“Formal education slows down our process of growing up.” – makes sense to me, anyway. Most of the “growing up” I’ve done happened outside of school, when I had to make my own decisions. A commenter adds some positive spin though: “[It] is partly designed to remove young people from the labor force for a period of time – it wasn’t until the Depression that most children went to high school, and that was a deliberate policy choice – it employed more teachers, and it kept teenagers from competing for jobs with men supporting families.
In some other sense, formal education is designed to slow our process of growing up – we don’t require children to show as much responsibility, in exchange for giving them the tools to do better when they do accept adult responsibilities.”