Here’s a short, well-written essay on one of the major problems with what now passes for “education”: 

[W]e provide students with a meager curriculum which overemphasizes test taking, which neglects the essential and perennial issues of being a human being and which fails to give students a means of expressing their life’s issues in any meaningful way.  The results:  They drop out or they graduate bored, indifferent to values other than those trumpeted by a consumerist culture and unaware of talents many of them may possess.  And we call this process “education.”