Why go to school -- A reasonable reason?

Today, administrators charge that, "Students have to go to college. Students have to be trained for employment."

Yet what they learn in school does not prepare them for working with different people, tolerate and discussing new ideas, facing problems beyond multiple choice questions.

And the worth of a college degree is becoming more exaggerated as the United States government shoves subsidies and easy credit at post-secondary institutions, whose primary goal is wooing alumni to donate more money for bigger facilities, larger sports franchises, and more celebrity.

What does any of this have to do with learning? What does this have to do with forming a philosophy of life? What does all of this testing, cramming, studying, reading, writing, thinking, bickering, fretting, rushing have to do with being alive?

With the cost of a college outstripping inflation six times over, with less and less on the return from a bachelor's degree, why do secondary schools insist on prodding students with enrolling four-year universities?

Students have very little idea of what they want to do in life, so busy are they in distracting themselves from the incoherent busyness of the public school system and the dangers of living in difficult neighborhoods with a lack of support. By sending them to college without any notion of what they want, why they are here, what they plan on achieving (or receiving) in this life, we are setting them up to be crippled by hateful debt and disillusionment.

What about those students who choose to forgo post-secondary education? Why go to school, then?

An education was supposed to liberate students from empty prejudices. Sadly, public schools seem intent on pressing them or at most rearranging those prejudices. Why learn about history if every event is a done deal, progress marking every step of mankind's march into end-of-history tranquility?

Students would care, I suppose, if the narrative forced on them contained any value, conflict, or truth, none of which is the case.

Mathematics from algebra to calculus. If you only expect to balance a check book once you leave high school, then there is no value to learning how to calculate the area under a curve!

English -- yes, everyone deserves to learn the skills of reading and writing. But what do we want to read and write about? And how do schools excuse themselves after releasing scores of students who cannot read?

"We go to school to learn how to think" -- think about what? Most students copy notes without connecting the dots, then take inane exams that test how well those students were able to cram and keep in the empty factoids that they learned.

"We go to school to learn how to learn" -- you cannot learn how to learn without a value system that helps one to discern what is worth learning, what is worth amending, and what is worth abandoning.

"We go to school to learn how to work" -- hardly, most students spend more time daydreaming, resisting the assignments forced on them, or cheating their way to mediocrity.

So, what was the question again?