I'm just not sure this is true. There are plenty of things wrong with the education system in the UK, and no doubt many individuals are completely failed by the system. But most kids do learn to read, write, perform basic maths and handle social situations well enough that they can get a job / engage in further training.

Room for improvement? Yes, hugely. Total failure? I think that's hyperbole.

> But most kids do learn to read, write, perform basic maths and handle social situations well

Kids learn to read nowadays at 5 or 6 (so some of them enter school already being able to read), learning to write and perform basic maths is not that hard either. The fact that you use these measures as a baseline shows that the education system is a train wreck.

Kids enter school at 5 or 6 with a range of reading abilities - some can recognise simple words, but very few are fully literate. The UK currently has a literacy rate of 99% -- something is going right.

Learning to write and perform basic maths doesn't seem that hard to us, but for most of human history was the reserve of a select few. Perhaps the fact that it seems so easy is actually because school can be quite effective at times?

No fundamental changes to learning are required when you push literacy rates from 10% to 99%, it is simply a matter of including more people into the learning process of a few years that existed for several millenia. If kids had a retention rate of at least 10% after 11 years of schooling and “are you smarter than a 5th grader” couldn’t be a thing, now that would be impressive.

I don't entirely agree. School certainly gave me no formal help with learning to handle social situations. I learned the majority of those skills through hobbies at Uni.

While I did learn reading, writing and math, my writing skills were subpar and this was never spotted or addressed. More importantly most of the writing skills taught were essay writing or letter writing. The former isn't particular relevant to the writing I do in day to day life and the latter was archaicly formal. The most valuable writing skills I got from school were actually science report writing (helped a lot with documentation and communication in a work setting) and even then I've learned far more from organisational roles in my hobbies and during my career than I ever did at School (or the formal education part of uni).

But would you have been able to learn from those roles if school hadn't laid the groundwork?

You can't expect a school to teach every child every skill they need for their adult life. It sounds like you were able to teach yourself the skills you needed to succeed -- in my eyes, producing children able to self-teach is the sign of a very successful school system.

I suspect so though I can't definitively say. Most of my later learning involved making a ton of painful mistakes many of which I'm certain could have been avoided with some basic help. I genuinely can't link very much I learned in school to helping me learn later in life. Science report writing, one product design class and a school show I performed in are about it.

I can on the otherhand link many things I did outside of school at that time to things I learned later in life.

I don't disagree with your view that the point of school is to teach children to self-teach. But I do disagree that the school system I went through helped very much with that.

Fair enough, although I think you are maybe thinking a bit too narrowly about what school taught you. To get you to the point where you can write a scientific report takes an awful lot of learning... seems unfair to dismiss all of that.

Perhaps. I could already read well and write a little when I got to school at 4, so I'm perhaps dismissing it due to natural ability and good parenting.

This I would love schools to teach critical thinking, how you country works, citizen rights and responsibilities, financial skills, how starting and running business work. All the plumbing that you have to deal with in the real life. However I don’t think schools are set up for this either in skills or willingness.

..or time. Schools in the UK have already got a curriculum that's pretty full. Everyone will have their own different list of "essential life skills" and trying to fit them all into the curriculum is impossible.

One thing that is often missing from these conversations is that arguably the goal of education isn't really to teach you any specific skill, but rather to give you the capability to learn things by yourself.

Part of this process will necessarily mean teaching you things like reading and writing, but whenever I hear "My school didn't teach me X, so I had to teach myself, wasn't my school terrible", I think "no, probably not."

FWIW, we covered critical thinking in lower-sixth (16-17yo) as my school offered it as an elective, and I did 2 years of critical media studies as part of my english-language GCSE (ages 14-16). Not every school will have offered those subjects to their student body though. Another factor is that I was in the top-sets which meant every course was available for me - if I were in a lower-ability set/group I would have had less opportunities for critical studies courses.

(Paternalism warning:) My main take-away from that experience was that the people that I feel would benefit the most from media-literacy and critical-thinking are the ones who wouldn't have been given an opportunity to study it at secondary-school in the first place...