On Education: an Opinion

Coming from an AP student who's managed to maintain passing grades, I've come to loathe school and its intentions, and I'm sad at that. Education has been corrupted. The purity, the simplicity of learning has been crushed into ugly white powder by the overwhelming pressure of institutions such as college, profession, career, and "success." We submit ourselves to seemingly endless waves of stress because we have been told and we have convinced ourselves that all of the information thrust upon us is essential in achieving whatever goal we are told to set for ourselves: in order to succeed in profession, we need college educations; college eductions require exemplary high school grades; exemplary high school grades constitute a strict regime of turning in large assignments and memorizing outrageous concepts. This is all wrong.
Education is no longer learning. Now, education means preparation, training for something in the future, usually something academic. Whatever happened to learning something, teaching yourself something that YOU dictated was essential? Why have we placed the significance of knowledge (a significance that can never be understated) in the hands of a method, a system, an institution that operates similarly to a factory? We ought to learn what our own intuitions suggest, not what a college application requires. Our mistake, or more specifically our predecessors' mistake, was placing SO much absolution in higher education, in college, in career. The belief that a successful life, characterized by an obese salary and a stable but always-occupied agenda, is a belief that has saturated, water-logged our future leaders and citizens. We have become so weighed-down by the necessity of going to more school that we have forgotten about and crushed the human need for self-betterment, which is obtained only through NATURAL learning, which is a process that can't be reproduced in any university or classroom.
In short, we've lied to ourselves when we say that we SHOULD continue on to higher education. College is trivial compared to self-respect, mental health, self-satisfaction, happiness, and sense of purpose. Assigning this much urgency to a f*****g building and an accompanying schedule is insanity that leads to things that make growth painful rather than encourage it organically.