Treating the entirety of an individual's education as a market doesn't really make sense. It's only a market in the last few years! There's a market for a colle

Treating the entirety of an individual's education as a market doesn't really make sense. It's only a market in the last few years! There's a market for a college education, but there's no "demand" for a 5th grade education. The whole education system is an investment in the future of our country - we wouldn't have a strong military or industry without it. So a pipeline was set up to funnel children from infancy to industry, because there's no other force that gets a kid to the point where she's employable. Your final step in this chute is jumping into the right college chute, which will land you in a job somewhere, for mysterious reasons. It wasn't always this way - my parents both had to consciously decide to attend college - it just wasn't a given. When you went to college, you had a clear end-goal in mind. "I want to go because it will let me do X." What we need is not "demand", but a goal. If people actually attended school as if they were contributing to some greater good, the quality of our education might not increase, but the attitude of our students would be more focused on the end-goal.