Kids In Competition

Here's a few complaints you could make about modern schooling, which basically come down to the reward structure of essays, exams and projects not-matching-well with the reward structure of the modern white-collar economy:

• results are capped, not-matching the real world environments where a single win can pay for 99 losses.
• projects are largely fixed, rather than the student deciding what is ultimately worth working on
• your results often depend on impressing one fixed person (the teacher or examiner), rather than getting a small % of a large population to buy what you're selling.

There's a few things to say about this.

• The meta-reward structure of schooling looks a lot more like the winner-takes-most tournaments of white collar profession: the real game is not getting an A on your papers, it's getting into an elite university, and that's an extremely competitive tournament with uncapped rewards, your own choice of extra-curricular projects, and at least several somewhat-heterogeneous judges who can come to different conclusions.
• Maybe not that many white collar professionals are actually in the Make Something Many People Want game? Maybe most are actually in the Impress One Powerful Person game? Not just within corporations, where it's possible to succeed while creating 0 (or negative) value, so long as the right higher-up likes you; even startups can succeed in some sense without making something customers want so long as the right investor likes them a lot.
• Another is that these complaints about the reward-system depend a lot about where you are in the white collar economy. If you're a low-level worker at a big anonymous company, maybe your life is a lot more analogous to the standard schooling reward system. I am far too lazy to find the citations for this but there's some kind of link between modern schools, armies, and large organizations, where obedience and hierarchy are the ultimate goals. The complaints you hear about the incentive system of schools is coming from people who actually lead extremely anomalous lives.

There are actually a bunch of childhood activities that are more analogous to the reward structure of modern tournament professions: things like sport, music and debate. Some of these (likes sports) are judgeless and objective, whereas others (like music and debate) still have the issue of being judged by individuals rather than a market where you only need a few true fans.