Sitting around in shopping malls might well be just as useful training for a future employee as close study of Star Wars Episode Four , or The Bush Tucker Man . Certainly getting a job would be. We speak about education and the education system when we speak of schools, but because of this desire for high retention rates, much of what happens in schools has to be training. Just as school overall is not for everyone, education is for an even smaller group - a smaller subset of those students who accept school. A lot of the students who are being forced to hang on to the HSC want to know the use of what they are expected to study.
Poetry is central to education, but irrelevant to training.
The usefulness of Shakespeare, or even Les Murray, is not easy to explain, particularly to an exasperated teenager with no detectable attention span. For these, the study of English or maths or science has to be reduced to the immediately and obviously useful, to a form of training for everyday life, so that the prisoners may be fooled into accepting their lot. This need for crowd control in schools is relatively new, and its demands have seen a change in our priorities. Since the students who seek education are tractable and docile, their needs can be safely ignored. It is only the ones who require training who ever threaten to riot.