A couple of counterexamples. Moscow used to have plenty of homeless people (not sure how it is these days) despite harsh winters. New Zealand has very few, despite similar weather conditions to SF.

While it's probably true that SF has more homeless due to migration, I don't think it's the root cause. You really have to look at the societal structure, government support and so on for the causes.

New Zealand doesn't have anywhere that poor people can immigrate from. But you can take a bus or two to California.

I still don't like the regimented age-based education heirarchy, which Europe still subscribes to. Beyond basic skills for human interaction (an understanding of the dominant language, basic arithmetic, necessary social skills like knowing traffic signs, what emergency lights mean what, how to calculate taxes, how interest rates work, and some basic history of the world and the local country) the most important thing is getting them interested in learning more, but it has to be by their own will, or else they won't absorb the information you try to force down their throats. The best way to do that is through exposure - I can easily see children aged 6 - 12 going through a school system where half their day is learning basic requirements to function in society (and none of the really unnecessary things for basic interaction like 18th century literature, ancient civilizations, trigonometry, and the number of electron orbitals on Iron) and the other half is exposure to professions, concepts, and ideas (go to a museum, go to a baseball game, go watch the local smelters forge aluminum, observe a busy intersection and discuss traffic patterns). In other words, to expose them to and enable them to explore a broader spectrum of the world than sitting behind decks looking at a chalkboard reading from a book and writing down notes to repeat on a test and forget the next day.

Theory of education systems is really complicated, and something I tried to read a lot about, and hypothesize about. I used to think along your exact lines as well. However, this is a very instrumentalist [1] approach to education.

I don't think this is terrible, but it has costs associated with it that will become apparent further down the road -- similar to how the existing education system born from the industrial revolution's needs has proven to. The system you have suggested has a prominent lack of means to introduce people to advanced theoretical physics, economics research, astronomy, abstract mathematics, etc, you get the picture. A generation without a hint of knowledge in the non-practical fields will function fine in the short-term, but it will lead to a stagnation of advancement until an external trigger brings it back about.

Essentially, as I'm guessing you're a hacker-hustler-type, you see the primary course of education to promote passion in "doing," and that's my first instinctual priority for education as well. But classically, education has had a role to do much more than just that (albeit extremely inefficiently) for many generations, and it could be detrimental to focus on only one educational priority of "learn to do things well", with a potential to lose being able to gain exposure to other kinds of intellectual commitments. Maybe it won't happen, but it's a real risk. Who knows what we may have lost already from generations past?

Of course, everyone in the world agrees that the "sitting behind desks competing on test scores forgetting all the knowledge and then stumbling through relearning the real world from scratch" model of today's education is broken and pretty stupid, but it's not that straightforward to fix, unfortunately. Your suggestion is definitely something a single school could adopt (and broad institutionalized educational requirements should be abolished), and I would love to send my future kids there over anything that exists today.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumentalism