Formal schooling provides people a very structured environment. When you have school, you always know where to go and what to do. It's especially true about grade school and high school. It's more true for some countries than others, I would imagine. In some countries students have elective subjects, but in many other countries they're given very little choice. Like you might be required to take a foreign language and your only choice might be which language you're going to take but you have got to take a foreign language: there is no choice about that.
So, kids are given this very structured environment where they are essentially guided and prodded every step of the way and then when school ends they are thrust into the real world, which, it turns out, is extremely chaotic. The experience can be especially bruising for those who leave school at the height of an economic crisis because often times they find that the skills they worked so hard to acquire are not really needed in the market, at least not at this moment.
It's also funny how in school kids are taught to play by the rules imposed on them from the outside but in the real world, in the world outside school, there are essentially no rules except for those you make for yourself. Sure there's law and if you go and do something really stupid you'll get in trouble for that, like if you go and steal something. But guess what, in our society people get away with stealing all the time as long as they redefine and repackage it as something else, for example as 'government work' and suddenly it's no longer stealing or embezzlement, it's allocation of treasury funds. And even if you get greedy and get caught red handed, despite the fact that you may have helped yourself to millions of dollars, you'll most likely be in much less trouble than the schuck that gets caught stealing food from a supermarket because he's hungry.
Anyway, my point is school is too structured and too unlike the real world. Instead of preparing kids for life, it prepares them for some idealised idea of what life should be if it was a perfect sphere in a vacuum. Sort of like all those nice differentiation formulas kids learn in school but that are hardly ever used in real life engineering where you have to rely on discrete mathematics to find specific solutions for equations that do not have any analytical solutions at all. That's school for you in a nutshell.
If any of you are still in school: beware, it's total chaos out there.
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