Education Lottery

In this TED talk by Sugata Mitra ("The child-driven education"), though it is not the main idea in the talk, he talks about the mismatch between what is taught in school and what is useful in life.

Here is some text about the talk:

Education scientist Sugata Mitra tackles one of the greatest problems of education -- the best teachers and schools don't exist where they're needed most. In a series of real-life experiments from New Delhi to South Africa to Italy, he gave kids self-supervised access to the web and saw results that could revolutionize how we think about teaching. 

I have seen news reports that have lead me to believe that the skills taught in schools in many countries are very badly matched to what people need to know in those countries. In those countries education becomes like a very costly lottery.  If you are at the very top of the class it might enable you to get visa to work in a developed country or to get one the few high level jobs available domestically but if you are not at the top of your class you get very little that is useful in your life.  There was a News report that focused on a girl in India and one of the comments by her family was that her older sister went to school for what they considered a long time and she was still a goat herder.  

I have seen a few reports that  claimed that many in Egypt had college degrees but were working jobs that did not require college. 

Shouldn't education be a way out or a way to live better?