The Benefit of an Education

I do not believe that people should drop out of school.
 Of course in societies like ours where education is compulsory, there will be students donning uniforms and entering the gates, but mentally and psychologically they have long left school. Their bodies are there, but their interests are not. They have essentially dropped out of school and are simply bidding their time until they are sixteen years old when no one can make them attend.
 I have been engaged in conversations in which graduating students struggled with the matter of whether or not they should attend college after leaving school, or even whether it made sense going to college at all since: "There are no jobs out there".
I have admonished young people, particularly, to educate themselves as much as they possibly are able to, because it is better to be prepared when an opportunity arrives, than for an opportunity to arrive and they are not prepared to grasp it. We have been conditioned to think that it makes no sense pursuing higher education if there are no jobs; that it makes no sense if the jobs trained for are nonexistent, and if the training and education cannot be put to use at some workstation somewhere. This is because we have been conditioner to look to others to give us jobs, rather than employ out training in jobs that we have created. This is another topic in itself, but higher education or education at any level for that matter, has benefits far beyond enabling us to acquire jobs. Having an education is beneficial in that it enables us to understand the world in which we function, far better than we would, had we not been educated, and the more of this understanding we have, the better our chances of living healthy lives under  safe conditions.
 The benefits of having an education go far beyond simply finding a job. Education has a way of putting persons into contact with other educated individuals with whom there would have been minimal or no contact or conversation at all, had there not been common grounds on which to base a discussion, and one never knows where such contacts and communication may lead.