Our education system needs some serious redesign. It fills you up with a lot of useless information and omits a lot of things you actually need to know. I am talking of course about general education, like the one you get in primary school, which should teach everyone the minimum they need to know to survive in the current world.
The following will be based on my experience in public school. I am not familiar with education in other countries, but I doubt it is much better in most of them. It has been some years since I was in school, but I doubt much has changed since. If you have or had better experience, then good for you and I hope it will keep getting better.
First, I would like to touch a few things about school besides the education it provides.
I had a lot of printed educational material. The kind of book, which you are supposed to fill up during classes or as homework, so everybody must buy their own one. There were also normal books, which I also had to buy (from store or some older kids would sell to you the books they no longer need) and rarely the school would have a bunch of copies which they borrow to children every year.
Now, imagine a small primary school kid running around with a backpack almost as big and heavy as their own body. I imagine that is a great way how to mess up your back early in life. The consumable books are an unnecessary waste of resources, even back when computers were not as common. Just write your answers on a paper. Fortunately, it is more common now to just get access from the school to digitized educational books and other materials. Cheap and easy access to knowledge is important. It allows people to self-educate as needed to find better jobs and therefore stop being dependent on government support.
As I got older, the food kept getting better. In primary school, it was terrible, in high school, it was still lame, but we had more options. In university, the quality went way up and now, at my workplace, I can finally say I get served good food. Ironically, at the very least, it should be the other way around, because little kids are still growing a lot, so they should get the very best. I really hope the school cafeterias are getting better. And yes, I did once vomit my lunch back on the plate.
This was not so prevalent during my time, but pretty much every child in the western world has a smartphone when or even before starting school. And through that phone, they most probably have access to the unending distraction that can be the internet. Enforcing no phones during class is a possible solution, but since these devices are at this point pretty much an extension of our bodies (after all, we now keep them around and use them our entire adult life), it seems a bit weird be forced not to use them. It is as if people evolved the ability to fly, but during school you must stay on the ground. On the other hand, it also seems degenerate for a person not to be able to do basic math without their phone. Maybe the answer is to allow phone usage during some classes and ban them during the rest. Like, you should be able to speak English without using the phone’s text to speech function, but it is fine to use the phone to look up details about some historical event.
Instead of commenting on individual classes, which I had to attend as a kid, I’ll try to rework them as it makes more sense to me, adding some things I think are missing and omitting the stuff I deem unnecessary.
Being able to use your native tongue well is crucial. However, screw learning about sentence structure. The vast, vast majority of people will never use that outside school and it does not help with learning a second language. Speaking of second language, that should be the "international" language and should be mandatory. Currently, it is English, so if that happens to be your native language, then congrats, your second language is optional.
Big part of language is also literature, which we had not so great classes about. I was taught summaries of various literature through out history and basic information about the author and their life. How about we instead actually read the books? Sure, we had a list of recommended books and we had to read a certain number of them, but we did that at home. Remembering a short description of a book is in most cases useless. If a book has few hundred pages and has something to say, it is not possible to compress the full message of the book to a single page. And what the hell is the point of learning about the author's life? It might have a significance for someone, who studies literature, but for 99.9% of people it is useless information. The message in the book is important to know, not whether the author was a drunkard or a soldier.
I would like to say that it would be more effective to cancel the class, so that kids can spend more time reading outside school, but we all know that most of them would not. Perhaps each lesson could involve reading various parts of a single book, different one each time. Or maybe even show a movie adaptation. Some are pretty faithful, so even if the kids ignore the original book, they at least got a sliver of the experience.
But no. The fact is that reading books should not be part of a class, where you learn how to use language. That is reading them casually, to absorb their message. The class should teach you how to work with literature, how to extract the important information and how to understand various writing tools you could encounter like metaphors etc.
An undoubtedly useful class, everybody uses at least the rule of three in their everyday life. Learning about statistics is very important, because they are used and abused all the time in order to sway our opinion. Geometry also has its uses. Really, the only criticism I have is about the need to remember equations and the lack of real life examples.
Instead of having to remember the equations, it would be fine to have them written on paper. After all, the important part is knowing when and how to use them. You will forget most of them anyway, but that is fine, because you can just look them up. It is not like lives depend on you finding out the circumference of a circle inside an isoceles triangle in under a minute.
And instead of solving problems, which happen only in the mathematician's wild dreams - like train A travels 50 km/h from station 1 and train B travels 70 km/h in the opposite direction from station 2, if stations are 5 kilometers away, where do they meet and who fucking cares? - we could solve some more practical problems. Like if I have a roll of 1 m wide isolation material and have a trapezoid roof, calculate how much of the material is needed to cover the roof with minimal waste.
Very important class, but unfortunately it is taught in a stupid way. It focuses way too much on the when and what, while the really important part is the why and how. Like, knowing that there was a second world war and that it started in 1939 is not as useful as knowing it started with a german invasion of Poland after a false flag operation. The point is to learn from history. You will not learn much from just names and dates.
When the history class ends with World War 2, that is also pretty bad. I know that the more recent the events are, the more controversial is to try and teach a single interpretation of the events, but recent events are also more important to the young generation, because it will affect their lives. Knowing what ancient civilizations achieved is important to understand how we got where we are today, but they have no direct link to current events anymore. Knowledge of 17th century Russia will not help you understand Russia of today. I do not say we should start teaching history from 20th century, but I do say the older the topic, the less details we need to know.
That being said, now watch me as I do a 180 and tell you that we should teach more history. Because history has been divided into geography, religion education, social education and so on, but these are all topics which changed a lot with time and you do not get the full picture from just the current state of things.
Take a look at geography. Most of what I was taught during that class could either be replaced by just buying a map or was obsolete or soon to be obsolete information about each country’s industry. There is no reason to have a separate class for this, you can not avoid talking about what country is where when teaching history and there you will get it with additional context. Religion is the same thing. There is a difference between knowing that the west is christian and knowing that it is christian now, but not used to be. There were, and still are, many religions, all equally convinced of their truthfulness.
Kids need to get a rough overview of how we got here. That before us, there were many species which died out, sometimes en masse. That in the past, people thought differently and things like slavery or physical punishments were normal. That countries formed and collapsed. And that people can abuse their power.
Similarly to history, this is also a topic divided into multiple classes, like chemistry, biology or physics, even though deep down it is all about physics. Teachers will throw a lot of equations at you, but I would have appreciated, if they spent more time on explaining how it physically works. Some concepts, like electricity, are easier to understand when you are able to imagine how the particles interact with each other. After all, science is about understanding our reality. However, for the purposes of primary education, the focus should be mainly on the practical side of things.
Unfortunately we are taught quite a bit of useless information. For example, how is it useful to know the names and properties of various minerals? Does it help me survive in the wilderness better to know, that the rock, I am sitting on, is a granite? You need to push into kids a lot of facts, which they need to survive everyday life. From what local animals to be wary of to why is it a bad idea to pour water on a pan with burning kitchen oil. There is no room for curiosities.
The ability to handle computers was already pretty important, when I was attending school, and now it is basically crucial. So I really hope we are not teaching kids how to use Microsoft Word and Excel anymore. For one it is a bit stupid in principle, because the software may become obsolete (though I know stuff like Word is not going to disappear any time soon), but more importantly the kids already mostly know. They are growing up with electronic devices and learning on their own how to use them before they even start to attend school. And a lot of that knowledge is transferable, because we try to make user interfaces intuitive, so they end up having a lot in common.
What we need to know is more general knowledge. How to take care of the devices, from the hardware perspective and more importantly from the software one. How to find information on the internet. How to protect our devices from malware and malicious actors. How to protect our digital accounts. How to not lose our data. And how to keep at least some of our privacy.
This class feels less like education and more like forced labour. Which is a shame, because it is important to know, how to take care of your body. You go to school to learn, you can play football outside of school. Some education does happen, we are shown few stretching and muscle building excersises, but there is more to know than that.
How to maintain a healthy posture is also a very useful information, when so many jobs make you sit all day. And perhaps some basics of self defense would not be a bad idea either. Or what about some basic first aid tips? Just like you can not rely on police to save you from immediate danger, you also can not rely on a doctor to find out whether you should seek medical help in the first place.
But paying attention to your body is only a single part of the whole equation. Eating the right things is just as important. Nutrition gets very complicated when you look deeper in it, but the only thing we get is "eat a balanced diet" and the food pyramid. Sure, we can not make every kid an expert on nutrition, but there are few more things they would find useful, like knowing how to lose excess weight, that vitamin D deficiency is common during winter, that many chronic ills may be the result of lacking in some nutrient or that shitting once every three days is not normal and you need more fiber in your diet.
Sooner or later the time comes for sex education, which is just another thing to learn about your body. I remember sex education mainly as fear mongering about sexually transmitted diseases. Do not get me wrong, it is important to know there are risks, but there is way more to know about sex. Without that knowledge kids will use porn as a reference and then get surprised by the reality. The reality of having temporary erection problems due to lack of confidence, the fact that seeing how other people do it is not enough to know how to do it, or that sex is nothing mindblowing, especially when you just started doing it.
Also, there is one disease, which requires more attention, and that is pregnancy. Preventing it is one thing, but people also need to know how to live with it - that is how to be a good parent. It is very important, yet many people are failing to do it well.
If there is one thing the government really wants you to know, it is how to file your taxes. Yet, I do not remember learning how to do it while I was in school. I remember learning about various types of companies and some general theory about how economy works. I never used any of that information. I learned how to deal with taxes at work and I had to learn how to invest on my own. Practical knowledge, that is what we need.
So, what does a person need to know? Most importantly, how to even get a job, which means writing your Curriculum Vitae and applying somewhere. To be part of the economy also means knowing how to plan for the future, including your retirement and how to work with other people in a team, even how to get others to agree on something (I specifically do not say “to convince others”, because I think it is more important to know how to get a compromise than to manipulate others into copying your opinion).
Here the goal is to make kids think. Not think like the government wants, but to think critically. It is important to not be gullible and know how to verify information or how not to end up in an informational bubble. Otherwise they will be easy to manipulate and will end up living in an oppressive regime before they know it. That is why they also need to know, how to deal with the law. What are some of their rights, some basics about finding and understanding laws, when and how to call police, why they might need a lawyer… I know it reeks of indoctrination and for many the word activist is like an insult, but society needs people, who speak up, when bad stuff happens. We do not live alone on this planet, what we do has consequences for other people and the environment.
You might have noticed there was no mentioning of arts. Lets be honest here, you really do not need to know anything about music, painting, sculpting, etc. to live your everyday life. When was the last time your ability to sing or to paint saved your ass? For the vast majority of people the answer is never. Classes like these should be completely optional and their grading (if any) should be inconsequential.
If you made it all the way here, you might be thinking: "That is a nice hypothetical plan you got there, but what is the reality?" Well, the reality is that it is hard to make kids remember something they have little interest in and for example the knowledge of how to invest is definitely at the bottom of the priority list of someone, who can not even legally get a job yet. Extracting the important bits of knowledge from current curriculum is easy, making it memorable is the hard part. Otherwise, kids will just learn it for the test and soon forget it. You can force kids to write it down, but when was the last time you looked into your notes from school? In my case, I do not think I ever did, once I finished studying. So, what is left? Teaching kids less, but repeating it for a few years to make sure it sticks? That could make them hate school even more.
Studying takes so long nowadays - primary school, high school, university... Personally, at my job I used at most like 20% of what I learned during the whole time I spent as a student. I do not know how many people end up in a job only partially or not at all related to their field of study, but I suspect the percentage is significantly higher than what I would deem acceptable (that would be less than 10% people have to reeducate themselves after leaving school). I am not saying it gave me nothing, but it is something which we could improve upon.