Compulsory schooling can accelerate the collapse of civilization
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If you take a bunch of experts in different fields of science and ask them about the most likely factor that might end civilization over the next century or so, they will differ wildly depending on their limited field of view.
A cosmologist will see multiple cosmic phenomena, while someone with limited understanding of artificial intelligence or nanotechnology will see those as important threats. Increasingly, the winner in the category shifts away from nuclear war to climate change.
There is a robust consensus that in the perspective of decades, we will not be able to reverse climate change. We can only slow it down. We cannot refreeze the Arctic.
Climate change is a human-made disaster that creeps on mankind as many others errors of human optimization.
Whichever threat is most prominent, it can be vastly mitigated with currently available technology: an asteroid, climate change, or otherwise.
Humankind has survived for millennia by its individual and collective ability to adapt. The key weapon in that adaptation is human intelligence.
It is the disastrous impact of compulsory schooling on intelligence that I perceive as one of the greatest threats for our civilizational defenses.
There is always a small fractions of students who avoid the negative impact of schooling (e.g. by being homeschooled, or having a good luck of tolerant parents or teachers, etc.). However, this fraction is too small to make a significant impact on democracies. Climate change is held hostage to the fossil fuel lobby, which keeps a grip on the well-schooled public.
Whatever is the greatest threat to civilization, the greatest threat to adaptive defense is coercive schooling that cripples human collective intelligence.
In the same way, as fossil fuel industry stymies the prevention of climate change, teacher lobby prevents a radical overhaul of the education system away from the Prussian Model of Schooling.
I am not pessimistic though, there is a formula to break the gridlock: school strike we dubbed Student Spring 2022.
I hope the strike will end in the Educational round table that will provide new guidelines to a better future.