I suppose that depends on who the employer is. Knowing in your head what 18% of $19.79 is and not paying attention to the world at large doesn’t gain you a lot either, except you might know how long you have. If the former is all you have at the end of high school, you might as well not have gone. If the former is all you have at the end of first grade, there is still hope. Learning WHAT isn’t as useful as learning HOW, and even less so than learning WHY. In addition, the amount of WHAT out there is orders of magnitude more than what we knew when we were kids. Knowledge accumulates, and the world we live in today is a lot more complicated than the one I grew up in, and certainly more than what my parents and grandparents faced. Kids these days will live in a world few of us can even begin to comprehend, and knowing how to make change is the least of their worries.
I went through the public education system in a couple different states quite a few years back. I firmly believe that my knowedge base, and my ability to learn, were not as a result of having gone through that process, but it spite of it. I slept through most of it, sometimes literally. I learned how to read without school, how to understand mathematics, and most of everything else, without the teachers or the system contributing much. I certainly did not learn English in public school. The best thing the teachers ever did for me was to realize I didn’t need the cookie cutter approach and cut me loose to work at my own pace, and few of them were able to do that.
Then I went to college. I learned some things, mostly about girls and beer. I got a degree, 98% of which is no longer inside my head somewhere. I went back to school, got part of another degree, and then left and went back to work. I went back a third time, got another degree (the all-important paper), and ended up here. But 95% of what I need to know in my job did not come from school of any sort. It came from experience and paying attention to the world, and on the job training.
But, you know, my parents expected things of me, and I do not see that as much these days. They helped me gain a love of reading, and everything else followed from that. They had standards that I had to meet, of accomplishment, of behavior, and so on. Where is that? Back then, if you wanted to know something, it took effort to figure it out. But now we have instant gratification, with information available without hard work (I see that even here, where people expect to shortcut the years of experience that many of us have, so that they can catch fish immediately upon taking up the sport), and people consider it a RIGHT that things should be given to them.
We had to use our minds even to have fun. We didn’t have XBOX and cell phones and all that. The worlds we played in were created in our own minds, and imagination counted for something. Now it is video games and realistic toys and so on.
The teachers are sorely constrained in what they can do these days. No child left behind means that no one can move ahead, either, and who knows what we stifle with the cookie-cutter approaches we use these days. Basing funding on standardized tests? All that does is lead schools to teach what the test asks.