I think one of the greatest things that is missing from formal education is the encouragement of exploration, and the acclimation towards the failure that often accompanies that exploration.
Everyone in school is so caught up on checking off the right prerequisites in the curriculum for the next set of prerequisites all the way up until graduation, that there usually isn't much room for any sort of real exploration in the system until graduation. However, after graduating, a whole new set of real world responsibilities appear that often restricts the ability to both explore and fail since they come with real consequences that make failing a high school class seem like nothing in comparison. For example, it is kind of hard to explore in university when that year exploring will cost tens of thousands of dollars, or if you are on your own and need to find multiple low skill/ wage jobs just to survive.
I was just lucky that my dad had a stem job and had a computer, which got me into video games, which got me into hacking them, which got me involved in communities full of people way older and smarter than I was, which facilitated my growth in a way that school never could. Without that first computer, there is a good chance that I would have just been railroaded into some soul draining corporate job pushing papers.
Everyone in school is so caught up on checking off the right prerequisites in the curriculum for the next set of prerequisites all the way up until graduation, that there usually isn't much room for any sort of real exploration in the system until graduation. However, after graduating, a whole new set of real world responsibilities appear that often restricts the ability to both explore and fail since they come with real consequences that make failing a high school class seem like nothing in comparison. For example, it is kind of hard to explore in university when that year exploring will cost tens of thousands of dollars, or if you are on your own and need to find multiple low skill/ wage jobs just to survive.
I was just lucky that my dad had a stem job and had a computer, which got me into video games, which got me into hacking them, which got me involved in communities full of people way older and smarter than I was, which facilitated my growth in a way that school never could. Without that first computer, there is a good chance that I would have just been railroaded into some soul draining corporate job pushing papers.