The problem with our school systems - whether we mean USA or Australia or any of the many other broadly similar places - is, in my view, very simple. Oh, sure, there is room for enormous debate and change and improvement in education and in education systems, but the key problem, the problem that makes all other problems so intractable, is a simple one: we cannot decide what the education system is for and, as always with things designed to do several things badly instead of one thing well, it fails. Repeatedly. Spectacularly. Predictably.
Is the school system there to provide education? Or a child-minding and unemployment-statistic-reduction service? Because it largely serves in the latter role, and barely at all in the former, it is, overall, a very bad thing indeed. It is a source of great surprise to me whenever I meet a well-rounded, literate young person. These people - Kristi, Sol, and the Soup Nazi are prime examples that posters here will have met - are not such fine people because of the education they have endured, they are fine people in spite of the education system. It amazes me that they have had the resiliance to survive 12+ years of compulsory miseducation in the starte Child-Minding Service and nevertheless make worthwhile, personable, skilled adults.
Why is it that (according to what we all say here) education systems, by and large, worked reasonably well in 1950 or even 1970, but fail so miserably now? Many people cite discipline and respect. OK, I'll buy that, at least to a certain extent, but it is very far from being the whole answer, or even a large part of it.
The key factor is participation - participation in the real sense of the word, where the teacher wants to teach (which nearly all teachers do) and the student wants to learn. I'll give you an example: in my first year at uni, there happened to be a very large mature-age contingent, around 20% of the intake. Eyebrows were raised, and concerns expressed that we, the mature-age students, were deleting the quality of the student pool. To be sure, some of us were a few IQ points short of the school-leaver average, others had children to raise, incomes to earn, housholds to manage. But every single one of us was there because we wanted to be there, not because we weren't quite sure what else to do with out lives, or because we couldn't get on the dole. And by the end of third year, when the final results were in, we, the 20% of mature-age students, made up 18 out of the top 20 places, including 9 out of the top 10. Were we smarter? hell no. We worked harder - because we were there of our own free will.
This example is typical and nothing unusual. Note, by the way, that many of the "older" students were not very old - I was 25, another one was 22, though there was a 60+ year old grandmother too (she found it hard going, especially the stats, but finished with a C+ or better average - i.e., somewhere above the 60th percentile of those that graduated, and did it on sheer determination).
So here is what you do with the education system: you make it strictly voluntary (which means you have to provide an alternative child minding service) and then let people go to school to actually (shock horror!) learn things.
Initially, you get a massive fall in participation rates as young people take the easy option and hang out at the child-minding centres. Hell, pay them a subsidy to go surfing if you want: it will make them happy for a while and be much cheaper than putting them through the school system as we know it. And to those who object that going surfing doesn't teach kids to read and write, wake up and smell the damn coffee, OK? Since when did modern kids learn anything in the modern education system? (Since before about 1980 or so actually, but it's been a gradual degenerative process, you pick whichever year makes you feel comfortable.) They are learning nothing now, so as a society we have everything to gain and nothing to lose by doing something different, such as paying them to go surfing and - here is the important bit - letting the teachers who want to teach stuff and the kids who want to learn stuff get on with it.
Naturally, over time, many kids would return to education, but on their terms and with some sense of motivation. Teach them when they want to learn, cause no matter how hard you try, you can't ever teach them at any other time.
The other effects are more subtle, but just as certain.
* You get a massive decrease in the time it takes the average student to master a given topic. Motivated students in a motivated environment out-perform have-to-be-there deadheads by a factor of around ten to one.
* You get a substantial increase in the economic productivity of the nation as a whole. You are no longer holding back the smart, motivated students, and they turn into smart, motivated workers. And when it comes to any of the areas where substantial training is needed to get started - science, engineering, and so on - the net national productivity depends much less on how many graduates you turn out than it does on how good those graduates are. So far as national success is concerned, education is much more about quality than it is about quantity.
(Not proof-read or spell-checked, just to prove that my education was flawed too!)
