@Daerovius
Firstly, school won't make idiots into non-idiots. At best it will only make them into educated idiots. The primary purpose of the compulsory education system is to condition children to follow orders from designated authority figures in a communal environment. That is why most of the information crammed into them is just general knowledge / trivia, most of which wouldn't amount to much without furthering it in University. And that leads into the second point:
What schools do NOT do is teach students practical life skills that could make or break their chances when they're eventually thrown out into the big wide world. Yet more evidence that much like with social media platforms, the schools don't exist to help the students function in society, but to program the students to be more usable BY society. Nevermind that being able to keep themselves alive would normally be deemed a prerequisite for being useful to anyone.
At least the average student MIGHT at some point in their life need to know that chunks of potato expand in pure water and shrivel in salt water due to osmosis. The odds of them ever needing to know the differences between
Ardipithecus ramidus and
Australopithecus afarensis, or how they relate to modern
Homo sapiens (the "sapiens" part is an exaggeration, frankly) are far lower.
And I'm sure a smart but uneducated person makes for much better company than an overeducated idiot crammed full of data but with zero understanding of it (which there are plenty of now, courtesy of the Internet).