The problem with proposed solutions for improving education is that they all beg the question in a somewhat subtle way. They all assume the contemporary system of public schools, classrooms and standardized testing is correct and simply needs refinement.

This is incorrect, in my mind. Compulsory schooling is an obsolete remnant from the days of Prussian militarism, and later revived by the large industrialists so as to breed a workforce that will fill the necessary quotas for such a society to work.

The day of combination is here to stay. Individualism has gone, never to return.

-- John D. Rockefeller

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We want one class of persons to have a liberal education, and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class, of necessity, in every society, to forego the privileges of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks.

-- Woodrow Wilson

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In our dreams, we have limitless resources and the people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hands. The present education conventions fade from their minds, and unhampered by tradition, we work our own good will upon a grateful and responsive rural folk. We shall not try to make these people or any of their children into philosophers or men of learning, or men of science. We have not to raise up from among them authors, editors, poets or men of letters. We shall not search for embryo great artists, painters, musicians nor lawyers, doctors, preachers, politicians, statesmen, of whom we have an ample supply…The task we set before ourselves is very simple as well as a very beautiful one, to train these people as we find them to a perfectly ideal life just where they are. So we will organize our children and teach them to do in a perfect way the things their fathers and mothers are doing in an imperfect way, in the homes, in the shops and on the farm.

-- General Educational Board, Occasional Papers No. 1, 1913

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So on and so forth.

Compulsory schooling was never about intellectual satiation or real learning, but to instill a Pavlovian routine and to raise citizens within a framework that rulers at their respective times see fit.

All attempts at educational reform that try to "fix" the problem within the confines of the current system are doomed to failure. It's insane just how well people have been raised to think that classrooms and strict routines are the only conceivable way to educate people. Not so, and the famous quote "I have never let my schooling interfere with my education" rings even truer today.

Nowadays with the rapid technological advancement of society, the necessity to abandon antiquated and ineffective compulsory schooling practices and replace them with more natural concepts: free schools, democratic schools, the deinstitutionalization of pedagogy, is more critical than ever.

But most important is to breed a strong feeling and desire for autodidacticism in people. This is what is truly lacking. Achieve this, and the problems will be solved more smoothly.

To figure out more about where I come from, read the works of John Holt, Ivan Illich (Deschooling Society), John Taylor Gatto, Charlotte Iserbyt and others. I cannot recommend them enough, especially the middle two authors.