school and how it fits in with real life

I am the doorway to the future and the dampener of the present, well most of the time...
What am I?
If you can read, and have minimal deductive skills, you should know the answer is School.

My feelings towards school are so bittersweet, for I must admit that I do love school (if only because it means seeing friends I love dearly), but I 100% HATE homework, which is sadly a part of school.

To me it just seems so unjust because if you look at the adult world of work, most adults never have to bring work home with them, sure there's some paperwork, but that's it.
Mind you I'm referencing your normal job, thsi excludes teachers, doctors and lawyers.

Now don't get mer wrong here, I really like learning, but there are times when homework is the LAST thing on my mind.

All that being said, school is a wonderful place for kids and teenagers to grow, but some curriculums just don't make sense when it comes to the real world.

For example a junior at my school would have to outline and read 20 pages of a textbook, 20 pages of some book for english, answer questions on that book, write a paper, do horrendous amounts of problems for physics and math. And study for a test tomorrow in (insert foreign language here).
Oh and I forgot to mention that this person is most likely either in a sport, club, or theatre production, or possibly a combination of the above.
And don't forget they also are expected to practice some sort of instrument every night.

Now one might ask, why the HELL would somone kill themselves with so much?

The answer is simple, that school that comes after highschool, college.

It is what so many of us aim for (including myself), especially those 'highly prestigious schools'.

To some degree this makes sense, for we all want to ensure the safety of our futures etc., but WHAT THE HELL ABOUT OUR PRESENT? Are our best highschool memories supposed to be of slaving away in front of a computer doing some stupid essay? or pouring ourselves of a pethera of dry textbooks? or spreading ourselves so thin that we eventually break under the pressure of trying to do everything?

So thinking about school, and college, i just wonder, is there any other system we can follow that teenagers get to have some more interesting flashbacks than "well i spent this one night studying for five hours..."?