system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
CMV: Nearly everything I did in school was a waste of time, money and effort.

I'll start by saying that school teaches a few useful things. Driver's ed is one; just about everyone needs to know how to drive. Reading and writing are essential, as is basic math. Some vocational and technical electives like computer programming were useful. However, most of what is required in a typical k-12 curriculum and even in college is not worth the time.

Take chemistry for example. Everyone in my public high school needed to take chemistry in order to graduate. We paid a significant amount of attention to valence electrons. I'd happily wager that hardly any of use remember what valence electrons are now. I can provide a vague definition, but the only time when I needed to know it was in another chemistry class that I took in college.

I took several years of Spanish classes. Today, I don't speak Spanish. I can form a few barely coherent sentences in Spanish; all of them are about extremely simple topics. It's hard to see how I'm better off today because I had conjugation tables in Spanish memorized years ago.

I could list more topics like this, but I trust your ability to see the pattern. I went to school, memorized some stuff, wrote it down on the exam, and forgot it. After forgetting this material, I have not seen it again in a practical setting.

Some people will tell me something along the lines of education being good for it's own sake. The truth is that most people in these classes find the material rather boring and don't care about it. As I said, they will forget it and be no more educated than they were before taking these classes.

One could also tell me that employers reward people for having degrees. This is true. I'd argue that it's because the ability to finish a degree says certain things about you. Employers do not care about the existentialist philosophy course you took to meet the humanities requirement.

I'd love to be wrong about this because it would mean that most of my childhood wasn't wasted. Someone please prove me wrong.
gpt
> One could also tell me that employers reward people for having degrees. This is true. I'd argue that it's because the ability to finish a degree says certain things about you. Employers do not care about the existentialist philosophy course you took to meet the humanities requirement.

This is entirely true and it shows why school *wasn't* a waste of time. Economists refer to it as the "signaling" value of education. By graduating from high school, it proves that you can show up on time, follow instructions, complete boring tasks within a given time limit, solve basic logical reasoning problems, and read/write somewhat coherently. Graduating college shows that you have an even more advanced command of these skills and a basic understanding of your major field of study.

It's very hard to prove that you can learn *how* to learn, that you are diligent, and that you are worth the time and money it takes to train and pay you. That's why people with degrees can earn higher salaries on average than people who don't (regardless of the amount of time in school).