Lemmings and similar phenomena?

Just found Chris Bigum's blog! Great. Don't know why I hadn't found this earlier.

In this post he gets right down to it on schools as 'organised child abuse' and I find myself agreeing in large part.

Here is what he says about our penchant for vitally important skills like spelling and grammar.

Let's make sure everyone can spell catastrophe or onomatopoeia. But let's make sure our children do not learn how to engage the world, nor develop agency in it. It is easy to attend to some of the measurable stuff. It is more important to be concerned about spelling skills of the young but less about how the system treats them and what the social consequences are. So let's turn out the best spellers in the world and keep counting the lemmings as they run off the edge.