Schooling...............................

     When you think about it, it is rather strange that liberated, free thinking people, when their children reach the age of five, send them off to a sort of prison for the next twelve to sixteen years.  There they are held, on pain of punishment, in cells called classrooms and made, on pain of further punishment, to sit at desks and follow particular routines.  Of course it is not as Dickensian as it used to be, and may people emerge with brilliant minds, but school is still a  highly authoritarian and indoctrinating place.  In my own case, the prison analogy was all too apt.  The boarding school I attended between the ages of eight and twelve had such strict rules and such regular and painful corporal punishment that we readily identified with stories of prisoners of war in Nazi Germany, even down to the point of digging tunnels, saving up food and planning routes across the countryside to railway stations.  Escapes were frequent, firmly punished, and generally considered heroic.

-Matt Ridley,  The Evolution of Everything:  How New Ideas Emerge