One video from the 1980s shows how schools trained you to obey, not to think

The idea that schools teach content of little use for adult life is nothing new: Brian Tracy was already making that case in the 1980s. His thesis was that school does not aim to make students shrewd, but docile.

There is a scene that repeats itself in many households: a child memorizes the geographical antiestéticatures of their region, the biographies of poets from two literary generations, the characteristics of bacteria and protozoa. Years later, that same child, now an adult, discovers that much of that syllabus was of no help in negotiating a salary or spotting a bad business partner.

## Brian Tracy and the line about friends

Motivational speaker **Brian Tracy** was already explaining an uncomfortable idea back in the 1980s: most of your friends are not your friends. Outside the family, he argued, human relationships run on a different logic. The family is not necessarily idyllic either, but the message school conveyed was another one: friends are the best thing and last forever.

That contrast has economic consequences. Anyone who reaches adulthood believing every relationship is selfless may take years to learn how to read a contract, a loan or a partnership. Experience eventually teaches it, but at a cost.

## The education system and docility

The deeper criticism is not that geography or biology are useless. It is that the education system, according to this thesis, selects content and methods that reward obedience more than judgment. Memorizing does not train you to question a miscalculated payslip or to ask for a raise.

The result, this reading holds, is a gap between what is taught and what adult life demands. There is no official figure measuring that gap, but the debate over the usefulness of the school syllabus has been open for decades in Spain.

## Family and the collision with reality

The message points to a specific factor: growing up in an idealistic, church-and-Bible family does not protect you from the shock. On the contrary, it can delay it. An emotional education that promises eternal friendships collides with a reality where relationships also break down over money, interests or simple wear and tear.

Brian Tracy was not talking about Spain or the Spanish education system. He was talking about human relationships in general. Even so, his line has become a classic of the economic self-help literature, the kind that teaches you to tell contacts from friends.