[jackcosgrove]

The brain is uniquely plastic during youth and there's so much to learn, so little time.

The problem with education IMO is the content not the methodology. Our curricula waste precious time on obscure topics because "that's what I was taught".

[lolinder]

What that attitude ends up doing to these growing, plastic brains is that it teaches them to live a life filled with anxiety and dictated by those around them. They spend their early years running from school to extracurriculars to homework and then back to school. Always supervised by an adult, never slowing down, never doing things on their own.

Intellectual development is not the only kind that happens during childhood, they're also learning valuable life skills, and if you run their lives for them in pursuit of one kind of development you're going to ruin other kinds.

[nitwit005]

It's easy to say schools are teaching the wrong things, but the people who say this tend to do what you've done and not list anything specific.

What would you cut from the curriculum, and what would you replace it with?

[M95D]

I don't know what kids lean today, but I wish I didn't have to lean Latin (yes, the ancient dead language) and learn about economy, money and banking instead. I wish I learned integrals before physics. I wish I learned chisese instead of french. Lots more.

[friend_and_foe]

Those are all sensible things to do, but at the end of the day we are talking about kids not learning the material they're taught. I'd like the material to improve too. Our government creates a very bureaucratic society and then teaches kids absolutely nothing about navigating that bureaucracy, this is an abysmal failure of education. But I think the methodology fails when it can't even demonstrate that it teaches them the subjects they're actually being taught.

[friend_and_foe]

I think it's a little of both. I tend to blame the methodology more myself.

Public school in the US has English literature, physics, chemistry, biology, algebra, arithmetic, geometry, trigonometry, calculus, second languages, civics, history... That the material exists, whatever you think of it, and kids aren't learning that material, says something about the methodology.

I think sending a kid to what basically amounts to a prison, in an intensely competitive social environment complete with people from all walks of life, including violent people, while simultaneously handicapping anyone's ability to enforce proper conduct, with a strategy geared to basically encourage cheating, is not conducive to learning anything for a long period of time. Then, telling them their time in their life where they get to do real fruitful things like decide their conduct, who they associate with, what interests to pursue, spend time with their parents, let their minds wander, is not theirs and they have to continue the requirements of school, IMO it hampers intellectual development.

[iraqmtpizza]

school has gotten longer and longer, homework more and more, tutoring, extracurriculars more and more. funding has gone up and up. and yet IQs are dropping