From my perspective that's some kind of weird Chinese thing. For a different view, you could for example look at the discussion at https://music.stackexchange.com/questions/120433/why-don-t-p.... It's a long thread, but search for "professional" and you'll find the same by multiple posters. There's also an interesting conflict of interest between students, their parents and music schools.

My teacher had 12 adults and 28 kids. We had our recitals separately. The adults were maybe 9 white & 3 Chinese.

But one time I saw the student list for the kids. Every single one was Chinese.

Just got around to looking at that Stack Exchange thread, and I'm reminded why I dislike that site so much:

It's full of PLPs (Pedantic Little People, or you can substitute a different P-word for "people"). And why is it full of PLPs? They get little brownie points for answering, and when you get to certain levels, then you're allowed to do even more! So they compete with each other and downvote your answer for, well, pedantic reasons.

I suppose this site has some of that, but it's not nearly as obnoxious.

Anyhow: I finally found a teacher who played standards, and actually studied with George Shearing! But they're few & far between.

Yes, music.stackexchange is pretty bad. Did you find any of the parts where someone writes that the classical teaching style is for training professional musicians or at least developed in the time when it was?

Regrettably, my visceral reaction to that site kept me from reading very far.

But yeah, conservatories are definitely that. "You, too, can get an expensive education and then struggle to compete with 200 other kids just like you for the the very few paying gigs in classical music!"