Life's Little Roadblocks: School

I was thinking about school and the extremely large role it plays in my life and it started to become clear to me how much bullshit school is. We sit in a building for 7 hours a day, then come home to 3 hours of homework, then wake up the next day and do it all again. If you asked me to explain what I've learned in school for the past 12 years of my life, my answer probably wouldn't be all that impressive. I can understand needing to learn the basics, but there comes a point where school just becomes extra. When will I ever use geometry in my life? Why do I care about British literature?

Every day as I sit in school, and each time I go to start some homework, I get frustrated thinking about how I could be doing more productive things with my life. I could be out doing and learning things that I actually care about, things that I'll actually find useful for what I want to do with my life. I feel as though the value of knowledge is masked behind fixed grading scales and generic, standardized tests that measure everyone's education by the same principles. We aren't robots. We aren't all the same, so we shouldn't have to learn like we are.

And yet, here we all are, wandering astray from the true essence of education because all that matters is doing what you have to do, most likely cheating, to get the right grades on that fixed grading scale and bubble the right answers on those standardized tests. To me, it's all just busy work. I'm not getting anything truly enriching out of it. Yeah, there are those few classes that teach me things I'll find useful for what I plan on doing with my life, but what about all that other bullshit? I feel my brain frying, getting overloaded with irrelevant material that I'll forget after I scribble it down on the next test--hell, maybe even before then.

Life's most valuable lessons aren't taught in a classroom--that's a fact. So why are we forced to spend so much time in them?