What is sChool For?

I've worked in IT in schools for decades and the question about what schools are for rarely gets asked.  Probably because most folks who work in schools believe they already know the answer but fundamentally it's a good question because as I watch my 3 kids go through the system I see how flawed the process is and how few people ask themselves this question.  What's clear is that the majority of the folks in authority in primary and secondary schools don't know what schools are really for.  Or maybe they think they do-Maybe they believe the 'traditional' version: that schools are there to train kids to fit into the industrial model-round off those edges kid.  Fit in. Obey and give me repeatable results. 
I got into IT because I loved to solve problems and god knows IT has problems.  But I got into IT in schools b/c I had a passion for learning.  Learning was cool-learning is cool.  To see it dismissed or outsourced to apps pains me to no end.  Kids have a limited time to learn-and they depend on us to do our best for them.  They don't know any better so when we mail it in they get short changed.  They don't know it right away but they'll know it soon enough.

The video below is a quick one so I'd certainly endorse watching it but if you don't have the time skip to the very end.  In a nutshell: Grades are an illusion; passion and insight are reality and real teaching happens when kids are put into situations where they can fail.  Persistence in the face of a skeptical authority figure is priceless.  All of this happens around 15:20 BTW so you can cut to the chase if you choose!  Real teachers find ways to make this happen within the structure given to them, and, while I'm all for IT in education, you can see that not a whole lot of what Godin is talking about lives in an app.