In any case, we homeschool.
I haven't really considered how to improve schooling at scale (particularly in an affordable way), but my proposal would be to introduce a _lot_ more granularity to schooling by eliminating the idea of grades and classes and focusing more on individual assessment.
Obviously this is likely cost prohibitive, but perhaps promoting and subsidizing homeschooling and homeschool co-ops is a good start in that direction, and could give rise to more cost-effective solutions over time. Not all parents are equipped to homeschool, but homeschooling does make use of resources which could be improved and which others could leverage as well.
In any case, the problematic schooling model that persists to this day was introduced around the time of the Industrial Revolution, which predates your references.
You could read more in my book: https://www.wyclifsdust.com.
Student A: Went to College X and majored in Y. Finished all XXX number of credits and graduated with Bachelor's Degree
Student B: Went to same College X and majored in same Y. Finished all XXX-1 number of credits so is 1 credit short and never got a degree.
Student B is worthless even though she/he learned exactly the same thing as Student A. School (especially in USA) never was and never will be about learning ...
In your example, I would argue you haven't taken my position to its required logical extent. I don't believe in the value of college degrees at all, the way things are currently structured, and I would discourage my kids from going to college unless they had a very specific career path in mind for which the degree is required. The measurement of learning has become the goal of learning, unfortunately.
What settings are those?
Notably, this is largely an American problem, since America is built around cars, which given the capitalist nature of American society proves to be antithetical to establishing local communities.
European and other countries, whose layouts and culture were established in pedestrian days, are much better off in this regard.
I would say it's quite similar.
For my own kids, you really see the differences at 11 to become more profound in their classroom, where some are running behind while others excel. So I saw that 12 is indeed the age where a split is necessary.
You don't have that?
Edit: After some Wikipeding, I see you really don't have that. Wow, that is crazy in my opinion. I have no clue how you could ever organize those differences among students. Here is the system of Belgium: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_Belgium.
For example my daughter is 12 and she is in a class "STEM and moderns languages". Very focussed on programming, science, math, and they also get Dutch, French and English. Some of her classmates at the end of the schooyear had to switch because their grades weren't good enough.
So in Belgium, there are even different schools for different tracks.
Let's divide it into kids that like to learn vs kids that like to work with their hands. The 2nd group would learn how to work with metal, wood, .... Way more practical stuff, very little theory. The other group is the reverse of course.
At 16, some kids are really tired of sitting in a classroom. For example plumber track would have these 16 year olds already doing an internship with real plumbers. At 18 they can start their own company already.
It's also no secret that a 16 year old in Belgium learns math that in US you would only see at higher education.
I think it works great, and what I saw with my 2 oldest is that last year when they are all still together at age 11, the learning differences really start to show. It's neither fun for the smart ones nor for the slower ones.
The same person as a student, gets tons of chances before maybe having to leave. Depending on what they’re doing, you could just be stuck with them for north of a decade. No escape.
I mean, we can joke about how actually such people still exist at work, but it’s a far less widespread problem and manifests differently.
You can look for other jobs if you want out of a bad work environment. Probably, you’ll be able to find somewhere else to go. Getting out of a bad class is way harder.
There’s a couple huge differences.
And to be honest, I have no idea how you can make the US system work, so I probably agree with you. Come to Belgium and let your kids study here :D.
I wonder if there’s literature analyzing Belgian academic outcomes alongside American academic outcomes.
Just a nitpick that school enforcing memorizing particular list of facts or memorizing poems - is indeed teaching people how to learn, because how else will you explain to a child or an adult "hey you know if you read this thing 10 times and then try to repeat it another 20 times from memory - guess what !!! that is one trick to learn to memorize something."
But if they spend time on finding out how to memorize hand picked for them stuff and how to perform on exams on limited and picked topics - that sounds like they will be able to learn anything but still too many don't realize what the real lesson there is.
Knowing how to memorize is occasionally useful depending on one’s profession, but I don’t think it deserves such a heavy emphasis. People naturally remember what is interesting and useful to them. Force-feeding facts or dates or speeches or poems into memory is not fun and has very little educational value. That time and energy would be much better spent on projects that use and integrate the knowledge.
Whoa there, society functions like a school environment.
You have cliches, bullies, enforcers, popular kids, the weirdos, etc.
What are our political parties other than massive cliches?
Bullies you can meet on the road, in stores, and nearly any other place you go.
Enforcers are police, detention centers, and fines.
Popular kids you need look no further than influencers, movie stares, etc.
The weirdos are anyone that doesn’t fit into our cliches.
Also, Foucault would have a few words with you as society is also an artificial environment.
The drama of daily life that plays out just happens in a larger more chaotic scale, but when we left highschool, highschool never left us.
Also, I think the biggest thing that present in school environments but missing from other environments is the forced segregation by age range, which prevents the more organic tribal self-organizational practices to which humans have adapted over tens or hundreds of thousands of years.
And I would also add that there are degrees of artificiality and what really matters is not so much whether we have constructed our environments so much as whether or not they have stood the test of time, and adapted to us as much as we’ve adapted to them.
School shouldn't be primarily about experiencing social interaction. It's an artificial environment that disappears as soon as you graduate, and which you'll never find again anywhere else in society. You can learn social interaction in plenty of other settings, most of which are vastly more efficient and realistic. Admittedly, none of them function as daycare...
School should be (and used to be) about learning to learn, building mental discipline and a base of knowledge sufficient to bootstrap whatever other studies appeal to the student, even more so than memorizing a particular list of facts. But it seems that that position has been largely abandoned.