This is basically right. Quite a lot of education is a waste, it's window-dressing actual learning. For instance, you might have spent some time getting exam p

This is basically right. Quite a lot of education is a waste, it's window-dressing actual learning. For instance, you might have spent some time getting exam prep advice: read the instructions, skip questions that are hard and come back later, try to memorize this or that formula / molecule / map / argument, if it's multiple choice strike out obviously wrong answers, look for hints to part 2 in part 1, if you can't figure out the integral guess that it's 0 or 1 (LOL a lot of high school integrals are elegant). You have to spend real time learning this kind of sharpening exercise in order to do exams, or you will get less than what you should get, given what you actually understand about a subject. There's no value to this time. You'll never need to remember how to reverse a linked list, because in real life when it comes up, you will just find it in a browser. Similarly with most things that require a precise answer, the effort in sharpening the answer is way more than what might reasonably be worthwhile in a real-life setting. Eg. I needed a Bessel function at one point in my career. Could I write down its form from having seen it at uni? No, of course not. Did I spend time doing just that at uni? Yes. The real damage is we end up not educating people. We give them a bunch of answers to memorize and never test them on how the question is important. Did anyone ever examine you on why complex numbers are a big deal? Or what the big gap between classical and quantum physics was? I bet you only had exam questions about how to do the calculations and derivations. Get a number or a formula, that's easy to test. Whether this formula makes sense to use, that's hard. The part about education being positional is also important. There's quite a lot of jobs that could be done by someone with no degree at all, including mine. My first boss in the City still has no degree, and didn't need it despite options trading having a reputation for being mathematical. All that's happened is nobody wants to not go to uni, and nobody wants to hire a non-degree holder to trade options anymore, because both groups think that going to uni signals that you're smart. Neither group actually thinks you need any of the actual skills you learn in uni, though.