With schooling/education, I suspect there's a potential trap for any society where the "norms", should they entail sufficiently large institutions, as they do n

With schooling/education, I suspect there's a potential trap for any society where the "norms", should they entail sufficiently large institutions, as they do now in the West, can become excessively "sticky" and inertial as they, and, pivotally, their institutions, become monopolistically attached to prestige. Once this occurs, it may be too difficult to reason about alternatives because competing within the unspoken game, as you put it, is too dominant a social factor and becomes the social air that we're all breathing. The educational institution and culture arguably becomes (and now the unworkable armchair philosopher comes out) a meta-norm or "Grundnorm"[1] from which others such as what makes a worth-while life, who has "prestige" and power (both real and earning) etc. For a few reasons, I think allowing this to go too far is undesirable for a society. And with the West having transitioned in modernity to this idea that nearly everyone should be getting a tertiary education of some sort I do wonder if some major scaling issues and negative secondary effects come into play. From my own peek into the workings of academia, one of the more disheartening things I observed was how Professors, the most successful researchers we have, were increasingly being burdened with duties not too dissimilar from those of high school teachers. Seemed to me to be a mismatch between the scale of the research and education sectors. And, I suspect, we're yet to see the knock-on effects. ~~~~ [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_norm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_norm