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SS: I make a case for drastically cutting back on education. I argue that education doesn’t achieve its desired goals. The material is irrelevant and students forget much of the material. Most information taught in schools is quickly accessible with a smartphone. Education might be warranted if it boosted cognitive ability but it appears to be increasing IQ scores rather than actual ability to think.
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I'd differentiate classes based on ability. The A-class would move ahead more quickly than the B and C classes, the F class would stay behind until they mastered the content. This does mean acknowledging that some people are smarter than others, yet it would be possible to move up if you did well in exams. Or down, if you did poorly. If the A-class finished early, they could pad out their part of the term with extensions. For your children who I assume would be very smart, they could spend more of their English time in the library doing free reading, or write their own stuff or something. I loved quiet reading time and still do, probably falling in your category of overly literate people.
This is how I was educated in high school and would've been nice to have back in primary school. Even in primary school we had special classes for the smart children, where we got to play around with robots most of the time since it was assumed we'd stay well ahead of the rest. There really is no limit to how far you can go in the humanities or the sciences. In my last year of high school I remember being shocked by these kids who could ad-lib a dialogue about the meaning of historiography, taking on the ideology of Zinn and various other people. It was a seriously impressive display when compared to us mere mortals who stuck to the scripts we had prepared earlier. I did go to a very good school, so my experience is very different from everyone else's.
The American 'everyone learns at the same pace so the stupid kids get left behind and the best kids are bored stiff and fantasizing about culling the stupid/teachers/stupid teachers' system seems like a gross failure. I just haven't really experienced it apart from people complaining about it online.
As for Orwell's experience, the system at least got results. I can sympathize with the struggle in learning classics, I had to do some of that at a much lower level of intensity. But Britain ruled the world back in those days, they had plenty of tough men who were ready to conquer and die for the empire. Despite an institutional contempt for science, Britain led the world in radar and jet engines. Orwell himself was no dimwit, his mastery of language is undisputed. What great minds has modern Britain turned out like Orwell? The social democratic education system is turning out people who get anxious answering the telephone, not warrior-poets.
Fair enough, it doesn't sound like we fundamentally disagree. I worked at a charter school for a while with the A-C class system, based on math skills. It seemed fine and reasonable enough as far as I could tell, though the teachers were all a bit frustrated with the behaviors, more than the ability, of the C class. Having a class like that all day every day in elementary school tends to drive teachers with other options out of the profession. It might work to pay the teachers with lower ability classes more to compensate, and this does to some extent happen, with public schools paying more than private ones.
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