Could You Modify It ‘To Stop Students From Becoming This Advanced?’

As the father of a near 3 year old the educational questions weigh heavily on my mind. While this is a great thought experiment ("How could we make it better?") it's scary when given a concrete example that is near and dear to your heart.

I believe:

[1] Each general subject has a core competency that you have to achieve at a minimum.

It's broken into skills and subjects.

Skills includes: programming, reading, writing, functional mathematics (+-*/ and solving word problems), learning (figuring out how the pupil best learns for themselves, or if you want "meta-learning"). I may be missing some skills here.

Subjects include: english, history, biology, chemistry, physics, mathematics (both higher level functional math and theory / proofs). I may be missing some subjects here.

[2] on top of #1 you have focused subjects of interest which you should support the pupil learning to whatever depth they are interested in learning. Most people I know upon finding something they are truly interested in become a borderline expert. Are they world class? Maybe or maybe not, but they are certainly journeymen. These range everywhere from finance to car repair to engineering to language learning to musical instruments to basically anything people take an interest in.

If your student can reach functional usage in all parts of #1 earlier that gives them more time to learn different things from #2. Note that the skills and background knowledge learned in #1 are reusable to various subjects in #2.

Circling back to the article: It's a stupid idea to even attempt to prevent a student from mastering anything in #1 above faster. It might help if the peer group instead of being defined by age could be defined by what your interests in #2 are. Then you get cross pollination of students by more advanced students in those same interesting subjects.

How is any article about public schooling not going to be about politics? The public school system is inherently political by definition.

How did this article hit the front page? What is insightful or interesting about it?

"This attitude is a natural outgrowth of our decision to operate education as a monopoly."

This is blatantly not true, in the US we do not operate education as a monopoly. There are plenty of private schools.

At the college level, private schools certainly do cater to the individual. I was fast in math, regular speed in everything else. They put me into grad level math and physics classes, while my writing/history/etc classes were still at the normal pace.

I don't see much reason why the incentives would be different below the college level.

Whenever you want to ask "what would a privatized primary education system do", you can often ask instead "what does the privatized secondary education system currently do?"

Well, I'd allow students the option to take the final exam once per semester at any time. Those that pass at 90% would be transferred to a mixed-grade same-subject classroom for that period where they could study at their own pace.

I'd start with Khan Academy math, since they've got pretty good tools for supervising students learning at different rates, and the math track is pretty thorough for someone in K-12.

Since the students are self-selected, I wouldn't expect significant discipline problems, and since each mixed-grade classroom focuses on a specific subject there exists the possibility for easier collaboration.

I think this model would stand a greater chance of success in middle- or high schools where students have a class schedule. I don't think it would be practical in very small schools; however, I would expect that very small schools already have their own ways of handling students learning at different rates for budgeting reasons.