Schools used to be designed exactly this way, with kids of varying ages/abilities all in the same room learning and teaching each other. It's actually quite successful and more aligned with how we are wired to learn (tribal/community style).

The Prussian model we use currently was not designed to create more educated people, it was designed to most efficiently create factory workers. That's an important factor to keep in mind. I would argue the school model is working, it's just not doing what you think it's doing. Any discussion of "improving" schools that doesn't completely overturn the Prussian model is just grifting for more funding.

You can get some of the benefits of this environment today if you are willing to pay a premium for Montessori style private schooling. My daughter loved it and was WAY ahead of everyone else, including the "honors" kids, when she transitioned to a regular public school.

Sure...when you pay for good schools with small class sizes you get better education. The point is that this doesn't work for 99% of children who are going to be in classes of 25-35 kids, and I wouldn't count the child of a smart HN reader as representative of the average "Montessori" kid.

My daughter's Montessori school had similar class sizes, 25-30. The kids were loosely grouped by age with ~4 years range in the same room. She was not uniquely successful, though I will acknowledge any private school will tend to be self-selected.

And you still missed that we had multi-age schoolhouses for generations that were successful.

If you want to argue for smaller classroom sizes, I'm on board, but you won't get a single vote from me for school funding until you're ready to completely upend the Prussian model. It converted our public schools into literal prisons for children and is a scourge on this Earth.

Class sizes in traditional schools were not always small. However, large classes would be taught differently, usually based on the students memorizing their daily "lessons" and chanting them out word-for-word. These "direct instruction" methods have only fallen out of use relatively recently as teachers sometimes felt them to be somehow demeaning, compared to more formal or intuition-driven teaching practices.

They would also break into smaller groups and the older/advanced children would teach the younger children lessons.

All those 18th Century Prussian factories?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prussian_education_system

>Good luck in a classroom of 30 kids

I think you get close to the real problem with this assumption. Classes need to be smaller. Even at a university, where the people are supposed to be more disciplined and attentive than a random middle school class, only the lectures are held for many people, and the practical stuff is done in much smaller groups.

In order to have more successful social systems, we need more resources in it. More money, and more people whose job is to care about the other people.

I’m probably a radical, but I’m open to not forcing children to learn things that someone deems “important to learn” which they are not interested in.

I think it’s great to give kids a taster of many subjects, but from my education I’m pretty sure that 90% of what I was taught was useless. The STEM stuff I would have done anyway because I loved it. And I have later come back to full in blanks in history etc. (Though I do acknowledge it’s hard to tell whether school builds a substrate or pattern for general learning, even if the raw facts were useless at the time.)

I had peers that were forced to learn languages, English lit, maths, etc, and then left school to be tradesmen or musicians, where they used approximately zero of what they were forced to learn. (And trade school starting earlier could have taught them the trigonometry or scales they needed very quickly).

The problem is we are trying to manufacture high school graduates rather than crafting or sculpting them.

I agree that the existing classroom model doesn’t work for this new way of thinking about learning. Siblings have done a better job of arguing for specific options than I could. But yes, I’d rather try something with different structure. For example, can you stream kids by interest rather than by age group? 30 kids all into history, with varying ages, might learn better than 30 7th-graders all trying to learn the curriculum on WW2 or whatever was decided is “important they know” and which most don’t care about.

Everyone has their own pet definition of what is “important to learn” in school, mine is the meta-level “learning is easy and fun if you care about what you are studying”.

It is "radical" for a reason. Look at how bad things are right now, and multiply it by 10 if you decide to get rid of all curriculum that kids aren't inherently interested in:

- Goodbye to any understanding of politics or social studies - Goodbye to historical knowledge - Goodbye to any understanding of our own bodies (except for kids who are interested in animals or medicine?) - Goodbye to classical literature - Goodbye to economics and personal finance - Goodbye to being able to appropriately and accurately express oneself when speaking and writing

ALL of these are very important parts of human knowledge that are essential to high functioning in society, but 99% of children have absolutely no interest in them whatsoever if left to their own devices.

I suppose we're unlikely to convince each other here. I'll just note that your list of "goodbyes" seems a bit overly-apocalyptic to me, and it's not even clear to me that many students leave the education system with meaningful knowledge of more than a couple items on your list. The students that do leave with knowledge of economics or classical literature almost certainly were interested in those things when they were introduced.

> 99% of children have absolutely no interest in them whatsoever if left to their own devices.

This would be the crux of our disagreement; I think that ultimately this depends on empirical investigation. It's hard to do such studies, since SES and other confounds are extremely hard to control for. I'm sure that 99% of kids have absolutely no interest in the current curriculum, but that's precisely my point; the curriculum is horrifically boring in many places if you don't connect with the subject matter.

I do think it's reasonable to note that most other developed countries have better public education systems than the US, and for the most part follow a fairly traditional model, which demonstrates that there are gains to be had in the US without revolutionizing the system. I'm in favor of trying to achieve that too.

And I'd of course not advocate for burning the whole thing down and starting with something new; I think experiments could be made with, say, one day a week of "interest-based learning" along the lines I put forth above, while still keeping the core curriculum alive.