I'm skeptical about efforts to revolutionize schooling

I'd argue honestly until graduate school too. Undergrad still has a lot of required courses that aren't directly related to your major, and it can be draining.

I'm not saying this is a "bad" thing, having a well rounded education is important, but it's still a lot of stuff that a lot of students don't want to do.

Graduate school is more fun, and in some senses kind of easier (for want of a better word). Sure, the work is "harder" on an objective level, but by the time you've made it to grad school you're probably studying a subject that you think is interesting, so you don't mind powering through the hard parts.

At least that's how it was for me.

Yep that's definitely fair, to not want to put your kids in a school which has a large population of troubled children.

But to the original point I was trying to make, troubled kids don't automatically mean they don't deserve education or we should allow them to fail out or give them the option of leaving primary or secondary education. We should really be making every attempt at figuring out ways to make them stay in school, given how stark the difference in outcomes are.

I think educational reform has often been motivated by several different reasons.

1. The desire for a "royal road" to understanding. This is a bad motivation, because while there are more or less effective ways to learn, there is no royal road. You will spend your entire life trying to squirm out of doing what learning requires.

2. A utilitarian view of education. This is a tragedy of our times. People insist that their learning be "useful". Calculus is useless, because chances are that most people who learn it will never employ it for practical work. But this totally degrades what education is. It turns human beings into mere machines for proximately practical work. There is no theoretical desire for understanding things to understand reality better. This is false education, because knowing and understanding the truth are central purposes of a true education.

3. An "agnostic" view of the purpose of education. Without a destination, there can be no discussion of strategy or tactics, no discussion of progress or what is good education. The classical liberal arts had an answer. Sadly, much of modern education does not, at least not a clear, coherent, or healthy one. It is often an incoherent assortment of disconnected and disorganized material with no organizing principle. This is disrespectful to the student. Also, where motivation is concerned, classical education places a great deal of emphasis on acquiring the virtues that should always be cultivated in parallel with learning.

4. Bad execution in practice. Not all teachers are great. When you press people on why they hate a particular subject, how often is it the case that the subject itself wasn't the problem, but how bad the teacher was, either as a pedagogue specifically or as a person?

5. A failure to distinguish between pedagogical problems and the influence of the home environment. Parents are the first and primary teachers of their children. Students enter schools as products of their moral and social education at home. When the home is deficient, students may lack the appropriate dispositions needed for formal education. Sometimes a good mentor can help counteract some of these deficiencies, but the bulk of the responsibility rests on parents. With the disintegration of traditional community life into which family life is embedded, things become even more difficult.

We also mustn't ignore that learning occurs within human relations. That is why a good pedagogue is so valuable. His goodness is first goodness as a person. Pedagogical skill becomes intelligible, human, and more effective when the pedagogue is like a benevolent parental figure who acts as a guide, neither dominating the student nor spoiling him. A parental figure also responds to the particular needs of the student, because there is a relationship there. The students doesn't just become an alienated number in the classroom.

children who are willing, teaching children of younger years certain skills they already know. Ofc they might need to learn some basics of how to teach in the first place. Its a bit meta but teaching as a first-class subject that is optional with hands on work during school would be really cool and be an incredibly strong indicator of people suitable for management/lead roles later up the track.

In my time at high school (UK equivalent) I don't remember receiving any peer assistance at all and its feels like we've missed a trick.

I feel like many of the more alternative teaching methodologies have unclear learning goals. What is "holistic problem-solving"? How can we measure it? Do we know that conventionally taught students lack it? Is it hard to acquire? Is it even important?

When I first went into the workplace, it took me a bit of time to adjust to the non-academic setting. You think differently, you work differently. I discovered and learned problem-solving skills that I was not taught in school. Frankly, though, I'm glad I was not taught those skills in school, because they are easy to learn in the workplace, especially if you have a solid theoretical grounding (something which is a lot harder to pick up on the job).

To the extent that generalized problem-solving is a real thing, I think it probably boils down to the ability to quickly internalize information and draw connections, which conventional schooling already focuses on anyway.