For example, my material scientist friend immediately launched into a tirade about how we should teach kids how subatomic particles actually work rather than the simplified model of the atom, about about how history is a useless subject that should be removed from school altogether. I couldn't have disagreed more.

Personally, I'd like to see tons of changes, including:

- vastly more funding, so we can attract more skilled and experienced teachers and have smaller class sizes

- year round school programs, so poorer children don't fall so behind during summer break

- more emphasis and encouragement around reading, which much fewer restrictions on what we consider "acceptable" to read (my high school did everything in its power to get kids to hate reading)

- systematic experimentation around different teaching styles and educational systems, so we can learn what works and doesn't

- history classes more focused on storytelling and distilling lessons from historical events, and less focused on pro-America propaganda and remembering random disconnected facts and dates

- more focus on practical psychology, rhetoric, debate, logic, and/or research in the curriculum (how can people become productive citizens and informed voters when they can't dissect an argument or perform research?)

- more emphasis on the benefits of the scientific method compared to alternatives

- practical education around business, finance, etc, so that poor kids aren't left behind in that arena

I could go on forever.

That's the problem, we have to get rid of the idea that there's a set of ideas that kids "have" to know. Why don't you let the kid decide what he wants to study. Like there will be limitations but fuck it, if s/he is interested in something weird, encourage it instead of killing it.

> vastly more funding, so we can attract more skilled and experienced teachers and have smaller class sizes

I think that the teacher model doesn't scale. Develop MOOCs and like online communities. School will be the bridge from real world to these communities. Teachers will help you when you get stuck.

> more emphasis and encouragement around reading, which much fewer restrictions on what we consider "acceptable" to read (my high school did everything in its power to get kids to hate reading)

Exactly. Also remove the idea that reading means reading fiction. Make sure that the kid is doing something somewhat productive and that s/he's engaged. Engagement is key.

>systematic experimentation around different teaching styles and educational systems, so we can learn what works and doesn't

I actually think that Barbara Oakley really hit the nail on the head. She describes it e.g. in this article http://nautil.us/issue/40/learning/how-i-rewired-my-brain-to...

> - more focus on practical psychology, rhetoric, debate, logic, and/or research in the curriculum (how can people become productive citizens and informed voters when they can't dissect an argument or perform research?)

Exactly. But also fundamentally just make sure the kids can explore whatever area of human endeavor they want to.

The collective cultural experience is that this is sometimes incredibly valuable, but very often leads to intense study of subjects of marginal economic value. A person may be intensely interested in Latin and Greek Classics, but the odds of this producing skills for a livelihood are not as high as some other subjects.

Which is to say there's sometimes an awkward tradeoff between "Weird thing a kid wants to study" and "Thing that can be studied that will pay the bills later in life". This is not something that can be avoided by making education services free at point-of-consumption, because student time is finite.

I strongly suggest to speak with some actual teachers, instead of blindly relying on ridiculous propaganda. The problem is not the system, the problem is social mobility.

Poor kids don't do well in school because their families and their environment don't value education. They perceive (correctly, BTW, from a statistical perspective) that if you're born poor, there isn't much you can do. You're gonna die poor anyway. So why worry about school? Families don't care (exceptions do exist, of course), peers look down upon you if you're "bookish", it's a vicious cycle.

There's a lack of hope among those at the bottom. No amount of educational reform will fix that. People know they're in a social straightjacket from birth.

Fix whatever systemic problems keep America's social mobility so low, and the aforementioned issues will get a lot better.

How can you blithely state this "fact" given that the article itself shows that a poor person who graduates college has a better-than-average income distribution (every percentile is better off than the population as a whole).

It's really frustrating to me that people like you don't make any honest effort to distinguish between objective "lack of hope" where poor people actually cannot improve their situation, with subjective "lack of hope" where people for whatever reason are unable to be motivated to take actual opportunities that could help them. Clearly these are different phenomena and conflating them is irresponsible and dangerous.

Have you considered the possibility that the educational system doesn't value the needs of the poor?

If you can stomach some underground hip hip, here's a track by Dead Prez for one anecdotal inner-city perspective: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-8IUbVQRqAk

It did not accomplish nearly so much as you might hope.

The underground hip hop complaints as relative to material mostly cover political questions and show that he didn't pay attention to the courses that would help "get our rent paid".

More diverse electives for specialist history would have been nice, but there are practical restrictions on the specialist teachers available in a town of 50k people.

I wonder if it could be feasible to rotate kids through some kind of county/state shared resource with opportunities for "demoing" various specializations. Educational almost-internships for kids, if you will. 180 days/year, 5 days/week = 36 specializations. That's probably not enough time to get much of any feel. Kids pick their top 5 or 10, and spend a year learning about those. You don't necessarily need a specialist teacher for everything, but rather a specialist skilled in teaching research / getting to the bottom of a field/industry. Make the kids teach each other; teacher is basically a facilitator? Too impractical?

Getting kids to teach each other strikes me as impractical. Most of them aren't going to learn enough in a few days to teach a useful amount, and learning about a profession through the lens of an opinionated kid seems very sub-optimal. Plus, a year is a lot of time.

I have seen a lot of schools have "career day" type things, where parents come in and briefly discuss what they do. That's a little more direct and a less time consuming at ten to fifteen minutes a parent. This is valuable in proportion to the economic diversity and schedule flexibility of parents, though.

Exactly, I can't think of a single subject that actually achieves what it should when taught in the school setting.

The problem with the class I describe isn't that it didn't teach effectively. It's that the students largely didn't care to apply what was taught.

The model of turning a literate child loose in a library and letting them be for six or eight years should not be assumed as universally useful. It's not a good way to produce a shared general foundation for a modern democracy.

OTOH, even that would still probably disproportionately benefit those with the best home environments and support to make use of the more efficient system, and increase rather than narrow the gap between the best and worst served. Efficiency and equality are largely orthogonal concerns.

The purpose of the current design for primary and secondary education is to produce a general foundation atop which any sort of tertiary education can be built.

> The purpose of the current design for primary and secondary education is to produce a general foundation atop which any sort of tertiary education can be built.

Yeah, it's not very good at that.

The model of turning a literate child loose in a library and letting them be for six or eight years should not be assumed as universally useful.

If you're rich, you start working in your parents' business, you're also likely to intern in it, and/or in your parents' peers' companies, and if you're any decent you're likely going to be groomed for an exec position, a position the poor college grad will never be able to aspire to, and if you're not decent you're probably going to get some sort of face-saving "consultancy" position, paying again way more than the poor graduate can ever hope to get.

This is unrelated to the education system, and it's not something you can ever fix, because people will always try to make sure their family has an advantage, which means that as soon as a family reaches a position of influence it will use it to perpetuate its position.

Meritocracy is nice in theory, but humans as a species are wired a lot more for tribalism than for meritocracy, hence why to get some semblance of it you need a culture/government that fosters it, and those are in short supply.

Jobs aren't hard to find if you are one of the few people in the world who can do the job. I know, these aren't entry level jobs but given the right education, you can skip those I think.

> This is unrelated to the education system,

Fundamentally, I think that few things in society aren't fundamentally related to the educational system. Or more precisely, quite a bit of society can be explained by looking at the educational system 10 years ago.

[1] http://voxeu.org/article/intergenerational-mobility-denmark-... [2] http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/08/the-amer...

2: Years of schools have essentially no explanatory power at an international level (even in lesser developed countries that should have much more "low hanging fruit") Other research shows that without improving test scores, which are strongly influenced by genetics, education is basically worthless for economic development.

https://pseudoerasmus.com/2015/06/15/education-econ-growth/

3: Poor people in the US, especially net of taxes and transfers, are quite wealthy by broader international standards. US poor vs Somalia? LOL that's not even a question. The poor in some of the more economically successful nordic/northern european countries might have somewhat higher material living conditions, but the differences are much more modest than you might expect and as compared to what you find in other developed countries (especially larger, less homogeneous, less cherry -picked countries), say, France, Italy, Spain, etc it's far from clear cut. The US also has significantly more diversity in multiple dimensions, especially as compared to an extremely (traditionally) homogeneous country like Denmark.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/10/161011131428.h...

I think that just about everyone has dreams that can be solved with more knowledge and skill. The path to achieving these isn't always very clear though. The school should be the organization that gives you that clarity and supports you.

I fail to see how this won't devolve into parents that have more time to devote to their children's education through encouragement, steering, tutoring, or paying for the same having a better outcome. And since I think having more money is causal for having more time, I think that's just a way to make the problem worse, not better.

On some level, I think that if the kids need tutors, the system is broken.

What you describe would be good to reduce the advantage of wealth on outcome, but it's also papering over how hard the problem is. The real problem is getting from here to there. It's akin to saying "well, just eliminate racism." Sure, that's a good idea, nobody should object to that. But it's not like we'll wake up a year from now and say "problem solved!". As a simple example of this, we probably can't make good computer tutors for kids without somewhat good AI. That's not exactly an easy problem to solve.

Wealthy families will be able to pay a better "person who helps", or send their children to a better high school to study optical engineering. Fundamentally, wealthy people will always have access to better services.

America spends more % of it's GDP and more $ / capita than any nation on earth.

America graduates far more people from college than any European country.

European Americans score better than Europeans on standardized testing.

Same for all ethnic groups: Asian Americans do better than Asians, African Americans do better than Africans etc..

The reason America - on average - fares a little lower than Europe has to do with it's ethnic composition. BTW - I'm not saying that some ethnic groups / races are 'smarter' than others, but that literacy, attitudes towards education etc. are multigenerational things, and most Latino Americans and African Americans are only about 1.5 generations fully literate, so it will take some time to fully catch up.

In fact - if you account for ethnicity - America has the best schools in the world - wherever they come in from - they do better than they would have from whence they came.

I'm not saying American schools are perfect or whatever - but it's worth noting that if you look at the facts, they don't fit the whole 'American schools are crap' narrative. It's more nuanced than that.

It's a ruse to imply that Reagan's policies don't play a role in this. GP didn't claim that he's exclusively responsible, just that correcting those mistakes would be a good place to start.

Do you think that kids aren't thrown in jail every single day for war-on-drug offenses simply because Reagan was president almost 30 years ago?

That's my point. Regan has been dead for a while, he can't fix things now. If you don't like how things are going, blame the current people in power.

Gotta love the kneejerk downvotes I'm getting from people who likely don't have a clue what happened.

http://www.newfoundations.com/Clabaugh/CuttingEdge/Reagan.ht... http://www.nytimes.com/1982/12/28/science/california-weighs-... https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/from-master-plan-to-... http://www.salon.com/2014/07/05/ronald_reagan_stuck_it_to_mi... http://www.ontheissues.org/Celeb/Ronald_Reagan_Education.htm