Theoretical knowledge is absolutely extremely useful, but the way we teach it is pretty much a non-starter.
We need to humanize our education systems. The concept that we all sit around in school for 20+ years and then go out and find something to do with all of that knowledge is based more on maintaining rigid financial/power structures than it is based on effective information discovery and utilization, and there's no reason that a useful piece of information recovered partially-intact from the caverns of memory here or there should continue to justify such a lumbering, monolithic system.
There are no guarantees that the system will provide even what you've enjoyed; as you said, a peer with similar education had either not been taught or had not remembered the needed concept.
Humans need it "on-demand". We learn and master a trade experimentally, most naturally in the context of an apprenticeship. We can't compartmentalize book learning and practical employment, putting years-long gaps between them, and expect the eviction algorithm in peoples' brains to have not pruned much of the relevant information. We need it cemented with immediate, meaningful, recurring experience, and we need systems that will make it easy for us to remember and reference as necessary.
The existing educational apparatus is none of this. It is just a cash cow for the banks and universities, enslaving most of its "graduates" to decades of debt servicing. That, IMO, is the primary reason it continues to be enforced, because there is very little that is rational about it.
It's also childcare for working parents. I know it's not supposed to be but it's a side effect that's widely taken for granted.
I believe you're correct about young people being turned into debt slaves. The rich and rich-aspirational in the UK are encouraging/implementing this here as quickly as they are able.
We need to humanize our education systems. The concept that we all sit around in school for 20+ years and then go out and find something to do with all of that knowledge is based more on maintaining rigid financial/power structures than it is based on effective information discovery and utilization, and there's no reason that a useful piece of information recovered partially-intact from the caverns of memory here or there should continue to justify such a lumbering, monolithic system.
There are no guarantees that the system will provide even what you've enjoyed; as you said, a peer with similar education had either not been taught or had not remembered the needed concept.
Humans need it "on-demand". We learn and master a trade experimentally, most naturally in the context of an apprenticeship. We can't compartmentalize book learning and practical employment, putting years-long gaps between them, and expect the eviction algorithm in peoples' brains to have not pruned much of the relevant information. We need it cemented with immediate, meaningful, recurring experience, and we need systems that will make it easy for us to remember and reference as necessary.
The existing educational apparatus is none of this. It is just a cash cow for the banks and universities, enslaving most of its "graduates" to decades of debt servicing. That, IMO, is the primary reason it continues to be enforced, because there is very little that is rational about it.