So even though you construct curriculum to challenge them, they're still wasting lots of time. So institutional schools by design turn great students into average students. Perhaps worse off are the slow learners. Armed with an excuse to fail, they go through the rest of their lives expecting to be underachievers - and finding those expectations met. Institutional schools by design turn slow learners into failures.
Institutional schools feed the formation of peer groups and peer pressure .
At home, a child's best friends are his siblings and mom and dad. If you've read any of my soapbox articles or book reviews you know that I have strong feelings about the evolution of companies from organizations where the customer and the product come first to organizations where the bottom line comes first. Schools are no exception. While public education may have started with high goals and expectations, the dominant issues today center around job security and pay for teachers. Teachers are paid by seniority, not by performance.