Regardless of class considerations, my point is that the education rat-race is prevalent in places where an average job doesn’t guarantee a good standard of liv

Regardless of class considerations, my point is that the education rat-race is prevalent in places where an average job doesn’t guarantee a good standard of living and/or where there are strong winner-takes-all dynamics, so everybody has to play the winner-takes-all game from the age of 6. I know people in London who have become catholics so they can get their child in a catholic school (for whatever reason they are considered better than others), the rat-race for them started before the child could even attend preschool. From my experience of Germany and of the UK, I’d say that a mediocre job in Germany gives you a much better quality of life than it would in the UK. So you don’t have to get your child into the super-fancy Montessori nursery with the highest rate of alumni attending <German-Oxbridge>.