 2L year, I was in a writing class and we had to edit a classmates major paper. I had to edit a 3L's paper I was seriously questioning how this guy had gotten so far in school. I spent a long time editing that paper and I still dont have a freakin clue what he was tying to argue because basic grammar and spelling were so bad and the paragraphs (one paragraph which was literally two pages long) were so poorly structured to render the point incoherant to anyone trying to read it. I was dumbfounded because this was a guy a year ahead of me and from what I could tell he wasnt doing bad in the classes somehow, yet he couldnt write a paper.
Education is vitally important for all of us. We need to learn it from books and experience. But we need to make sure the goal is actually learning and not just going through the motions for a certificate. Because really, those are meaningless.
