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I’m going to do a write up of how I think education curriculum should be reformed. For context: I went through highschool in Ontario, Canada. The way it worked was from kindergarten to grade 8, we’d have a set curriculum every kid in the grade followed, with lots of english and math classes, some science classes, history, geography, French, and gym, and one each of art, music, and health classes a week. Then starting in grade 9, which is highschool, we are given two elective choices, where we choose a minimum of one between art, drama, and music, and the second may also be a general technology course or a general business course. Each year of high school there are more electives choices offered and fewer mandatory courses, with the priorities of what the school system requires us take being the same as elementary school. There were also choices between more difficult and easier options for some classes like math, english, and science as well. Universities and colleges would also require higher level math and sciences for STEM programs too, and there is a standardised literacy test needed to graduate.
I think a lot of people when talking about school want to just add more requirements without thinking about what to cut. It’s very easy to say “all kids should learn to program” or “all kids should have PE every day”, but if you’re adding you either have to keep kids there longer, or cut something. First, I think the elementary school program is basically good, I wouldn’t change anything there. Maybe take a little of time out of science and add it to more PE.
For highschool, I would start more drastically reworking it. First, I would basically replace English with history in the mandatory curriculum for everyone who is literate. Learning about Shakespeare and studying themes in classic novels, while not completely useless, is less useful than learning about real historical events. You gain the same “critical thinking” skills analysing what motivated the people in WWI to conflict as you do analysing what motivated the people in Hamlet to conflict, plus it actually happened, giving it substantially more value. The same english classes will be kept as optional electives, like how history is optional in higher grades now. Science will only be mandatory in grade 9, and computer science will be mandatory in grade 10.
Gym class will be mandatory every year. There is a crisis in how unfit people are today. I recently joined the military. They have drastically reduced requirements, shortening basic training from 13 weeks to 8 weeks, and the weighted march from 13km to 5km. Because people weren’t fit enough to pass. A great many jobs, even today, still require physical fitness, and gym class offers more professional preparement than just about any other possible class other basic literacy. On top of that, being healthy is just healthy, and that’s good for every single person.
There will be extra emphasis on making sure every single person who graduates is literate and numerate. I wouldn’t really require anything else to hand out a highschool diploma, but if they can’t do basic reading, writing, and arithmetic, they don’t get the diploma. They’re stuck in adult night classes until they can or they give up. Ontario high schools also require 40 hours of volunteer community service which I like and anywhere else that doesn’t have that should implement it.
It might be a good idea to have a class on how to get the most out of AI too because it’s looking like that’s becoming an ever more important skill, but it’s changing so fast I don’t know.
I've been interested in much more radical forms of education than shuffling classes around.
The current American school system seems to have basically no idea what to do with kids who seriously don't want to bother at all and don't have parents who care. They're required to do something with them though. It seems most of them send them through to the next grade anyways, even if they barely did anything and fought them every step of the way, either so they aren't that school/teacher's problem anymore or so they don't look so bad for failing so many students. Perhaps they should be able to just kick some kids out completely, though it's harder to figure out a system to make that possible but not also let them kick out every kid who's only slightly difficult. I dunno the right solution but there's gotta be something better than just sticking our fingers in our ears and humming loudly to pretend the problem doesn't exist.
I've always thought that there's way too much structure in current schooling. Too much, we'll stick you in a class where you must do X, Y, and Z, and get a grade based on how well they do it. Little kids I've been around always seem super curious, something perverse must be going on if they usually hate and get nothing from the system that's supposed to teach them. What happens if we designed a system around letting them do much more self-directed things? Ask why something happened, or something is a certain way, well here's a library and the internet, you tell me! Wanna build like a go-cart or a video game or something? Here's all the tools and guides, get to it, we'll give you a few pointers.
Seems to me that a lot of problems come from trying to come up with a generalized solution to everyone all the time. How can we do less of that, have a bunch of options all over the map for how you can learn. Maybe something like the voucher systems that have been talked about. Maybe flexible enough that you can go to something like today's regular conventional school, or the one in my previous paragraph if you do well in that environment, or just skip it and do real work as some kind of apprentice instead if you hate school but your family really needs the money, like my first paragraph. Of course then it's hard to judge success, which huge bureaucratic systems tend to do poorly without, but maybe that's the problem in the first place, we need less huge nationwide bureaucracy in this mess.
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