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My suggestion is to bring back high school — heck, bring back middle school. With a decent curriculum and the right method of teaching, kids could be leaving middle school with entry level admin assistant skills, and high school with business-building skills.
There’s a style of teaching which people deride as “rote,” and study after study shows it gets better grades immediately with better long-term retention. I, being a product of Albuquerque Public Schools, have of course forgotten the name.
I'm here from the Quality Contributions thread to say that the style of teaching you're thinking of is called "Direct Instruction". It's such a generic name for the specific method that it's near-impossible to remember, but NIFDI sounds like "nifty" and might do a better job sticking in your brain. It also doesn't help that Google deprioritizes references to it in search results since "authoritative" sources on teaching are generally the same ones who hate Direct Instruction.
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What business building skills would school be teaching? I guess I'd teach stuff about compound interest finance lest they get their financial advice from tiktok. Do you mean teaching a trade?
The key thing is to separate the smart and stupid kids IMO, early on and consistently. The smart kids can do advanced stuff, they can do historiography and debates or higher calculus. You'd have regular exams to test how people are doing and resort the classes. I hear a lot about how Americans get their souls crushed in school, going at the rate of the slowest student. School unironically can be fun if you sort people to their abilities.
But but we'll be doing things like Brave New World! We don't want Brave New World ranked humanity! (Never mind the 1984 memory holes around every media corner...)
Streaming isn't Brave New World, at least if you do it correctly and don't just dump the less academic kids in the basket of "fit only for a job in the box factory" (especially today when the box factory has probably closed down and the parent company has moved overseas).
As it stands, it sounds from the worst horror stories online that many schools are just holding pens, and there's not even a pretence of trying to teach anything. Even a basic classroom where the dumbest of the dumb learned simple things like "how to behave like a human and not a shit-flinging chimpanzee" would be better than that, but even the dumbest of the dumb may be capable of something.
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