Education matters for its own sake.

One of the things that I bitterly regret in modern society is that education per se is so badly undervalued.
The only way that I can persuade schoolchildren - and tragically, their parents too - that 'education is a good thing', is by linking it as directly as possible to a future career.
It is now virtually beyond all human effort to get the point across that education does not require a following career to make it valuable for the individual.
This is one more area where those who abolished the grammar schools should be hanging their heads in shame.