An even more fundamental problem is that education doesn't teach how to think, how to freely express oneself and how to support the expression by others, while still maintaining one's own beliefs. It fact, it seems to do just the opposite. If you want to explore this idea more I highly suggest looking up John Taylor Gatto who was a brilliant and awake educator, and reading what he has to say. He influenced millions of people to think clearly about education, via his teaching, book-writing, and activism. He died in October 2018. Gatto had the most disadvantaged and written-off inner city middle school kids doing college level calculus and reading Moby Dick, all because he fueled their natural desires to learn, instead of shutting down this impulse, which seems to be the true purpose of modern K-12 public education.
He argues similarly to Alan Watts that that our way of education is very confusing to students, bombarding them with an "incoherent ensemble of information" that must be memorized, and takes up a large portion of their daily lives. Information gained from this steady programming has a tendency to be quickly forgotten, while also reinforcing class identity and fostering indifference and dependence, both emotionally and intellectually. He also draws conclusions that point to the control mechanisms in place behind these systems, reinforcing and demanding the need for supervision and confirmation by recognized authorities,
This is an interesting thought from The Naked Capitalist writer Lambert Strether:
"It wasn't the “dunces” who lost two wars, butchered the health care system, caused the financial system to collapse through accounting control fraud, or invented the neoliberal ideology that was kept real wages flat for forty years and turned the industrial heartland into a wasteland. That is solely, solely down to — only some, to be fair — college-educated voters. It is totally and 100% not down to the “dunces”; they didn't have the political or financial power to achieve debacles on the grand scale."
