An interesting perspective

Has institutional schooling outlived whatever usefulness it once had?

Look outside Western culture and watch children, even very small children, as they gather firewood, weed gardens, haul water, tend livestock, care for younger children and run errands. And no one complains because they are mostly outside and usually with other children....

When we were an agriculturally based nation, American children used to work just as hard and contribute in the same way. But now, Western children are trained intellectually, in school, where they are taught to think about things as the entree to adulthood...

Everyone sits quietly at their desks, thinking and thinking, just when they’d rather be out tending cows or weeding the garden.

And then we think and think about why there's so much obesity.

One advantage of the agricultural society was the reinforcement it provided to the family structure.  Children spent as much or more time with their parents as they did anyone else.  They were expected to make age-appropriate contributions to the family's labor--in the process, learning the skills they would need as adults.  While working alongside their parents, there were opportunities for conversation that resulted in values being transmitted from one generation to the next.

The industrial era improved the material lot of society, at the expense of that family model.  First the fathers left the home to work (a new development); later the mothers chose to follow or economics forced them to.  As a result, the training of the next generation was delegated to "specialists" who promised to prepare them for the Brave New World.  Rather than reinforcing families, the new model pulls them in separate directions where, in military terms, the unit is defeated in detail.