| I think it's bad, mainly because it was built at the end of the 19th century and since then it's calcified. It's like having legacy code and instead of refactoring it when you need to make changes, you build more stuff on that, get more technical debt. To add some context to what I mean, the current system is largely based on the decisions of the Committee of Ten[1]. If you read that short note, you'll notice that it's pretty much applying the lessons of industrialization to education ie. assembly line approach. The example of the assembly line approach is especially relevant for me because I don't think that it is applicable to humans. Different humans learn at different rates so it doesn't make sense to group them by age. Additionally, teaching everyone the same things, while making things nice and uniform, takes away the biggest motivation for learning - curiosity. This is completely anecdotal, but the further away I moved from this assembly line education system (from high school to college, from college to self-taught developer) the better grades I got (college) or more money (work) and the more time I spent learning, even things that are unrelated to my main focus because the world is fascinating. As for an idea on how to fix this, I admit that I don't have a concrete one. I've skimmed the topic and the thing that drew my attention most is the Montessori system[2] system of education. It proposes a few points relevant to what I wrote in the previous paragraph, but also one that I find particularly interesting to developers: "Uninterrupted blocks of work time, ideally three hours". [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Committee_of_Ten
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montessori_education |