This argument is immensely popular. It looks a bit like a warmed over Rousseau - just shake off the chains of the old fashioned education system, give kids one on one guidance for 10 years with a great mentor, and they'll do pretty well.
Let's look at a few counterpoints:
- Biologically secondary knowledge are the things that it's proposed that humans haven't evolved to naturally of. Math writing, ect. The upper middle class academics who had their mommy and daddy teach them literacy and numeracy felt stifled by the "drill and kill" explicit teaching, and provably think they'd have "flourished" if they could follow their own heart and figured it all out themselves, but only because they were privatised to have effectively a private tutor. That doesn't scale.
- Motivation. Schools do OK at teaching the things that are a priority, as long as they aren't too progressive (the preogressive education movement is older than the more modern traditional approach, but progressive educators claim they are the hot new thing for some reason). Just look at something dead easy that lots of people want to do - learning a second language. How many people can be bothered without school? (And sure, schools suck at language teaching, but only because it's not a real priority).
Like critics of capitalism, the most strident critics of modern education often have a solution they are trying to sell and it's a solution that doesn't work very well at scale in the real world.
Could schools compress the curriculum, getting kids ready for uni by year 10, then putting 2 years of uni into years 11-12 (or the trade school equivalent) so unis don't need to teach the drab basics? Yeah, probably. Middle school could probably be done in half the time if it wasn't treated as a total joke since it doesn't count for anything.
But you can't cherry pick extremely privileged or exceptional people and expect that everyone can replicated their results
> give kids one on one guidance for 10 years with a great mentor
Aristocratic tutoring works. The whole issue with it is that it's not affordable except for some kind of extreme super elite, hence why the rest of us have to make do with mass education, supplemented with some very limited individual tutoring and "tiger parenting".
Feels like AI could fix this, learning with a llm companion that never is exhausted and always encourages you to follow your intuition and curiosity is already better than 99% of teachers on a public school (sadly)
not blaming the teachers, but the system, one teacher 30 students will never work well
Let's look at a few counterpoints:
- Biologically secondary knowledge are the things that it's proposed that humans haven't evolved to naturally of. Math writing, ect. The upper middle class academics who had their mommy and daddy teach them literacy and numeracy felt stifled by the "drill and kill" explicit teaching, and provably think they'd have "flourished" if they could follow their own heart and figured it all out themselves, but only because they were privatised to have effectively a private tutor. That doesn't scale.
- Motivation. Schools do OK at teaching the things that are a priority, as long as they aren't too progressive (the preogressive education movement is older than the more modern traditional approach, but progressive educators claim they are the hot new thing for some reason). Just look at something dead easy that lots of people want to do - learning a second language. How many people can be bothered without school? (And sure, schools suck at language teaching, but only because it's not a real priority).
Like critics of capitalism, the most strident critics of modern education often have a solution they are trying to sell and it's a solution that doesn't work very well at scale in the real world.
Could schools compress the curriculum, getting kids ready for uni by year 10, then putting 2 years of uni into years 11-12 (or the trade school equivalent) so unis don't need to teach the drab basics? Yeah, probably. Middle school could probably be done in half the time if it wasn't treated as a total joke since it doesn't count for anything.
But you can't cherry pick extremely privileged or exceptional people and expect that everyone can replicated their results