There was a book written some time ago called Brain Building by Marylin Savant who has a very high IQ and has been crusading for educational reform before many of us were born. Anyway I studied it and improved my IQ by at least 30 points, not trying to brag, I usually never try to tell people I'm smart, a really smart person imo wants to know what they don't know and doesn't care about keeping up appearances. So this is probably the greatest modern day teacher in how to think better that very few people seem to acknowledge. I would bet everything I have that under such methods a typically student's IQ would go up 10+ points in the first year. Playing chess alone after a year is 5+ points. Which is probably why they don't teach it or hear of it...
The reason education is a "failure" is because people don't know themselves, basically the root of all "evil" is ignorance, but more specifically, we domesticate the next generation to be docile and easily controllable thereby useful to us instead of getting one up on us and we rationalize all of our actions such as, they must raise their hand if they have a question otherwise they would all be talking at the same time, instead of saying they should be told to try to figure out these questions for themselves and learn to find the answer on their own, otherwise they are getting into the habit of looking to an authority to give them the "answers", which essentially means they are trained to be suckers. On the other hand education is a grand "success" depending on your point of view or how far the view can look.
Another fundamental problem is having knowledge forced on you not of your choosing not of your time of choosing would make you less interested in knowing it right? If I said you can't look it up on google, you must wait until I send you an email that tells you what the answer to your question is would you tolerate that? So why do we do it to our children? Because we know that asking questions improves curiosity and is a threat to our sense of control, they might learn things we don't know it upsets the status quo and powers that be, so we seek to quell curiosity from that start by forcing knowledge onto them...All of these things get rationalized to ourselves and justified by society, society can't handle real democracy or free speech or real education so we have these coping mechanisms for our ego's sake...there are 2 parts of the brain one is primitive and emotional and egotistical the other is the higher brain capable of reason, abstraction and fantasy and such, often it is as if they are disconnected so that the "right hand doesn't know what the left is doing", so that we can do great bad in the world with a clear conscience, it all gets rationalized, until someone comes along and tells us otherwise, then generally society hates them for it and denies and rejects everything they say because they can't handle the truth otherwise they would already know it.
So what is the "truth"? Of that I'm don't know, but our educational system is designed to make basically unquestioning to "authority" obedient drones that know just enough to run the machines but not enough to build their own and compete with us, in every system of society, take away the fancy dress and pleasant words and we've got cutthroat survivalism and everywhere there are virtually insurmountable walls to get anywhere in life, to break into any industry we have to know the right people, do unscrupulous things, lie, cheat, steal, etc... I suspect that what we have here is not a solution to the animal nature of man, but rather the continuation of it's domination over society, which effects the whole of society, that is, if we were to teach or more accurately ever find the courage to teach children truly how to think and leave them alone we would get a lot more productive citizens thereby society as a whole, true intellectual education truly pacifies the animal nature of humanity or rather puts it to better use, this false education today merely bridles it by force and stunts humanity's true potential.
