This sounds like an overstatement until you actually trace the roots of our biggest societal problems. Then it becomes almost impossible to avoid. School is the one institution that processes nearly every human being for over a decade during their most formative years. It shapes how we think, how we relate to authority, how we handle disagreement, how we view learning, how we measure worth, and how we prepare for adulthood. If those outcomes are broken, the problems don't stay in school. They ripple out into everything.

Look at health. We have an epidemic of obesity, chronic disease, and mental health struggles. We spend trillions on healthcare, mostly treating problems that could have been prevented. And yet school, the place where kids spend most of their waking hours, does almost nothing to build real health literacy. It offers brief bursts of gym class and a semester of health education that's quickly forgotten. It doesn't teach kids how their bodies actually work, how to manage stress, how to eat well, how to move in ways that feel good. Worse, it models the opposite: sitting for hours, ignoring physical needs, treating the body as an afterthought. School didn't just fail to solve the health crisis. It helped create it.

Look at money. Most adults struggle with finances. They carry debt, live paycheck to paycheck, have no savings, and don't understand basic concepts like compound interest, budgeting, or investing. Where did they learn this? Nowhere. School spends 13 years teaching algebra, geometry, and calculus that most will never use, but it can't find a few weeks to teach personal finance. Young people graduate knowing how to factor polynomials but not how to file taxes, how to balance a checkbook, or how to avoid predatory lending. Then we wonder why so many are drowning in debt. School didn't just ignore this. It actively prioritized trivia over survival.

Look at the social media crisis. This might be the most visible failure of all. People are addicted to validation, can't handle criticism, compare themselves destructively, fall for misinformation, and lack any ability to self-regulate online. Where were these skills supposed to be learned? School. For 13 years, students could have been taught how to evaluate sources, think critically about information, delay gratification, regulate their emotions, and build internal validation instead of seeking external approval. Instead, school banned phones, punished curiosity that strayed from the curriculum, and trained students to seek teacher approval for everything. Then we handed them infinite validation machines and wondered why they couldn't handle it. School didn't just fail to prepare them for social media. It created exactly the vulnerabilities social media exploits.

Look at our political discourse. People can't disagree without rage. They can't debate without demonizing. They can't encounter a different view without feeling personally threatened. Where did that start? School. For 13 years, students are rewarded for giving the expected answer and punished for challenging it. They learn that disagreement is dangerous, that conformity keeps you safe, that the goal is to please the authority, not to think for yourself. Then they grow up and enter a world that requires exactly the opposite skills, and we wonder why our politics are a mess.

Look at the mental health crisis. Anxiety and depression are at record levels among young people. Why? Because they've spent their entire childhoods in a system where they have no control. Their days are scheduled. Their choices are made for them. Their worth is reduced to numbers on a screen. They're constantly evaluated, ranked, and judged. That's not a recipe for resilience. That's a recipe for learned helplessness. School didn't just fail to prevent this. It created the conditions for it.

Look at the credential bubble. We have millions of people in debt for degrees that don't guarantee jobs, while trades go unfilled and practical skills go unlearned. Why? Because we told generations of students that college is the only path to success. We made vocational education feel like a second choice. We built an entire economy around the idea that a piece of paper matters more than what you can actually do. School created that hierarchy. School enforces it every day.

Look at the breakdown of community. People are more isolated, more polarized, more distrustful than ever. School could have been the place where they learned to connect across differences, to collaborate on real problems, to build relationships that matter. Instead, it sorted them by age, rewarded individual performance, and treated social connection as a distraction from the real work. School didn't build community. It replaced it with a system.

The list goes on. Groupthink, authoritarianism, fear of failure, inability to think independently, dependence on external validation, confusion about adulthood—all of these can be traced back to the same source. School didn't just fail to solve them. It actively produced them.

But here's the truth that makes this hopeful: if school caused these problems, school can also solve them. Not by doing more of the same. Not by layering on new programs. But by changing the fundamental design. Remove the force. Restore agency. Focus on real success instead of abstract metrics. Help people become self-sufficient, healthy, and capable of thinking for themselves. Teach them how their bodies work and how to manage money. Teach them how to evaluate information and regulate their own emotions. The same institution that created the dysfunction can become the engine of its repair.

That's not wishful thinking. That's just following the logic to its end. The problems started there. That's where the solutions start too.

 

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