Quora answer: What is the purpose of education?
Keep young people off the labor market as long as possible. The higher the level of employment the longer young people are kept in school. This delay reduces competition and also creates a filter that distinguishes classes of workers based on education. Significantly, what it takes to be successful at school is different than what it takes to be successful in work. Therefore, to be successful in life one must be good at both systems. The educational system represents Logos, and the Industrial realm represents Physus. Thus the difference between education and business is a way to enforce this fundamental distinction in our world view which is the duality between Logos and Physus. Interestingly the nondual between these Nomos appears in Education as the major discriminator in the filtering system that is weeding out students because depending on the subject math plays a greater or lesser role, and math is one of the hardest subjects for most people and so minimal math requirements are one of the bases for differentiating between students. However, in business the amount of math that is actually performed is normally not as great as we would be led to believe by the math classes that are demanded in school. Only specialists actually deal with the mathematics in industry. Rather the kind of Math that is mostly used in business is ordering math, financial and statistical mathematics and for software discrete math. The amount calculus or algebra used by most workers is paltry. Therefore, in the academic system math is used to discriminate between those who can and cannot pass the required math, and in business it is the domain of specialists. So what we see is that the distinction between education and industry or business is there to enforce the distinction fundamental to the worldview between Physus and Logos. And interestingly Education is a large filter for getting into jobs in the work force whose entry is governed by Education and Experience, and so since higher levels of education are needed for better jobs in many cases, this means there is a greater delay of entry into the higher tiers of the workforce. Between filtering and delay the higher the position in industry the more competition for those jobs is curtailed. In this way economic resources are distributed in a Pareto fashion with the more educated getting the higher paying jobs after the longest wait, and after the most filtering. Logos becomes the filter for the Physus, and Nomos is used as the highest gain filter within the educational system, but there is a great disparity between the emphasis on math and its actual use, with other kinds of math that are not emphasized in school having greater weight in industry and the knowledge of math being the discriminator for specialties in many cases. From a philosophical point of view it is interesting how the Logos/Nomos/Physus duality is enforced and the role that the nondual of nomos plays in the filtering in education and specialization within industry. This way of introducing economic reward and inequalities is seen as more fair than earlier distributions based on inheritance or other factors in the sovereign regimes prior to the dominance of democracy. It is considered fair because it is based on the inherent properties of individuals subject to educational filtering rather than extrinsic factors like birth into a given family that would allow inheritance of positions whether or not one had the skills or innate dispositions to perform well in those positions.