>It’s also unpleasant. Most people care as little for literature as I do for American football. Forcing them to learn about it leads to no lasting knowledge or appreciation and makes their lives actively worse.

>School is the closest to prison most people get, the most locked down, unfree environment they will ever encounter, sitting for hours doing as they are told, when they are told, asking permission to use the bathroom.

Summary: Kids hate school. I don't wanna eat my veggies. Your conclusion: compulsory education is bad. My conclusion: make education fun and delightful. Look at the Finnish model for example.

Even if most of humanity could survive economically, not being literate, the world is far better off with universal education and literacy in innumerable ways.

It's shocking to see someone even arguing that kids shouldn't be compelled to be educated. Perhaps you could argue that adults shouldn't, but education overall in sociological studies has been shown to be an inoculation against violence.

Hatred of having to learn things you don't want to learn is not a condemnation of education. People often don't even know whether or not they will like something until they are exposed to it, and anyone with children knows this, how "I don't wanna do this" can suddenly turn into "hey, can you drive me to class, I don't want to miss this"

I absolutely hated history class in high school. I hated economics and philosophy in college. Until after I had taken them, I then became intensely interested in the subjects and voraciously read everything I could find.

We are headed into a world where people won't be able to delegate critical thinking skills to institutions, because institutions will have trust in them destroyed by fakery everywhere. Teaching people to think critically and be skeptical, to reserve judgement, demand peer reviewed facts, to hedge against rash action will be critical to stability in society in the future IMHO.

> Oh yes it can. If you can point to what health of a society means we can make a first pass at measuring it.

Many studies have correlated the education of women with numerous variables that represent non-economic quality of life: reduction in infant mortality, increases in life expectancy, reductions of violence. The UN and OECD have many variables beyond economics that measure well being. There are even surveys of overall satisfaction and happiness.

I also question conclusions that people "don't use" stuff they learn in college. That treats learning as a vocational enterprise. You don't just apply specific things you've be taught by rote memorization and practice, but you develop connections between subjects you've only briefly been exposed to, that can affect your decisions later in life, sometimes serendipitously and unconsciously. The same people who say they never use algebra or calculus, end up solving problems in Excel using the same skills they learned solving word problems in school.

I took 4 years of French in high school. I forgot most of it. However, when I travel, most of the latin roots I learned have helped me decipher signs in countries where I couldn't even speak the language beyond Helloy. And the experience of what I did wrong in French, later helped me learn Mandarin by avoiding the behaviors that turned me off in French.

I hated taking "required" classes in college. Now I am glad I did, because I was so narrow minded and pigheaded at that age. I also used to hate travel, really hate it. I was introverted, bored of long rides, uncomfortable in foreign lands where I didn't understand anything. But after being dragged all over the world, traveling and living abroad, my perspective on many things changed.

Too many people want to live circumscribed in a bubble. Education in all its forms, be it primary school, college, voracious reading, or travel, moving people outside their comfort zone has many benefits.

Eat your veggies, they're good for you.