Students are often thinking of how to maximise their grades and efficiently use their time in the short term rather than how to best learn the subject matter. Anyone who has had to deal with assignment deadlines can understand why a student may choose to take such a shortcut if it's available, even to their own detriment in the long term.

Implying anything learned in high school is of benefit long term… ha.

Someone recently described their high school experience as “slightly better than prison.” I agreed. If you want to fix education, perhaps start at the root of where we force kids to do bullshit work.

Teaching them how to do their taxes would be infinitely more valuable than memorizing pointless geographical locations (solved by google maps) or names of dead white people in history class (also solved by google) or forcing them to learn Spanish (google translate). The experience was so unpleasant that I didn’t realize until my 20’s that I actually love studying history.

I don't completely agree. I mean it should not feel like prison, and putting pressure with grades is not necessarily good.

But I don't think that school is about learning useful stuff. There is plenty of time to learn a boring job/how to do taxes after school. School should be an opportunity to learn how to learn, and to discover new things.

Because you don't need it in your job later doesn't mean it's bullshit.

Sure. I'm honestly not a big fan of grades, to be honest. But that's a hard problem: some students will be better with grades, some without, and some won't care.

Still I don't believe that the goal in school is to learn useful stuff. The goal is to learn how to learn, and to discover stuff. There is plenty of time then to learn how to do a boring job.