At one point or another, the human race is collectively going to have to admit that schooling has reached absurdity. Unless you were a monarch or a very wealthy aristocrat, the amount of schooling that children across the world receive today is entirely unprecedented. Using US children as an example, look back 100 years ago from now. Only about 60% of US children were enrolled in school, the number of days in a median school year was about 120 (as opposed to 180), and the median 25 year old only completed 8.2 years of schooling (https://nces.ed.gov/pubs93/93442.pdf).

With that in mind, take a look at this list.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_Index

In the US, the number of years spent in school on average is now 13.2. In 100 years, the number of school days has increased by (13.2 * 180) - (8.2 * 120) = 1392 days.

Now consider the life of a modern US child. It is already decided before they're born that they will spend 9 hours a day (8 at school, 1 for HW), 5 days a week, for ~13 years of their youth in an office environment. In this office environment, children are expected to be quiet and stationary for the wide majority of that time. If a child disobeys, it will be recorded on several surveillance cameras, and the event will basically be remembered forever. Despite being able to surveil every pupil, bullying is still somehow a commonplace event. For the bullied, they have no recourse because they are forced to interact with their bullies on a near-daily basis. How anyone can convince themselves that this is a natural environment for children is beyond me.

To be completely clear, I'm not saying I have an easy solution for this. This is simply the reality of competing in a highly technological, global economy. The need for menial labor is dropping everyday, and the demands of specialization are becoming increasingly stringent. But like a man eating tree bark in a famine, the necessity of the action doesn't magically improve the circumstances. Whether anybody likes it or not, it is a hard fact that governments around the world are forcing children to grow up in environments where they can not move, can not talk, can not play, and must complete copious amounts of paperwork.

Schooling has become the elephant in the room for several modern dilemmas. On this site in particular, there have been numerous articles circulating about the depression epidemic, the loneliness epidemic, record-breaking virginity, record-breaking obesity, etc. etc. While unlikely to be sole cause for any of those issues, it is a blindingly obvious contributor. If I force a child to stay at a desk every morning until night for several years, it should come as no surprise when the child's health and mental state starts to fail. Yet if I do that in the name of education, this is a surprising result?

This is an untouchable subject for politicians, except when arguing to _increase_ its size and scope. It is too easy for political opponents to smear such candidates as "anti-education", and a large group of teachers / school administrators consider such proposals to be an attack on their job security. Unlike other job sectors, these teachers / school administrators have a regular captive audience of children for 8 straight hours. Even unintentionally, their political attitudes are bound to be reflected in their students. So, the attitudes continue, and the cycle stays unbroken.

To hazard a guess, I don't think the end of this cycle is going to be an intentional political action. I think it is much more likely to be a collapse, based on the carelessness that this issue has been given up to now. Eventually, the constraints placed on children are going to become unbearable, and the rewards at the end of the pipeline will become too meager. If this happens, there will a large number of people in a single generation going insane en masse. Unfortunately, that would probably collapse more than just the school system.