Without education, a lot of people wouldn't be able to read the article (for the better?)
Without education, people would rely on their instincts and get tricked by this article, rather than critically analyzing it.
Without education, the author wouldn't have been able to use 90% of the complex vocabulary uses throughout the article... It's almost ironic to read.
Sure there could be perverse incentives here and there that make the education system look bad, and it's definitely not perfect, and sure there's some unspoken learnings that teach people how to behave in society , but I'd argue that being at school is one of the most effective ways to make humans learn. How would you learn everything learned from age ~5 to 18 without teachers and peers?
I know a decent amount of linear algebra now. I took a linear algebra course in college; I retained almost none of it. I remember learning something about SVDs and eigenvectors; I don't remember how to do an SVD.
So how did I learn any linear algebra? I had to learn it in graduate school, where I was trying to model evolution as a Markov process. I looked up some stuff in Numerical Recipes, wrote some C classes implementing matrix exponentiation and other such things. That stuck.
School is useless.
How can you tell that undergrad knowledge didn't help you when you "looked up stuff in numerical recipes". In other words: would your younger self in high school be able to understand the stuff in Numerical Recipes, and able to write some C(++?) classes.
I know I wouldn't, and that undergrad education taught me some strong basics that would let me do it now. The end of class stuff where you take a toy example of how to use your learned basics such as calculating the SVD is just an attempt at giving some "real world" example which exercises the basics, and an attempt at grading you on this, and that can of little usefulness long term yeah, but the core concepts are useful if you pursue your education/career in a scientific path that requires those.
Yes, because my younger self used to read math books on the side for fun. This is also how I learned C.
While it is true that you may absorb some basic stuff from schooling, it is VERY thin. I was by all accounts an exemplary student, and I still retained a small fraction of what I learned. Meanwhile all of the real-world stuff I learned is still mostly there.
We would do much better to figure out how to integrate young people into real life earlier, like we used to - apprentice => journeyman => master. But we can't tolerate that, because adults need to be "maximizing productivity" or some garbage, and don't have time to train kids.