I'm not sure I fully understand the point of the question. I've got several children in K-12 now, and there's no doubt in my mind that the school system could be more aggressive in terms of the amount of content they fit in (at least as far as I my kids are concerned.)

However, if they did so, the goal (for me) would be to teach them more in the same amount of time, not to shave years off of the school experience in order to get them into the workplace faster. Obviously, young people who want to go straight into the workforce always have the option of dropping out of school, but that doesn't mean that the societal goal should be that all 17-year-olds should be finished with structured education.

Although I believe I could have learned the material in significantly less time...

1) What I thought was important at the beginning of high school is not what I thought was important once I graduated. If the decision was left to me, I would have been wrong.

2) You can't pack social skills into less time.

I was homeschooled, so I don't have any first-hand experience, but in my possibly flawed observation:

High-school has always seemed to me a very artificial and unhealthy sort of social environment, where the social hierarchies and rules are defined by other high-schoolers, who don't have a lot of maturity or experience. Is this wrong? Is high-school in general a good social preparation for 'the real world', or is it a matter of finding the right group of people to hang out with?

3) You have to have a place to leave your kids during the day while you work.

The idea that a 14+ year-old human is a "child" is a ludicrous modern delusion. Less than a hundred years ago, they sailed the seas, fought in wars, etc.

Those are some pretty crappy things to make kids do. I'm glad we stopped.

> to make kids do

And now most people (including you) also deny that the "kids" possess free will. I argue that this act is far more cruel than hiring someone to sail. And once again you take our society's ludicrous definition of "kid" as a given, as though it were an obvious law of nature that we turn from livestock into human beings instantly at age 18.

I don't think the k-12 curriculum as it stands is optimized at all. Taking social aspects into consideration, I think at least two years could be shaved (so that students would graduate at 15 or 16).

I shaved two years, it's worked out great for me.

I was scoring at a post-highschool level on standardized tests in 8th grade, so I can say with confidence that I could have done fine (compared to public education) with 8 years, but public education is garbage. It should be easily possible to learn what most people learn by the time they finish college with 12 years of schooling. The fact that colleges offer remedial math classes that basically amount to simple algebra and that professors still have to explain the difference between adjectives and adverbs proves the point that public school is a tremendous failure.

Highschool graduates should not look confused when asked "What percent of 75 is 40?" nor when asked "If a refrigerator is running in a closed system, will the temperature decrease, increase or stay the same?", which I once overheard a group of about a half dozen college students discussing for literally almost half an hour and still coming up with the wrong answer (that it will stay the same). And this was at a private university.

Programmers should not graduate college and be unable to write FizzBuzz, but they do.

Education in the United States (and I'm fully aware many readers will not be from the US) is a joke. It is at least an order of magnitude behind where it should be.

There's a Star Trek episode where a boy about 10 years old complains about calculus homework. I sincerely believe that could be a reality if we tried hard enough.

first of all i don't assume "learning only what i consider to be important" is good, not just because at the age people do not have the ability to tell what is really important (for themselves). but the key is: learning what you consider to be not important is just as important. it's like learning math: to have children learn and practice multiply for years is not about getting them the ability to multiply 2 numbers above ten in head, but giving them routine for broad topics in "real life" (from not being cheated at paying at a store to "higher level" logics of "thinking").

on the other hand i really think our education (and this is about our university education in my country - hungary) is too much based on "dictionary knowledge" in contrast to getting people able to solve real life problems (so teaching people how to think and be creative). but the k-12 education is much about getting you a "general education" (that is expected by the local society/culture). so the time is not the bottleneck here i think.

excuse me for my english

The biggest waste of time were the honors/AP classes I took to "look good on my college application." At no other time in my life have I worked so hard to learn so little of actual value.

about 4 years of my education was overly redundant. I'd say 5th-8th grades I didn't learn anything.

do you think a 15 year old can decide on what's "important" to learn?

People don't change that much. If they were interested in computers/music at age 8, then they would probably be interested in computers/music at age 80.

My computer experience going into high school was playing commander keen on a 486.

I went to college to get a diploma in computer animation.

I am now a web programmer.

People change.

Still working on computers though.

my point is that I've gone from knowing almost nothing about computers to being a programmer since I started high school. If I had learned about what I wanted to learn at 8 years old, I'd be digging up dinosaur bones in Alberta.

I think it'd be interesting to see how far they'd get if they developed a sense of curiosity. They might end up being really specialized (like say only studying dance), or they might end up discovering that everything's rather interconnected and end up being generalists.

they do everyday in democratic schools > http://www.sudval.org/index.html

I thought the pollster meant what we now consider important. How long would that part of our education have taken?