Who's perfect.

A trap of our modern culture

Yes agree on what you say! Schools practice for the future, but the practicing is only in relation to a skill. A skill that we contribute to society for physical means. Such as practicing how to build how house, fix a car, do electrical wiring etc. Perfection is required for the physical. Physical is all about geometry and form.

But outside of physical, such as emotional. mental aspects of who we are as humans, the schooling system fails, since being perfect does not apply. As there is no such thing as being perfect in those aspects.

So the term “practice makes perfect” is archaic or a failed old phase that tries to conceptualize all of what it means to be a human. Only really applies to one minor aspect.

“but nobody’s perfect so why practice?”

Yes, we need to remove the crippling idea of trying to always be perfect in comparison to someone else. And practice for the fun of it. Learn a skill or similar, simply to explore life. Practice for enjoyment

Practice doesn't make 'Perfect', it makes 'Better'.

Schools don’t practice for the future, they train for learning, now and in the future. Practice doesn’t make perfect, but it makes better. Nobody is perfect, but many are better learners than others. Those who learn better usually achieve more in the future. That’s why school (learning how to learn) is worthwhile.

I found this problem actually shows up in music

The trick in that case is to practice at very slow speeds where you can do closer to perfect, and then work on speeding things up. Another real life variant is to break down the difficult tasks into multiple different components which you may be able actually practice perfectly. For instance, practice drumming, but at first just practice your feet. Then just your left hand, then just your right, and slowly work on combining them.

The reason the question interests me enough to answer is that my first day of piano lessons my teacher explained that she can never be world class because she didn’t practice properly as a kid, and now she is stuck with muscle memory habbits that are suboptimal and very difficult to retrain. Kind of fascinating.

Wrong question

Practice does not make perfect. The phrase should be “practice makes permanent”. Humans are creatures of habit, and we hone our skills and talents through repetition and rehearsal.

There is another saying that it takes 10000 hours of practice to become an expert. This is closer to the truth since mastering anything worthwhile usually takes a supreme amount of effort - discounting any gifted individuals, who are born with innate predispositions for highly desirable skills. But imagine spending those 10000 hours learning the wrong thing, or the right thing done in the wrong way: not only would you become highly efficient at doing something badly, you would also have to “unlearn” what you already knew in order even to begin improving.

So, I would summarise by saying that practice does not make perfect, but it will make permanent. In which case, you had better make sure you spend your time wisely when learning something new.