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MarkusRamikin comments on Two More Things to Unlearn from School - Less Wrong
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Considering the number of complaints I hear about recent graduates not being good at work, it's possible that schools aren't doing a good job of preparing people for typical office jobs--- after all there isn't reliable feedback from graduates or employers to the schools.
I suspect the short-run goals (baby-sitting, status enforcement vs. children and teenagers, acquisition of easily checked credentials) are the ones mostly being served.
This is going to sound very naive, I suspect, but I'm trying and failing to imagine how this came about. What the decision process that gave this result looked like, and what the people who shaped schools' goals, acting out of this motivation (among others of course), were actually thinking about their own motivations. I mean, I can't see myself designing an education reform and thinking that "teenagers need to be shown their place".
It's easy. You just assign different rights and responsibilities to teachers and students. Which rights and responsibilities get assigned are going to come partly from 'common sense' and implicitly encode things about their relative age and status; you don't need to think about that part explicitly at all.
And sometimes it's semi-explicit. For example, there's a lot of evidence that many teenagers have sleep schedules that run late. They may not be able to get to sleep before midnight or 1 AM, but it's very difficult to get schools to give them later schedules.
Waking up early is thought of as virtuous, and letting teenagers get enough sleep is thought of as coddling them.
And study after study shows that students do better when school starts later... yet they hardly ever actually implement a later start time. Apparently something else is more important to the powers-that-be than actually making students do better.
If you haven't met any adults who think precisely that way, you've led a very lucky life. ;-)
Even a well-run school that's actually directed at useful teaching requires some structure. And that structure must be enforced on the children because only the most incredible children naturally follow the rules all the time.
Some of the rules that could be imposed don't really have correct answers. (I'd offered something like dress code as an example, but I predict that there has been some research on what dress codes are "best" for education outcomes). But having no rule is strictly worse than any plausible rule. So the principal picks a rule. The teacher doesn't agree with the chosen rule, but enforces it anyway for one reason or another (he doesn't object that strongly, he is concerned about punishments for his deviance, he is logrolling to get support for some other issue, etc).
And that's one way status enforcement rules get into the education system. Since the usefulness of education is not easily measured, there's a significant risk (as others have noted) that this and similar issues become more important than useful education.
This presumes that the structure needs rules. Some "free" schools get by with very few, and little or no status impositions. Also, homeschooling is another case where "structure" can be arbitrarily simple and tailored to the needs of a single child.
Really, the only reason rules are required to be "enforced on the children" is when you have the same rules for every child, regardless of fit. This is not a problem if your school has a 1:1 teacher:student ratio. ;-)