The key problem with schools is that they teach you to not just respect authority, but also to defer to it. In the real world, conforming and deferring to autho

The key problem with schools is that they teach you to not just respect authority, but also to defer to it. In the real world, conforming and deferring to authority only makes you mediocre. In order to succeed, one needs to develop the mental framework to question authority and challenge the status quo. The current schooling system, for the most part, does not encourage the development of such a mentality. As someone who grew up in India, I am all the more sensitive to the role of authority. Thanks to massive density of population, weak economy, and cultural norms, Indian institutions promote the worst forms of deference to authority. However, rather than culture, in countries like the US, the schooling system is the primary source for teaching people to conform to their peers' expectations and to defer to authority. The American society, in general, is quite different from the hierarchical structure that exists in American schools. In the real world, you have more freedom to question authority. Life is also different for adults because they are often more mature than kids, and are in positions where they have more choice than in the school. Schools should thus change to mirror the society, while still understanding the fact that school students are mostly immature. Often, such suggestions for reform are mistaken for 'give them the choice to study what they want'. On the contrary, throughout secondary school, students should necessarily be taught all subjects and forced to sit through all classes. But, be careful to note that this does not necessarily imply that they should be judged on all these courses. The key problem in modern schools is that the 'judgement' system is broken. Just like performance review systems in most companies. Schools should take a leaf out of the HR policies of companies like Netflix [1] and do away with formal judgement/performance review processes. [1] http://hbr.org/2014/01/how-netflix-reinvented-hr http://hbr.org/2014/01/how-netflix-reinvented-hr