There is an old Paul Graham essay to that effect (https://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html https://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html). It's a pretty good essay (though

There is an old Paul Graham essay to that effect (https://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html https://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html). It's a pretty good essay (though I think there's plenty of room to argue the finer points). The tl;dr of how it applies is tht industrialization mandates finding something for young people to do (that isn't working) in a way that previous eras did not. In the era of, say, sail, you could be a 14-year-old sailor. A 14-year-old in a factory was decided (over years and lessons paid in blood) to be not only counter-productive, but dangerous for the 14-year-old. We outlawed it. But that does cause the demographic problem: you can't have these young folks roaming free getting into trouble, so what do you do with them? The hypothesis that forms is high school is less about education and more about containment (making sure, essentially, that we babysit / warehouse our young adults until they ripen enough to be productive industrial-society members).