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(disclaimer: this is just my theory...)

Coming from an Asian perspective, I can see why the concept of schooling has become so heavily mainstream.

Surely enough, people in the old days didn't get as much "schooling" and entered the adult world with real responsibilities and work earlier in life. For this reason, the jobs they held would typically have been labour-based jobs.

In such societies, though labourers received a decent life, it was the doctors/lawyers/professors that held the highest respect socially. The reason for this is that when things got tough outside the norms of what the common people could control (health, injury, legal issues, politics, etc), people from such educated professions were the ones that were looked up to.

It's due to the commanded respect of such learned professions that more and more parents wanted their children to receive further education. Even to this day, I hear a lot of my aunties and uncles talk in awe of children who grow up to become doctors. They really were the celebreties in my parent's culture.

Times have changed. Rather than being a place to go to learn, highschool has turned into a mindless competition to get "ranked" on how well you can retain (mostly) useless information that would have little to do with what your target professsion will actually require.




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