My kindergartener's at one of the best public elementary schools in our city. Great middle and high school in her future, too, assuming their quality holds out. Brand new building, too, first year in use.

They give them (the kindergarteners) twenty minutes of recess. Indoor recess, if the weather's bad, is often (part of) a movie. This is all day kindergarten, mind you, none of that half-day stuff.

Since school's largely in the Winter when the sun's up late and down early, and they're getting outside only about 20min a day, best guess is these kids are gonna have a lot of "ADHD" misdiagnoses and they're all gonna be badly nearsighted due to insufficient exposure to sunlight. The low-recess crap is incredibly unhealthy, in ways that will permanently harm many of these kids. Plus, you know, the whole obesity epidemic thing.

The school food's terrible, too. I think they've just done the same thing a lot of parents do and gone for whatever hyper-palatable crap they know the kids will eat (hungry or not) to reduce complaints (from parents—"my Sally just won't eat vegetables! She's going to starve!").

[EDIT] point being yes, schools' priorities—even the "good" ones—are totally messed up starting the very first year they have the kids.

Public education is fundamentally broken in this regard (except for the times tables, IMO much more time should be spent on math in-school vs homework).

History in the elementary school level seems near useless, aside from building reading comprehension skills.

I'd much rather see kids doing things in class that benefit from the use of multiplication, along with exposure to how to do it and arguments for using it, than to just lecture them on repeatedly writing 2x2=4 2x3=6 2x4=8 over and over for weeks.

I'm pretty sure in my own first grade experience that was the point where half the class started drifting towards the "I hate math" camp of now-adults.

Isn't this roughly the idea behind Montessori method?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montessori_education

Also, math education in general has a huge problem around teaching solutions without teaching the problem. (Hence the pervasive question of what will I ever need this for...) I will always know what a limit does, because my precalculus teacher taught it by finding the area under a curve using rectangles. We started with large rectangles, were shown the error. Cut the rectangles in half, hey error goes down. Make them really really small, error goes down even more! What happens if we make them zero? Oops, equation explodes because zero-width rectangles also have zero area... The function is discontinuous at zero. So let's learn limits to work around discontinuous points of a function!

Should parents have no responsibility in this regard?

It isn’t the elementary school’s child.

They should but assuming it will "just work" is foolish.

If society wants universal capability instead of depending on parent ability and inclination (rather scattershot) the answer is yes they do have a responsibility.

Sure. But on a school day my kid spends around 7 hours at school. And only 3 awake hours with me. And in those 3 hours we also have to fit in breakfast, dinner, chores, and getting them ready for school. So maybe 1 hour of actual time where we can do something.

There are also weekends of course. But ultimately kids spend about as much time in school as they do with a (working) parent.

Flat out, you can't leave it to parents. For example, drivers have total responsibility for their vehicles, yet cars still have all sorts of safety measures that wouldn't be necessary if drivers simply drove perfectly and never crashed. It's an acknowledgement of human failure.

Parenting is the same. Not everyone is good at it, and it's in the best interests of society to raise kids to be as productive as possible even if (and especially when) their parents don't do a good job.

Public education has been a huge net positive for society over the last few hundred years. It used to be that most people couldn't even read; such people in the modern information economy would just be total drags on public resources. Better to have the state educate everyone as much as possible to ensure a talented, capable, intelligent workforce and society.

1. Kids also learn through play and downtime and simply going with the adult to do things.

2. Too much schooling is detrimental to learning.

3. Most parents aren't trained in teaching. If we expect a parent to teach a child formal stuff, perhaps we should train the parents on how to do these things.

There is no accountability for a failure to raise a child well, so no, parents have no responsibility.

It is of course a conversation one could have on if parents should be held responsible.

Schools are the only force in childhood held even remotely accountable for the success of those children entering adulthood. Which is kind of where the desolation of inner city schools come from - the schools are punished for bad parenting, but have no real capacity (especially once punished via funding cuts) to do anything about it.

Should we expect anything from parents, really?

An absurd percentage of people can't properly learn the simple task of driving even after taking classes and passing a state exam. How do you imagine these people to perform in the task of raising a human being, from an objective perspective? The answer is they suck. Terribly.