I’m going to use a few quotations to explain my current thoughts on school. One is the above.
“I consider that a man’s brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things, so that he has a difficulty in laying his hand upon it. Now the skilful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order. It is a mistake to think that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones.”
Sherlock Holmes, “A Study in Scarlet,” by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
The above quotation has to be one of my favorites. Not just about education, but for life in general. Sure I have a lot of my favorite songs memorized, and yes, that knowledge could make way for more biology. I have “Ode to a Nightingale” by John Keats memorized, and that could be shoved aside in favor of more calculus. But without these things, what would make me ‘me?’ I would merely be a computer, a robot, an android, whatever terminology you care to use. My Pre-Cal teacher says that if we can memorize stupid lyrics to popular songs then we can memorize mathematical formulas. That’s true, but why would we want to? We memorize song lyrics because it’s fun. It brings us happiness and joy. Does the distance formula do that? (On a side note, I find it funny that we use jingles to remember things, like the quadratic formula for instance. Irony?) It feels to me as though school is just a factory line to churn out robots of rote memorization. All they want us to do is remember, remember, not the fifth of November, but the gunpowder formula and scatterplot.
There are so many more things I have to say, but I think it would be more efficient and organized if I put them in separate posts. According to that plan, I will instead leave you with some quotations on education. Enjoy.
“Education is what remains after one has forgotten everything he learned in school.”
“It is little short of a miracle that modern methods of instruction have not already completely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry…. I believe that one could even deprive a healthy beast of prey of its voraciousness if one could force it with a whip to eat continuously whether it were hungry or not…”
Albert Einstein
“Education … has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth reading.”
G. M. Trevelyan
“We are shut up in schools and college recitation rooms for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a bellyful of words and do not know a thing.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson
“They say that we are better educated than our parents’ generation. What they mean is that we go to school longer. They are not the same thing.”
Douglas Yates
“Men are born ignorant, not stupid; they are made stupid by education.”
Bertrand Russell
“I’m sure the reason such young nitwits are produced in our schools is because they have no contact with anything of any use in everyday life.”
Petronius
“The principal goal of education is to create men who are capable of doing new things, not simply of repeating what other generations have done.”
Jean Piaget
“He was so learned that he could name a horse in nine languages; so ignorant that he bought a cow to ride on.”
Benjamin Franklin
“Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts.”
Henry Brooks Adams
“Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.”
Oscar Wilde
prongs 
Can’t agree more.