> I think our schools (in most of the West) are proficient in producing generalists.

schools are proficient in wasting time, and most students would be better off without them

taking the usa as a significant example of 'most of the west', less than 47% of adults can name all three branches of government https://www.asc.upenn.edu/news-events/news/americans-civics-... (only 24% knew the first amendment guaranteed freedom of religion), only 49% knew that heart disease was the leading cause of death in the usa https://newsroom.heart.org/news/more-than-half-of-u-s-adults..., only 48% of usa college undergraduates in 02012 knew that baghdad was the capital of iraq (which the usa was currently quasi-occupying) https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/s13428-012-0307-9, only 42% could name sputnik, only 31% knew moscow was the capital of russia, only 30% could name einstein as the proposer of the theory of relativity, and only 16% knew gunpowder was invented in china

you can guarantee that they were told all of those things in school at some point, but they mostly forgot. and you can't claim these facts are irrelevant to their lives (unlike some others listed in that last survey). a quarter of those surveyed will die from heart disease; all of them are governed by those three branches; all of them are subjected to racist anti-chinese propaganda and interact with chinese-americans; many of them had high-school classmates occupying iraq; all of them face the problem of religion

these are not generalists, who know a little bit about everything. they're dunces, who know virtually nothing about anything, until they get out of school and start getting responsibilities, at which point they learn what they need to learn to handle their responsibilities

it's harder to find good statistics on skills rather than declarative knowledge, but if someone can't name the #1 most likely cause of their own death (let alone #2 or #3), their decision-making about health is going to be seriously impaired, and if they don't know who einstein was, they probably don't know much about physics either. the few statistics on proficiency at skills that i've been able to find also look terrible

if children were being turned into generalists by schools, then children without access to schools would be far behind when they entered the school system, and would remain persistently behind for years. in fact within a year or two they're indistinguishable from the kids who've spent their whole lives being subjected to schooling. examples of such children are immigrants to places with compulsory schooling, ex-homeschoolers, and homeschoolers who go to university

how do schools in the usa, and for that matter everywhere, manage to be so profoundly useless and even destructive to learning? the 02007 rohrer & pashler paper linked yesterday https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41274602 probably explains a lot. it's well known that schools waste students' time on overlearning, use massed practice rather than spaced practice (across many timescales), reward recognition rather than recall/retrieval, reward recognition or recall rather than performance, reward conformance rather than performance, and are profoundly dysfunctional in many ways. see gatto's famous jeremiad at https://selfdirectededucation.neocities.org/pdf/JTG%20The%20... and pg's milder 'the lesson to unlearn' at https://paulgraham.com/lesson.html