Contrary the popular belief that US education system is designed to mold workers, this is possibly wrong for the following reasons. Schools and the workplace couldn’t be more distinct, so I dunno how the former is supposed to be a facsimile or preparation for the latter:
Schools are purely meritocratic in which one’s success is dependent on producing correct answers on tests and assignments, but in the workplace the link between talent/skill and one’s rank is not as direct. However, teacher bias can play a role in writing assignments, which can be subjective, as opposed to multiple choice tests, which are less so.
The intellectual and obedience demands placed on students, such as tests, punctuality, and homework, even at the lower grades, is more demanding than most work environments. Think about all the employees who show up late to work, do their job half-assed, or are just generally incompetent yet remain employed. Bosses complain that their employees are unable to write or perform simple instructions. Most jobs don’t have homework, or it’s treated as overtime. There is no equivalent of ‘overtime’ for school, because homework is expected.
Many school assignments require repetition and memorization of facts and figures, but most low and medium-skilled jobs involve taking orders and following printed or verbal instruction than rote memorization. Many of the subjects taught in school– history, geography, algebra, geometry, and literature–scarcely, if at all, have any applicability for ‘real world’ jobs. If the purpose of school is to create better workers, rather than having students memorize historical names and dates, would instead have them learn tasks that they may encounter at work, such as sorting papers, creating PowerPoint presentations, following instructions printed on a placard, operating a cash register, or entering data into a spreadsheet.
Social skills are much more important in the workplace than at school, and social skills can be used to not only curry the favor of bosses, for possible promotion, but also to mask incompetence. Employees who mess up can sometimes smooth-talk their way out of trouble, but that does not work in school. Because work assignments tend to be much less objective than school assignments (something as vague such as ‘project management’, vs. multiple choice tests), this strategy can be effective.
In the workplace, delegation and outsourcing boosts productivity and is encouraged. Schools abhor it and consider it cheating.
Many jobs, especially certain tech jobs, encourage or require collaboration (for example, many coders will work on a single project), but school typically discourages collaboration.
Overall, if the sole purpose of school is to create better, more-obedient workers, they are not doing it in the most efficient manner. Students with IQs less than, say, 90, are never going to excel in school, and those with only average IQs are probably don’t stand to benefit from 12 years of schooling when maybe only 9 are enough to gain the skills to be sufficiently proficient in reading, writing, and math, but even then, schools sometimes fail in that regard–yet everyone regardless of IQ (except for extreme outliers) is shuffled through the same, time-consuming k-12 system. I suspect much of these superfluous courses and unnecessary years of school , in addition to acting as a mechanism for screening high-IQ and conscientiousness students (who tend to get good grades; less conscientiousness students who are smart may test well but do poorly on homework), is necessary to maintain the multi-billion dollar ‘educational industrial complex’, such as teacher salaries, administration, buildings, and so on.