What can we do to make education better?

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How about we agree to disagree? I need to step outside for a bit, smoke a cigarillo.

I love the idea of free education. But I think market forces will always play into some forms of education. But not all, I remember a website that planned on having a free college curriculum, but some "bodies" severely dislike that idea.

Unfortuneately with the economy the way it is, I dont think free, good education is going to happen anytime soon?
with that being written, think it would be a good idea to substitute some of it*? Ive learned that a good education isnt stuff thats always learned in schools, it comes from books and other outside school sources*?

When I was in grade school I had 8 classes (subjects) divided into two days that I had to participate in. In college I have 3 classes plus assignments to complete throughout the week. Giving kids a lot of material to go over and little time results in poor retention (if any), and subjects like math, and english require practice, not memorization. Subjects like history and social studies should be reformatted to fyi type presentations (the subject matter changes depending on who puts out the information anyway).


Summer vacations are impractically long, they need to be scrapped. Students can get shorter, more frequent breaks throughout the year instead.


I think the biggest challenge in education is trying to get a student to learn, I didn't take learning seriously until I was 15, I was 25 by the time I figured out how to learn (like participating instead of multiple choice).

Well in regards to universities, there has to be free entry rolled out for all. That has to be fundamental. I am of the view that university fees are the single biggest obstacle to social equality. Your right to study at university should be determined by your ability to do the course and not your ability to pay.

In regards to school and under 16 education I'd like to see the holiness of the 3 'r's challenged and the stigma of vocational training challenged. Theres too much emphasis on purely academic stuff and not enough on workplace related skills. Doesnt even have to be low brow stuff like carpentry or home economics. When i was at school there was no opportunities to learn things like programming, CAD or web development. These are things that i wish i could now do in later life.

I'm aiming for the opposite approach as Fnord. Fnord's seems rather authoritarian.

My approach would be allow the GED to be taken in middle school, 7th or 8th grade, and just run GED testing quarterly or every semester, and allow with parental permission the ability to sign up for testing starting in 7th-8th grade, without being enrolled in any sort of gifted program/getting clearance from teachers or guidance counselors/etc. Then potentially have students go straight to community college or regular college after passing the GED.

I ended up taking my GED after dropping out, and I was pissed. I was getting in trouble for truancy because I hated school for a variety of reasons, and I told teachers in 8th grade I could pass the GED if they gave me a month to study. I go to take my GED, and find out everything is elementary school to middle school level. Hardest math is prealgebra at best (stuff like 3 + N = 5, solve for N) and a little basic geometry where they already give you the formulas to use. History and science relies very little on background knowledge, and mostly reading comprehension. You also have to write an essay. It's basically as hard as a 7th grade standardized test. I think it'd be fair possibly to have the test be harder than the modern GED, but basically, make graduating based upon knowledge, not time spent. If you have the knowledge to leave high school, then I feel you deserve to be done with it and do what you want. If it's sit around at home and play video games or go to the beach, well, hey, you earned it. If you want to go for a career/apprenticeship, then you're allowed to. If you wanna go to college, go!

So in my eyes, if people can pass high school with 6 hours of testing, let everyone do it and not waste time in high school. So that's more or less my plan, open the door to allow kids to pass high school early. I guess high schools would still exist, in two categories. Public/nonspecialized high schoolers for kids who either want the social experience of high school (or are dumb and basically the arrangement of high school as babysitting as it exists now would remain), and then specialized technical or prep schools. It's also entirely possible after passing the GED that kids could go from grade 8 to community college. So, under this plan, we could have kids with Masters or Doctorates by the age they'd normally have bachelors. This is what great minds like George Washington and other people of the 1700s did. George Washington went to Harvard at I believe age 12. Why not have everyone aim for that? I see high school as basically a redundancy. Anything worth learning there can be learned in college, and much of the time will have to be relearned in college due to how poor high school's tend to teach it anyway.

Basically, my system just gives more choice. Also, parents would get a subsidy from the government to send their kids to whatever school they wish (obviously schools could set academic admission standards, if they wish.) Public or private. In any town they wish as long as parents can arrange their own transport out of town. I was in a religious fundamentalist private school, and despite being Fundie, I got a great education there. In public middle school, I had to review diagramming sentences, whereas in private school I was doing it in like 3rd grade. And of course in private schools, people could vote with their feet and just not enroll in the school if they didn't like it. Lastly, with the money saved by not enrolling every child in high school babysitting, we could use some of the money that'd otherwise be spent funding high schools to fund college tuition perhaps.

The super libertarian in me says no public education at all, but it's been proven despite how crappy public education can be, it has improved the quality of life for the most part. So I guess there has to be some semblance of public education going on for the "general welfare." Ideally, parents would be responsible and home school their kids, and in my education system home schooling would be a completely valid option. But, history has shown for the most part that parents failed to do that. So until society enlightens, publicly mandated education is the way it'll have to be.