Bryan Caplan (economist at George Mason) wrote The Case Against Education (https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691174655/th...). IMO, he's definitely too provocative and it's certainly not perfect but he makes really good points on modern education. My version of a summary below:
1. There's an enormous return to attending 4-year university. 4-year degree holders on average ~400k over there life time than high school graduates. This is somewhat suspicious, because it's not obvious 'HST 105: History of Ancient Greece' is imparting labor market skills.
2. Economists says education builds (1) 'human capital', i.e. education causally makes individuals more skilled and thus labor market success. There are two other stories: (2) action bias which is that universities simply selected people who would have been successful whether or not they went to college or (3) signaling theory which is that the degree communicates to employers you're smart, conforming, punctual, can accomplish ~4 year goals, etc...basically you're a 'grade-A worker'.
3. Bryan lobbies for the signaling theory. A flurry of educational psychology research is presented and it's impressive. A good example is there's almost (A) no scientific evidence that 'learning how to learn' or 'transfer of learning' or 'critical thinking' are taught well in classroom. It's shocking how this appears on every syllabus but that actual research that classrooms can impact this essentially doesn't exist. (B) The fadeout effect, where giving students extra education does boost tests scores for those individuals, but if you track them for the next 5 years the effects fade out -- like many things there's regression to the mean (C) Memory isn't as reliable as we think -- this has been very important in the judicial system that has historically relied on witness testimony. I don't remember anything from my 'History of Rock and Roll' class when I was a freshman.
4. Non-psychological critiques are that (1) the econometrics almost never include the stat that ~50% of all students who attend 4-year college don't graduate (some transfer, so that number is a bit difficult to calculate). But almost nobody guesses baseline of ~50%. The returns to college look good because of survivorship bias. (2) Labor econometrics in general is weaker than we think...for example, how do you operationalize 'experience' -- almost all academic studies on discrimination, pay gaps, etc. have this problem. (3) There's extremely strong evidence and intuition that getting the degree matters, i.e. if go for 4 years but don't graduate returns are much lower.
There's a ton more in the book, but those are the big parts. I was a teacher for 5 years and it's crystal clear to me that 'passive learning' isn't nearly as useful as 'active learning', but for classroom management reasons active learning is rarely viable. Active learning also makes the teacher look like they're not doing much work, which is bad for their bargaining.