Broadly one problem with education in advanced, industrialized countries is the ratio of number of teachers to number of children.

E.g., if waste enough time on YouTube, can find some videos of, say, cooking in some 2nd and 3rd world countries. So, yesterday I found a video of cooking in Madagascar. Yup, for the kids, it was very different from the US!!!!

Basically the kids were right in with the parents, fathers doing whatever work, especially fishing, and mothers doing whatever, especially cooking. So, the ratio of number of parents to number of children was MUCH higher than in US public schools. The kids were just running around, playing with each other, no doubt learning roles and skills from the adults. The kids just had little opportunity to form cliques, in-groups, a hierarchy, do social climbing, bullying, etc. In particular, the kids were MUCH better supervised than in US public schools. Maybe among the adults there was a Big Man on the Beach but not among the kids.

Is this education? Well, yes!! There is the old, famous John Dewey Democracy and Education where with a definition that education is the passing down from the older generation to the younger one. What gets passed down is all of it, good and bad, true or false, written or not, scientific or not, etc.

Then some educational theorists decided to separate the kids from their parents, have schools with MUCH lower ratio of number of adults to number of children, have the kids do 3Rs, read some often silly literature (fiction), learn some questionable history, learn some propaganda civics, and learn some technical subjects that are supposed to make them good apprentice workers or some such. Whatever the learning is, that low ratio remains important and, in particular, brings the opportunity for bullying, social climbing, in-groups, status hierarchies, queen bee, pretty, cheerleader girls, big man on campus athlete boys, football Homecoming King and Queen, etc.

Then there is the darned problem of SEX: Bluntly, at least in the US, the girls are ready to be good as wives and mothers years before the boys are ready to be good as husbands and fathers. So, in grades 7-9, lots of the girls are the prettiest human females ever get and attractive to any man that can still stand but look at boys their own age as silly children. The boys have to put up with the high quality social distancing from the girls their own age until they get to the 9+th grades and notice that girls 1-3 years younger WILL pay attention to them. Similar thing happens in college: The freshmen women are gorgeous, but the ones looking for their MRS degree will be looking at the senior men, not the junior, sophomores, or freshmen.

Heck, when I was in college, I lived at home and dated a girl about 200 yards from my house. She was 4 years younger! So, right, as I was a sophomore in college, she was a sophomore in high school. Mother Nature and Darwin were happy. But the difference was still not large enough: When I was a first year grad student, she was a college freshman looking ONLY for her MRS degree, and we broke up, she quickly got married and "punched out" two boys, all before I got married.

Gee, when Lady Di was 15 she decided that she would marry Prince Charles, about 15 years older. She did! Lady Di was drop dead gorgeous, and Charles didn't have a chance!

Later I got a second lesson: I had a late model high end Camaro and a good job and for the job wanted to do some library research. So, I drove to my old college and hoped that I would be able to use the library. As I drove up, parked, and started to walk, I got a really good "come hither" look from a coed about 50 yards away. I never got any such looks when I was a student there! And all that coed knew about me was that I had a late model sports car, looked older, out of college, and didn't look like any of the students she had already seen.

So, in Madagascar, I guess the boys of 15 or so either (a) the US age differences apply and they chase girls 2-4 years younger (with parents not far away) or (b) the US differences do not apply and they chase girls close to their own age. And for (b) maybe there is little reason for the US differences to apply, that is, a boy of 15 may have long since learned the work of the men, fishing, boating, net making, boat building and repairing, collecting shellfish by swimming to the bottom, etc. and, thus, be qualified as a husband.

I would ask (1) what the heck are the goals of US public education and (2) does the current system have even 10% of the bang for the buck possible for the goals?