For many centuries, children learned through apprenticeship and personal one on one teaching. In the last hundred years or so, that style of learning has shifted to impersonal lectures in large auditoriums meant to teach as many people at once as possible with as few dollars as possible spent on paying educators. To learn basic concepts such as reading, writing, and basic math, these types of settings work fairly well. But as students progress to the high school and college level, the learning doesn’t become specialized enough quickly enough. What this results in is bored students taking classes they have no interest, learning subjects they will never use personally or professionally.
A key example of this is mathematics. For those becoming engineers and programmers, calculus and advanced algebra might be useful subjects. For the other 99% of the population going on to be tradesmen, lawyers, doctors, salesmen, and almost any other job, those are useless classes, and yet we require them. Why? No one I’ve talked to really knows, it’s just the way it’s been done. Hopefully there are some innovative thinkers on the way into positions of power in the education system soon, because it needs it.