The quoted part is admittedly a bit awkward to read -- I exemplified exactly what I meant in my analogy. It's true that most good universities "sort" rather than "teach." My argument is that sorting is not what schools were invented for. We have Olympiads for that.

"My argument is that sorting is not what schools were invented for"

Hmmm, are you sure about that?

Being a student and learning are not the same thing. To be successful in school, you have to excel at the former.

Plato's academy (and most of the ancient academies) were not built to "find out who was the best" at X or Y. They were built to a) teach current ideas and b) develop new ones.

The problem with post-scholastic (and I would argue even scholastic) thought is that we've mixed up the two roles. Grading (as we know it now) is a relatively new invention... probably invented around the late 18th century at Cambridge.

And yet these non-sorting educational institutions still produced Newton, Galileo, Augustine, and so many others.