There's not one thing I've ever done to earn a living and get by in life that is dependent on information I learnt in school. And I had a lot of time in school and university.

That doesn't mean it was a waste of time. What school and such can give you is a set of tricks and disciplines and skills that you can use to find out what you need to know, when you need to know it. And it can teach you to be confident that if you keep on trying to find out, you will get there.

Where schools go wrong is when they think that they are there to fill people up with information. They aren't, because it will all leak out soon enough if that is all that is happening. And it's quite possible to damage people's ability to learn in the process, and it is done all the time, and probably increasingly so, in the current Gradgrindery of educational "reform" in England.

Schools should be there to educate, to bring people out into a condition where they are in command of the skills they possess. This involves providing skills, and tools (mental, physical and spiritual), and protected space and time.

And this also involves giving people feedback as to whether what they are doing measures up to what they could do. That's important too, though dangerous, if teachers don't have the insight and humility to realise they can be wrong about that kind of thing.

Chuirchill said in the context of the war and American aid "Give us the tools and we will finish the job." That's a quote you can usefully wrench out of context. It's what every good teacher wants to hear from their pupils or students.