Stop Stealing Dreams (what is school for?) - Seth Godin

Changing school doesn’t involve sharpening the pencil we’ve already got. School
reform cannot succeed if it focuses on getting schools to do a better job of what
we previously asked them to do. We don’t need more of what schools produce when
they’re working as designed. The challenge, then, is to change the very output of
the school before we start spending even more time and money improving the
performance of the school.
The goal of this manifesto is to create a new set of questions and demands that
parents, taxpayers, and kids can bring to the people they’ve chosen, the institution
we’ve built and invested our time and money into. The goal is to change
what we get when we send citizens to school.
7. Mass production desires to produce mass
That statement seems obvious, yet it surprises us that schools are oriented
around the notion of uniformity. Even though the workplace and civil society
demand variety, the industrialized school system works to stamp it out.
The industrialized mass nature of school goes back to the very beginning, to the
common school and the normal school and the idea of universal schooling. All of
which were invented at precisely the same time we were perfecting mass production
and interchangeable parts and then mass marketing.
Some quick background: