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> Because you could have the answer to nearly any question at your fingertips, and yet it's arbitrarily taken away?

There's a person there, usually in the front. They have the answers in their head. It is their job to put those answers in your head. To transfer those answers you can ask them a question. It's what they're there for.

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The key here is "any question." When did classrooms give you that kind of flexibility? In my experience it was hit or miss between how many on-topic questions an instructor would allow, let alone questions that deviated from the lesson plan.

Modern public schools institutionally are not designed to cultivate the intellect and knowledge of individual students. They're designed to transfer a specific set of ideas to a large group of people at once.

And yet, filling my head up with over a decade of information from a public school education was essentially useless to me.

Studying programming on my own (not offered in my schools) was vastly more important.

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