Alternate take: it's a icing piping tip. It's focusing the bag of messy icing into a focused tip that can create any design the imagination can conceive. The right schooling can have the same effect on people.

Yes, because a tested foundation of standardized knowledge on which our entire civilization relies is a bad thing... Really? You can still have a standardized education and "think outside the box". Problem is, there is a difference between creative thinking and superstitious ignorance: I hear "Think outside the box! The education system makes you a sheep, dude!" constantly from idiots like crystal healers, flat earthers, conspiracy theorists, anti-vaxxers, and the mentally ill. Maybe, just MAYBE, its because they need you to abandon reason and education to pass off their ignorance as some kind of wisdom?

The school molds children into what the system wants them to be. How kids and how many times are they told "no, that's not a good career for you. Focus on your challenges instead." at the same time "No, you're not good at that, so that will not be a good career for you. You're not going to make much money doing what you love and actually good at, either." Maybe not in those exact words, but the implications are there and it's always, "Now, go home and give this report card to your parents and have them sign it." Which is also saying "The school needs to make sure your parents are not free from the school system, and we need them to feel included in feeling bad/proud of their offspring's grades so the parents don't teeter to liberating thoughts that are not what the school system values."

I wonder if it would be like this if we hadn't cut out so many of the arts.

Wh-what, everyone is thinking to hard and going philosophical? when in truth schools teach everything but what's actually good is just a small bit of it!

There's two sets of things that are summed up as "equality" - one is considering everybody worth the same, regardless of age, gender, colour and all the other irrelevanteries that have been considered the main determinator of what and who one is far, far too often ... and the other is actually making people identical as far as they can, suppressing everything individual or outside of the norm, punishing people for "not being like all of us are" - and that, usually, represents schools' take on it. Of course, this has been way, way worse in decades prior to those I went to school in, but, after all, I often enough got in trouble not for doing something bad, but for doing something differently than usual. I got punished for looking out the window after finishing what we were supposed to finish (some math or such), I was punished for attempting to use the bathroom regardless of being told to wait, and the idiot kid who grabbed my arm to stop me from leaving, who started screamcrying after I got myself lose from this not even not got punished, but praised and comforted he got, while I was accused of "attacking him" because I "didn't get it my ways", which was the only reason imaginable why I would even want to go to the bathroom. Not because I couldn't hold it anymore, and of course, nobody, especially not a snitch of 6 years, would just grab me because I was about to not obey. Of course not, although he was a teachers' pet and hadn't done such the first nor the last time, ... school does attempt to equalize people in an age of great influencability, and school failing at this, fails at the same age. When I went to school, making us equal, making us obedient units of economical exploitability and generally uncritical towards authorities definitely was a goal of our education, and definitely was considered more important than supporting any individual need or interest or even allowing students to learn beyond, besides or exceeding the schedule. Instead, if you were done before you were supposed to, it was an exercize in sitting silent and motionless, in obedience in general. On top of that, like half the world is even worse, some by not having any sufficient education system whatsoever, some by teaching mythology during biology classes, ... but, the key point here is, making people equal, with the goals of equal AND general obedience, non-criticalism towards authority is what was standing out from those teachers who just didn't care at all. But, obedience can only be anything positive if a lot of requirements are met that maybe not every firstgrader knows to their full extent - I certainly did not -, but nobody who is able to understand the concept of obedience is unable to understand that it cannot be a trait that is generally positive, but always only is positive because of specific reasons and justfications. Obedience in itself is neither good or bad, but totally depends on what is to be obeyed, who is to decide, why, for how long. Kids too young to get that are too young to obey anyway, at least whatever they do by obeying is neither important nor dangerous, unless it itself is totally off ...

The school system will only teach you to a level the gangsterment approve of, so never let your schooling get in the way of your education, you don't need school to learn things.

Yup and they get out to be perfect numbskulls sjw woke trash