[jjk166]

I don't think that assumption is valid if you look more closely at what is actually happening in a school.

Typically kids are learning a series of loosely related concepts that require different skillsets to process. If for one person integrals are intuitive but vectors are not, while for another vectors are intuitive while integrals are not, both would average roughly the same rate of learning, but you are still faced with the same dilemma - either you're slowing down to make sure the one student gets the concept they struggle with at the expense of the one who wasn't struggling or you move ahead quickly at the expense of the straggler. Both students would appear to be equal performers but that doesn't mean it made sense to group them together. While perhaps classes could be designed to have good correlation between concepts, you certainly couldn't do so for a well rounded education - there is absolutely no reason to believe someone who learns mathematical concepts quickly would also pick up literary concepts quickly. There may be small populations who do learn everything quickly and others that learn everything slowly, but certainly the overwhelming majority of the population would fall in-between.

[dolni]

Point taken and I agree with the examples you provided.

I would argue this is not quite the problem you make it out to be, because generally speaking, people tend to be strong or weak in a subject overall.

If you're generally good at math, getting tripped up by vectors is not a death knell for pursuing coursework at that level. But there is a massive divide between the ability of someone "generally good" at math and "generally bad" at math. Tests do a really good job of capturing that, actually.

[jjk166]

Yeah, the problem is more with the schools. At least until post-secondary education, you don't go to school for just a narrow range of subjects. You might be excellent at math but does that mean you can keep up with people who are excellent at history? Unless we expect people to hyperspecialize from a young age (which would have disastrous consequences), we need schools to be able to deal with people at various different levels of proficiency.

[dolni]

That does exist, but I think we could do a better job pre-high school. At least at the high school I went to (which wasn't highly regarded, or anything) there were remedial classes for kids who were behind, and honors classes for kids who excelled. You could opt-in to honors courses on a per-subject basis.

I think K-6 are where we struggle. At least that's my experience.