Education is more than just learning from books, and it is a shame that a lot of schools do not see that it is more than just a curriculum and school grade. A good education can teach a child how to learn so that the child may take up independent learning as an adult. Education may also teach a child how to reason so that a child does not grow up to be ignorant.
The biggest selling point for education in our society is the fact that it helps to learn "how" to learn. It is about the knowledge they accumulate, it is the way a child is taught how to learn things. A child may come away from school not knowing a lot of the subjects, but if that child has been taught how to learn, then the child may become an adult that learns everything he or she needs in life. Otherwise, that child may grow up to be a person that cannot see the obvious because he or she cannot reason and consciously learn new things.
Education teaches a lot of people how tonreason, and if they are taught how to reason well, then they help subdue their own thoughts of ignorance. For example, there are lots of intimation about childhood vaccinations and how dangerous they are. Ignorant people that never learned how to reason will look at them, believe them and support them. If a person is taught how to reason then he or she will know how to recognize empirical evidence. That person would look at all the people in the United States for examples that have had childhood injections with autism. They would reason that if childhood vaccinations caused autism then most of the people in the United States would have autism. If a person is taught how to reason then that person may see how people smoke seem more likely to develop emphysema than people that do not smoke. They would then reason there is a link between smoking and emphysema. This sort of reasoning can be taught in schools, and children are taught, then they walk around risking their children's lives by not vaccinating them, and walk around smoking because their daddy smoked for years and it never hurt him.
If education is not seen as important, then one day it will just be all about school grades and hitting the factors of a curriculum. There will be a day when children start to hate learning because school put them off it for life (this already happens in some cases). Without education, teaching people how to reason things out and teaching them how to separate what is fact from what is faulty evidence, then our society will become more and more ignorant until a smarter country simply takes over and takes our country from our ignorance.
I'm a Nigerian.
Thanks for reading.