Whatever we have now is not working. It’s a 100-year-old model that’s too bureaucratic and ineffective.
We spend more dollars and get less for it than many leading countries. Obviously, administrative bloat, pensions and tenure doesn’t work in properly educating our youth.
Let’s rely more on technology and adapt to modern needs and health concerns. This is for 1st through 12th grade education.
Step 1: Start school at 9am
Kids need sleep. More than adults. When they don’t get it, they don’t learn. Starting so early (before 8a) is convenient for parents to drop their kid off. Not a good enough reason to harm the kids health and hinder their education. Plus, most of y’all aren’t working and a UBI is coming to make sure you don’t have to if you don’t want to.
Step 2: Teach kids two languages starting in 1st grade. Teach them about consent in 1st grade.
We need our youth to be bilingual in a rapidly evolving world. It’s easier to learn as a kid, before the brain gets set in its ways. Spanish seems like the natural second language in the US. Teach it.
Consent is important. Clearly, good parenting is deficient in the US. We can’t force people to be better parents. We can teach kids about ownership of their bodies and proper etiquette when dealing with others, since parents have proven they won’t.
Teaching them this at an early age makes the sexual consent education a lot easier.
Step 3: Break the whole curriculum and start fresh.
Do kids really need to know calculus or ancient African history? No.
Not unless they choose to learn those things. Because history education works so well right now.
What do they need? Life skills:
1 – home economics – cooking, relationships, physical and mental health (exercise, meditation)
2 – financial education – balance a checkbook, budgeting
3 – internet education – how to act appropriately online, setup a blog and publish their thoughts
4 – career paths – trade schools, online education, college, travel, job opportunities
5 – critical thinking education – logic and reasoning, questioning authority, conducting research, self-awareness
Condense everything you were teaching high schoolers into less classes, make them electives or ditch them entirely.
Step 4: end at 3pm and have after-school programs
The school has computers, tablets and the internet right? The required part of school ends at 3, but let kids use the place as a resource until 5. Now the kids know a 9-5 schedule, even though we will be off that by the time they graduate.
6 hours of classes (minus a 30 min lunch) is really all the brain can take in a day anyway.
Step 5: More teaching assistants, less administrators
Kids need the hands on help. They won’t get that in a 30 person classroom. They don’t need a bunch of paper pushers they’ll never interact with.
Cut admin, hire TAs.
If we kept spending the same, but reallocated the resources to better use items, we could greatly improve the lives of our youth and the future for our country.