So did anyone actually bother to see the video? The guy actually is largely right. Save his extreme comments near the end, where he basically dismisses *all* the humanities, it's true that a lot of "studies" are full of BS, and are basically worthless for employment.
But, I must nevertheless disagree with OP's thread title, because the worst aspect of the whole education thing discussed in the video is the deeply ingrained notion that academia is just some training stage for getting a "productive" job, and not that the pursuit of knowledge is something inherently valuable (and that a "productive" job *is* inherently valuable and necessary). A lot of modern education merely consists of info regurgitation and repetition of methods without much thought, even in the "productive" fields. So the deepest reason why societies are declining is because knowledge is not considered a worthwhile pursuit unless it leads to money. Philosophy is done for, and its child science is quite dysfunctional. "God is dead", perhaps our civilization has not yet fully internalized that. Society as a collective has no worthwhile direction.
Speaking of classical education, in Plato's discussion of governments he placed the abandonment of wisdom and virtue as the first step towards decline, where in oligarchy the only virtue remaining is the guile and discipline required for wealth accumulation.
Alas, having never imagined the manipulative powers of mass media or modern banking, Plato never foresaw the possibility of our present system: A veneer of democracy masking a super-oligarchy, combining the chaotic freedom and consumerist wastefulness of the former with the economic stratification and exploitation of the latter. When will the insanity of the system finally lead to its collapse, and what, if anything, shall replace it?
