[barry-cotter]

> I think this is one of the biggest points. Kids spend all day in school being forced to learn, they come home and do homework, and everything they're doing day to day is exposing them to something new. Every little thing they know feels like a huge accomplishment.

You’re far too kind to school. You can teach an illiterate 9 year old to read English in 40 hours, about the same time as it takes to cover the entire primary school math curriculum with a 12 year old. Homework in primary school has nugatory impacts on learning; it’s a theft of time from children and their families for ~0 benefit. You can take a native speaker of Mandarin from completely illiterate to grade level in reading and writing in three years and that’s either the most difficult or the second most difficult language after Japanese to write. If children actually retained what they were taught in school maybe it would be worth it but the average US adult doesn’t know each state has two senators. People do not retain knowledge they don’t use or find interesting.

School before 12 years old is an exercise in teaching children things slowly and haltingly that they are capable of picking up quickly and easily in a fraction of the time two years later, and things that genuinely help children like play time, especially unstructured play are forced out to increase test scores in earlier age groups when the increase washes out to nothing compared to those of two decades ago by the end of high school.