Just a few comments about schools.

I tend to agree with my learned colleague, M. McGrath of Harlow, that schools should be there to educate. But this isn't a given. Schools have been used over the millenia for a number of different things - to train, to socialize and in many cases to provide a credential. All of these are legitimate purposes that do not always lead to an education as we think of it. Some of these purposes tend to whittle down the individual - as I see it an education enlargens the individual and society.
As I tried to express in my last rather windy post, it's up to us to educate ourselves. Schools, i.e., formal training is one road in the educating process. Too many people think that formal education, and the credentials that a school confers, are the end all and be-all of education. What most people who are impressed by a degree on a wall forget or overlook is that respect for an "education" is a learned attitude. In a way it's a self-aggrandizing product of our formal institutions of learning, IMHO. If "society" over-values formal training (in my mind it does)while disregarding informal, the result can be disastrous. I want access to folk-medicine, an acupuncturist and a good HMO.
When it comes to music, I have some formal training. I also have about twenty years of learning "on the job". And before all that I had the music that has been "in the air" since I was just a little squirt. It all comes in handy and I wouldn't trade any of one for a little more of another, either. In fact I'd like more of them all. I'm nowhere near done learning and this forum is full of brilliant teachers, luckily for me.