> You're really questioning the value of education past 5th grade? No, I just raised this as a response to your comment claiming people in 1840 America were "m

> You're really questioning the value of education past 5th grade? No, I just raised this as a response to your comment claiming people in 1840 America were "mostly illiterate"[1]: I was talking about reading and writing, because you were talking about literacy, and I do agree that it is valuable to teach people basic literacy and numeracy. In no way my comment above implies that I question the value of education past 5th grade. That said, I do in fact question value of state-organized mass education past 5th grade as it currently exist, yes. To be clear, I'm not questioning the value of learning things past 5th grade, but rather the way we pretend people learn things today. > Most things in life can't be quantified, yet aren't useless. If you decompose the syntax of the sentence you're referring to, you'll find that the "useless" in it does not refer to "education", but rather to your argument: it is useless to argue that "X is good for you, so extra 4-8 years doing X is worth it", unless you can quantify exactly how good X in fact is for you, and how good extra 4-8 years of doing X would be. Say, imagine X to be "learning to play a musical instrument": it's probably worthwhile for everyone to spend some time doing that, but the idea that everyone needs to spend at least 12 years of their lifes, and most people should spend 4 on top of that, is rather ludicrous. How do you know that regular schooling is not exactly liked that, without trying to quantify it? You don't. > What studies? The Google Scholar keyword for you to familiarize yourself with the rather substantial literature on the topic is "sheepskin effect". [1] - you are very much wrong that Americans in 1840 were mostly illiterate, by the way: literacy in US was historically always very high, and by mid 1800s, large majority was already literate, despite lack of federally-mandated government schooling. This is a legacy of English heritage, where majority of male Englishmen were already literate in mid 1600s. They did not get there through top-down state-organized schooling, it was mostly a bottom-up effort, where local Church played huge role.