What If We Closed All the Schools?

Over the last few weeks our think tank has been discussing the challenges we face in the future with regards to education. There has been so much in the news lately, it's as if the target keeps moving - indeed this makes planning tough enough, not to mention our in-house dialogues. Okay so, let's talk.

First, you are probably wondering what I am talking about when I speak of the news, well, let me give you a few examples here;

-Student Loan Interest to double, a trillion dollar time bomb.
-Stanford's Tina Seelig states we must teach students to innovate.
-Students need to be turned on to math, not turned off, a study shows.
-We spend more on education than the rest of the world - where are the results?
-The University of Florida is cancelling computer science courses to save $1.7 million per year.

Are you beginning to see how deep this topic goes? And mind you, these were just a few of the headline stories in the news this week on the topic of education. If our schools are failing to turn out the type of people we need, then why do we need the schools at all?

-Do we need schools for babysitting?
-Do we need to prop up the "College Bubble" to prevent economic chaos?
-Do we need colleges to keep people out of the workforce as long as possible?
-Do we need to indoctrinate our population to get everyone on the same page?
-Do we need schools to pay for already retired teacher and professor pension funds?
-Do we need education to get little humans to submit to authority (albeit, often false authority)?

Really, what is the goal here? If we are not teaching people for the future jobs they will be doing, if we don't teach them to think, or even do math, or help them learn how to innovate, adapt, and reason, what on Earth are we doing? If the system is failing financially and not performing or yielding the proper results, why do we have it in the first place? Personally, and realize I run a think tank, I am appalled at the dismal abilities of graduating students in High School, College, and post-doctorate studies from Universities - this isn't good enough.