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I haven't really thought about the point made here about education ideally getting students ready for the "real world" or the rest of their lives.  I definitely think of education as preparation, and hopefully as teaching skills that will be needed after formal education has finished, but somehow I never questioned the time spent in school.  I know that Steve Jobs and Bill Gates are the typical examples of influential people who dropped out of college, but if all people of a certain degree of influentiality (?) were studied, I wonder if there would be more college dropouts, or people with high levels of formal education.  I'm not sure, but I suspect that Steve Jobs and Bill Gates are exceptions.  Then again, this could be because as a society we value higher education so much that those who dropout are looked down upon and therefore will find it very difficult to gain power in society.

Should we be spending less time in school and more in the real world, or maybe more of school should be dealing with real-world experiences, like praxis or lab courses?  I wonder how learning things through experience in the actual field vs. in the classroom would change our level of comfort and skill in those areas.