Does education prepare you for life?

My answer to the question of whether education prepares you for life:

I don't really know any more what education is like in British schools but when I went to school we were streamed and much of our work inovolved rote learning. One of the main focuses though in British schools like mine, which, incidentally, was a private girls' school, was on working in teams. We did quite a lot of working in groups, particularly later on in our school career and there was a lot of competition. This was connected to sport but also to academic work. The girls were divided into "colours" and you could get points for your "colour" or lose them :-(( At the end of the year, the colour with the most points won the school cup. This taught us to be highly competitive, which is not necessarily a good thing, but, I suppose it did teach us to work in teams as well. On the whole though, I think we did learn how to work together and we learned a lot of information but there were shortcomings too.