I have a little bit of a struggle with this right now in my own experience. I graduated high school in 1992 and made my first attempt at college immediately after. I ran up a decent amount of debt in the process, but I had a hard time maintaining focus on school. I started out as a computer science major and after I failed some stupid calculus class for the third time, I discovered that there was another track available called information systems. The basic difference being that CS was all theoretical and mathy and was about how computers worked while IS was much more practical, required way less math, and was all about how you could take what the CS geeks dreamed up and actually do things. Meanwhile, I had already started my career job and was making good money and advancing pretty well. What I was learning at work was about 10 years ahead of anything they were teaching at school, technology-wise, and I found myself in conflict with professors who were teaching things that were often 180 degrees opposed to what I was experiencing. It finally came down to the fact that I was making pretty good money and learning a lot more at work so I could focus on that or give that up and focus on spending a lot of money to not get any useful knowledge and slow down my career path. Not to say that I didn't learn anything at school - I would have taken all the philosophy, theology, and music/theater appreciation classes they could throw at me.
About a year ago, as I was helping my eldest daughter shop colleges, I decided to go ahead and take advantage of the free $5000/yr that the IRS says my employer is allowed to give me to try to wrap up my degree. I guess it was just because I didn't really have enough going on in my life. Not that I think I particularly need it at this stage, but just because I'm a tiny bit more mature than I was the first time around and it's unfinished business. I've taken a total of 4 classes at this point and I'm about to sprain a muscle in my head from rolling my eyes so hard so frequently at these people. So far, what I've been taking have been basically the gen-ed classes to sort of synchronize my 25 year old transcript with what they're doing now and so much of it is just absolute crap. First of all, there's a raft of classes that I cannot take because I haven't completed their 6 hours' worth of English credits. No matter that I'm the person in the office that whenever any written work needs to be sent to a customer, it comes to me first. No matter that I have reams of customer deliverables that I've written - I'm talking 100+ page analyses* - to provide as evidence that my ability to use the written word exceeds anything that they're currently teaching in ENG101 and 102. They'll let me take a CLEP test to test out of 101, but I've still got to take 102. I've studied for that test and the amount of time that they spend in the study material on the concept of the differences between "they're", "there", and "their" makes me wonder what in the hell is going on in elementary schools these days. The rest of the time is spent on trying to convince me that if I put a comma in the wrong place in an in-line citation to a source that I've committed the sin of plagiarism (which, by the way, they have misspelled in a couple places as "plagaraism" or something similar to that), am a very bad person, and should be dragged out to the middle of campus and shot as a warning to others. Or, I guess, be qualified for an $800k/year job at Harvard.
But what I'm really struggling with is this "World Cultures" class which is nearing completion. One of my last assignments is to write a couple paragraphs on the topic of what I think I have learned this semester. I know what the "right" answer is supposed to be, of course. I'm supposed to have learned that other cultures exist in the world and they do things differently and just because it's different doesn't mean that I can judge that based on my own culture and I can't apply my values to those cultures and white people are bad and people living in grass huts in the jungle are good. Which is fine and all and not really anything that I learned because of this class; I'm a pretty big proponent of "can't we all just get along" and for the most part don't give a damn about what other people are doing in their cultures. Except that the real lesson that has been taught in the class is that we should be shocked and dismayed when there's a culture out there that subjugates women and we should talk about how bad that is. And a culture that doesn't use money or gather material wealth is good and free and unburdened from the anchors that weigh us down in our culture. Now, I'm not here to debate either of those points. I'm against subjugation in pretty much all its forms. But if you're going to spend several weeks' worth of classes comparing two different cultures primarily on the basis of how good one culture is because it's so egalitarian and gender roles are so fluid while the other must be miserable for women because they get to thatch the huts and watch the kids while the men go hunting, that sort of sounds to me like you're judging a culture based on your own culture and applying your values to those cultures. So it's either okay to do that or it's not okay to do that, but you sort of need to pick one.
Anyway, despite the fact that I would probably find myself on the "school bad, experience good" side of the battle line that is being drawn, I don't know that I'm very invested in that fight. I think the real solution is in how formal education and training is approached. Certainly, much of it is not tremendously useful. I have VMS command-line knowledge that was useful to me while in school and absolutely nowhere else. Being able to properly cite sources is a skill that I have used exactly zero times in my 30 year career. What I picked up in philosophy and theology is basically useless to my ability to do performance analytics. I dropped number theory after a couple classes because it was some bullE36 M3, but never have I ever needed to know WHY 2+2=4, I've been doing just fine accepting the fact that it is. That said, though, if you can sit through the bullE36 M3 that a school can throw at you, then you'll be just fine dealing with the bullE36 M3 of corporate America. If I'm going to hire someone to do any sort of work where your brain might need to be engaged, I want to have someone that has some level of intellectual curiosity. You don't need to care why math works, but I've dealt with people that know their specialty really well and are wholly uncurious about anything else in the world and they're awful to try to work with. So while a lot of formal education is like so much fart gas, there's definitely value in learning things just for the purpose of learning things. Even if it can't be readily applied to what you're doing today.
* Case in point: I can tell you with 100% certainty that the plural of analysis is analyses which is something even the spellchecker that the forum uses doesn't seem to know.
