It is important to ask if an instructional intervention better than none at all, or more generally to ask if our formal education is better than no education at all. People just assume that what schools do is beneficial. We need evidence to determine if that is true for any educational intervention or system.
One truth is that formal education is intended to teach specific things that "society" or our culture want children to learn. If we don't direct learning, likely many fewer children would learn the intended information or skills. I make...
If we view time as the increasing entropy of the universe, it is sort of hard to deny. Maybe, it is "emergent" only above the quantum level, but so what?