[originaltext] If you were to visit education, as an alien, and say "What’s

If you were to visit education, as an alien, and say "What’s it for, public education?" I think you’d have to conclude—if you look at the output, who really succeeds by this, who does everything that they should, who are the winners—I think you’d have to conclude the whole purpose of public education throughout the world is to produce university professors. Isn’t it? They’re the people who come out the top. And I used to be one, so there. And I like university professors, but you know, we shouldn’t hold them up as the high-water mark of all human achievement. They’re just a form of life, another form of life. But they’re rather curious, and I say this out of affection for them. There’s something curious about professors in my experience—not all of them, but typically—they live in their heads. They live up there, and slightly to one side. They’re bodiless, you know, in a kind of literal way. They look upon their body as a form of transport for their heads, don’t they? It’s a way of getting their head to meetings.
    Now our education system is predicated on the idea of academic ability. And there’s a reason. The whole system was invented—around the world, there were no public systems of education, really, before the 19th century. They all came into being to meet the needs of industrialism. So the hierarchy is rooted on two ideas. Number one, that the most useful subjects for work are at the top. So you were probably steered away from things at school when you were a kid, things you liked, on the grounds that you would never get a job doing that Is that right? Don’t do music, you’re not going to be a musician: don’t do art, you won’t be an artist. Kind advice—now, profoundly mistaken. The whole world is engulfed in a revolution. And the second is academic ability, which has really come to dominate our view of intelligence, because the universities designed the system in their image.
16 What will an alien think of the whole purpose of public education?
17 What is the emphasis of education system according to the speaker?
18 What does the speaker think of studying the most useful subjects?