[Viliam1234]

Sometimes people and institutions who say "I am going to focus on nice-sounding nebulous goals instead of this measurable stuff" achieve neither. I'd like to keep some measurable goals in school system.

But maybe we could have both. Self-directed learning, and then participating in Pisa tests. With no bad consequences for the student if they utterly fail because they studied something else. But to have some feedback like "while you congratulate yourself on this and that, literacy in your country is the worst in the world".

[smoe]

I think I was/am one of the students that would have benefited from more cross-pollination of topics and a mix between self direction and directions.

I never enjoyed math for its own sake when I was in school and my grades where pretty mediocre, later I had the same with algorithms & data structures.

On their own, how they are often presented in books and platforms like hacker rank, I find them rather boring and solving challanges just with a correct and optimal solution in mind is not very appealing to me. But as soon as I'm in a work context, or when I dabbled in computational biology or digital signal processing for music on the side I can completely lose the sense of time while digging into whatever is necessary to get done what I want to do.

So I think there a ways to get from nebulous goals and activities into measurable impacts.