As a former teacher I think that's very common, but a fatal error to assume that it's something that it's up to education to achieve this at all. It's up to student to decide what they want to achieve, what their motivation is, whether they are motivated at all etc. The point of education have always been to provide students tools.
Btw, what makes a great teacher? One of my most influential teachers was universally hated by the rest of the class.
Despite the fact that the results aren't what they could be in an ideal world where every student is motivated, the results are much better than any place where education is not universal.
Still, until you're in your mid-teens, your needs are not much different from anyone else. You need to get the basics of education which are the same for everyone. As you get to your late teens, you need to start figuring out what your specialty is going to be and start moving in that direction.
I feel it's important to make this distinction because otherwise it's too easy to be arguing past each other when people don't realize that there are different stages of life that do have different needs.
I think we can just call that "good" education vs.. the best we can do.
If you are thinking about the individual, you are going to be thinking about individualization... Like the coach of a gymnastics team, chess club or whatnot.
I agree that from a societal, governmental or taxpayer pov... It's different. That is the "true" perspective if you are doing national policy, which is why that "woke stuff" is so often a disaster when applied to national education systems.
But... as a student or parent... not thinking about it individualistically is pretty pathological.
A school system I attended when I was young divided classes between academic and social --- social classes were attended at one's age level, academic classes were attended at a student's ability levels, I believe that there were also trade school tracks, prompted by students taking Sloyd Woodworking claseses:
Which is to say, the vast majority of students are not different. There are some much below average kids who need a lot of help but never will reach anything, but the vast majority are very close to average and we don't need particularly anything better for them than anyone else. What we need is to give the programs we give to the most gifted students to the less gifted students because they would benefit from the same attention
Mastery learning is also more effective than moving on with knowledge gaps, so this should be expected to raise everyone's outcomes.
That's a laudable goal but I think it backfires in practice: a lot of students struggle with math and consider it to be torture, and will rarely require the skills and insights that learning algebra, trigonometry, geometry, and calculus will offer. Having done that work I find that I use very little of it in my day to day life (personally and professionally (as a programmer)).
I'm not suggesting that path be eliminated, only that it be an expected track for those interested in a STEM career.
For those who are not, just teaching them math literacy that can be used in contemporary daily life (some statistics, math reasoning (investments and debts), etc.
I love math -- it's the language of the universe! But it shouldn't be used to torture kids who will only learn to say "I hate math".
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/30685840-practical-shop-...
1. STEM: To Calculus and beyond
2. Everyone else: math for mere mortals; practical applied mathematics where every bit of it contains a "here's where it's gonna help you" payoff.
Liberalism is fundamentally a universalist idea. I mean "liberal" in the original sense: the cultivation of free and indepdendent human beings capable of governing themselves. A democratic society can't survive for long without universal liberal education.
We need to distinguish between education and the education system. You make good points that the system as it is today doesn't scale as much as we might like. But that doesn't mean we should abandon the goal of universal education. Unfortunately, I think the solution requires something much broader and deeper than more schools and more teachers. It requires a culture that values learning and independent thinking, parents who bring up children who are curious and willing to learn, and institutions that uphold these values in society.
We made a lot of progress over the past few centuries, but now there's an increasing number of people who want to question and undermine the core values of liberalism and replace them with something either more elitist, more authoritarian, or both.
It is definitely appreciated if you actually learn something there, and often required to earn any of the goodies.
I appreciate your comment doesn't try to state if these are good or bad things, just that they are.
1. Free government daycare
2. Inspection/interference with parenting
3. Surveillance towards prosecuting negligent parents
4. Evaluation of conscripts
I think I agree 100%. It is exactly those things, even if I can't be so cheerful as you about it. That's why my children have never stepped foot inside a school.
a) Teachers themselves went through this system, so if it's so great, it should produce plenty of great teachers
b) Now we are blaming the kids for the failure of the system?
c) Yes, absolutely, but is the bureaucracy really inevitable, or is it even contradictory to the original idea?
Anyhow, Humboldt's humanism was ideology from the start. It was a way to change as little as possible from christian values. Instead of God making humans all great now it is the great human mind and civilization.
By now, most of German academia is a bubble for humanistic fundamentalists, that have long lost their connection to reality.
After WWII, and observing how it could occur despite the recent occurrence of WWI, it was decided to put extra focus on the horrors of war in Western Europe.
Both on allied as well as axis side, sure, but especially on axis educational systems.
Having grown up in Belgium, I can confirm that the never-ending stream of unprompted details of the horrors of WWI and WWII were not exactly "fun" part of education, but hey at least we haven't been lobbing chemicals at each other for the last ~80 years, so at least it seems to work, here, locally in Western Europe, despite all the side-effects of such an education.
That said, I don't feel confident that any insights that may truly improve education in Western Europe (without losing the pacifying -as in peace generating- benefits somehow) would apply well to educational systems elsewhere, because a large fraction of negative side effects in Western European education stem precisely from the educational pivot after WWII.