confusing education with schooling

Prescient words from John Holt's essay "Beyond Schooling" in Freedom and Beyond, written in 1972: 

"And if by spending 250 or 300 billion dollars a year we should make it possible for all young people to get a four-year college degree, that in turn would be worth no more than the earlier diplomas, and we would have to start again, piling new degrees on top of he old."  

"When we define education as schooling, and put public educational resources into schools, the children who benefit most are the children who can stay in school the longest.  These are, necessarily and in all but a few cases, the children of the well-to-do. "

Holt emphasizes the distinction repeatedly:  education is not the same as schooling.  Schooling creates the manufacture of credentials and the control of access but it should not be confused with education.  The US does not have a long history of credentialism though the rapid rise of schools and industrialization in the 20th century has changed that.  Agricultural work was dominant until the 1920s, unionized factory work was widely available after WWII, and even the computer industry provided work with real wages though that has been sliding away for a long time. None of these businesses required a credential beyond what was provided for free by the government.

Today citizens are being asked to pay out of pocket for a BA, a credential required for many jobs that would not require one except for the creeping credential race based on confusing schooling with education, and I might add, confusing a credential with a real change in class status.