The truth was quite different. By age five, before he entered school, he was able to speak all three languages fluently and had a good start on reading in both English and German. Personally, I doubt that we really tax our children's capabilities if we both love and challenge them. Too much memorization and insuficient critical analysis produce mental poverty. When you consider the domination of our public educational administration by unhampered political sectarianism, we can expect that no educational innovation is ever practiced long enough to bear fruit.
Education is a long term investment in the human infrastructure of society.
We need to apply our best minds to it. When the innovations are valuable, as some are, they are just as likely to be scrapped as when they are poorly conceived and executed. No one understands a student's peculiar genius that sets him or her apart from the crowd except people who have continuous and intimate intellectual contact with the student. Frankly, I believe the answer has more to do with someone's ego and urge for power than anything else. It is time we recognize publicly a number of facts that most of us only admit privately, Central administration of education is useful for managing the physical resources, buildings, books, desks, buses, and such.