[surreal]

> What's interesting about our education system is we focus a lot on precision and accuracy and not that much on strategy and planning. It seems like a system built to produce accountants and actuaries more than a new generation of entrepreneurs.

You're spot on (nearly). Seth Godin will tell you[1] that it's a system quite literally built to produce compliant workers for factories during the industrial revolution: https://youtu.be/sXpbONjV1Jc

[1]: as will many others. But I like how he puts it in this video.

[supahfly_remix]

> it's a system quite literally built to produce compliant workers for factories during the industrial revolution: https://youtu.be/sXpbONjV1Jc

Maybe initially it was, but I can't see how a today's college-prep / AP sequence prepares kids for working in a factory. In fact, the opposite has happened: too many kids are going to college when many would be better off financially learning a trade.

[amalcon]

That seems a bit off. The Industrial Revolution was considered to have taken place from around 1760-1840 per Wikipedia, but compulsory education began in places in the 1500s, and public schools started popping up in the 1600s. The reason for this is actually quite well documented: early Protestants, dissatisfied with the Catholic clergy's stranglehold on religion at the time, wanted to encourage literacy so that everyone could read the Bible.

Indeed, the primary reason that the stereotypical factory worker in the early industrial revolution was a girl was that girls were not yet required to attend school.

I would totally believe that deliberate elements of compliance were added at some point, but those seem to have mostly appeared in the late 19th and early-mid 20th centuries: clearly well past the Industrial Revolution.