I thought basically the same thing all through grade school and college, and for a couple years afterwards, right through doing my startup. And I still do - as far as you go. But I think you're missing something very important.
School is not about learning facts. It really, really sucks at that - go grab a book or twelve out of your public library and devour them for that. And it's not even for learning skills - the best way to do that is to get a private tutor, mentor, or coach, and then practice your heart out.
School is for learning culture. And culture, by definition, can neither be learned nor taught. It functions on a subconscious level, in terms of the little behaviors that people can never quite articulate but certainly notice. You have to be immersed in it to pick it up, and it takes a significant amount of time, and an open mind.
It's an open question whether all school cultures are worth learning. For me, elementary school bus culture and middle school culture certainly were not, and probably set my development as a human being back by a decade. But the culture at my high school - a public charter school that was just starting up - was a good portion of the reason I decided to go into startups, and played a major role in me becoming the person I am today. I wouldn't trade it for anything. The culture at Amherst, my alma mater, taught me to look at everyone I meet as a peer and equal, no more and no less, and to feel that I have nothing to prove, whatever silly hierarchies people dream of. And the culture at Google, IMHO, is without equal in the software world. You pick up so many practices and ways of thinking simply by being there.
So yeah, I think you are basically right. It's interesting that you pick out the pledge of allegiance as the most ridiculous thing in all of schooling. That's exactly what I mean by culture. And in this case, that particular ritual was designed to create a culture of subserviency, a form of indoctrination so that the masses of public schoolchildren would mindlessly support their power-elite overlords. It's bullshit, as you say.
But by recognizing it as bullshit and then putting up with it long enough to "win", you open the door to many other communities which are far less fucked up than the public education system. Google is nothing like middle school, and it's only similarities to elementary school are the colorful beanbags, the ballpit, and the massive quantities of Lego. But it's much, much easier to get into Google if you did well at elementary and middle school.
I disagree - school is an excellent place to learn skills, especially if you do sciencey stuff. It teaches you how to question things fairly and appropriately, and how to do and dissect research.
When I left tertiary education we were all sitting around doing the trendy thing and bemoaning how university had been worthless; we couldn't remember any facts. Then it dawned on us that we got insights into industry, learned how to communicate professionally, learned how to find the truth or the most truthful path, how to research, how to critique work, learned how to better collaborate with others, gained a small measure of self-direction (tertiary is the first level of education where it's up to you to show up), tastes of politicking and how to survive it, professional ethics, so on and so forth. Occupational skills were learned in addition to all of those. Part of the above meshes with culture, but they're all tangible if non-obvious skills. If you want someone to do a root-cause analysis, you're not going to turn to the dropout unless he's talented and a passionate self-driven learner. Most folks are not this.
As always GIGO, but you learn a hell of a lot of skills in tertiary education, they're just not all in 14-point font on your syllabus.
University is a whole lot different from K-12 schooling, and which university makes a difference as well. I felt I learned a lot about respect for data, the scientific method, how to formulate and test hypotheses, etc. in my physics classes at Amherst. I learned mostly facts at UMass. I'm not sure I learned anything about what science really was through my K-12 studies.
One of my main beefs with K-12 science education is that it mistakes the results of science for science itself. So kids are taught evolution, they're taught plate tectonics, they're taught Newton's Laws, but they're rarely taught how these were discovered, or the rigorous data-driven experimentation process that's refined them. The scientific method is covered as 6 bullet points that get glossed over in a week, and never returned to.
In many cases, if a student actually does science - they question the recieved wisdom of their teacher, and go off and do the experiments themselves, and report back objectively on the results - they'll be labeled a disruptive student and sent to the principal's. Hell, if the science involves chemistry, they'll probably be reported to the FBI and arrested for making bombs.
I dunno, man, that'd sure be nice if school taught you how to think, how to question. Maybe your friends do that. But schooling in general seems to be "them's the facts, get used to it". Industrial-strength indoctrination.
Some colleges teach you to think, some don't. A 'classic' liberal arts education starts with debate, discussion, and rigor. An engineering school starts with terminology, overviews (survey classes), and specialization options. Learning to think takes both an institution willing to teach it and a student willing to learn it.
However, it seems that a number of people, possibly more than half, under-estimate the value of learning how to motivate yourself to finish things in the presence of losing interest in doing so. Lots of people "get" the joke that the last 10% of a project takes 90% of the effort but they don't get the fact that folks who never learned how to motivate themselves through the finish (of which having a college degree is a reasonable signal) will 'drop out' at the 90% point at best, and become dead weight at worst.
Combine that with the unemployment statistics of folks with versus those without college degrees and statistically it seems you want to be in the 'with' group.
The bottom line is that college is the first place you get to show the world your work ethic and your 'mettle.' That's because for many its the first place where not-going is considered a legitimate option.
You can be very successful without finishing college, see Bill Gates or Steve Jobs as examples, just like you can get into the National Football League or Major League Baseball by going to open tryouts. If your personality is suited to that, its going to be a great option for you. But success on those roads isn't the "more common" outcome.
School is not about learning facts. It really, really sucks at that - go grab a book or twelve out of your public library and devour them for that. And it's not even for learning skills - the best way to do that is to get a private tutor, mentor, or coach, and then practice your heart out.
School is for learning culture. And culture, by definition, can neither be learned nor taught. It functions on a subconscious level, in terms of the little behaviors that people can never quite articulate but certainly notice. You have to be immersed in it to pick it up, and it takes a significant amount of time, and an open mind.
It's an open question whether all school cultures are worth learning. For me, elementary school bus culture and middle school culture certainly were not, and probably set my development as a human being back by a decade. But the culture at my high school - a public charter school that was just starting up - was a good portion of the reason I decided to go into startups, and played a major role in me becoming the person I am today. I wouldn't trade it for anything. The culture at Amherst, my alma mater, taught me to look at everyone I meet as a peer and equal, no more and no less, and to feel that I have nothing to prove, whatever silly hierarchies people dream of. And the culture at Google, IMHO, is without equal in the software world. You pick up so many practices and ways of thinking simply by being there.
So yeah, I think you are basically right. It's interesting that you pick out the pledge of allegiance as the most ridiculous thing in all of schooling. That's exactly what I mean by culture. And in this case, that particular ritual was designed to create a culture of subserviency, a form of indoctrination so that the masses of public schoolchildren would mindlessly support their power-elite overlords. It's bullshit, as you say.
But by recognizing it as bullshit and then putting up with it long enough to "win", you open the door to many other communities which are far less fucked up than the public education system. Google is nothing like middle school, and it's only similarities to elementary school are the colorful beanbags, the ballpit, and the massive quantities of Lego. But it's much, much easier to get into Google if you did well at elementary and middle school.