I thought I hated Math till I got to university. I had to take a bunch of remedial courses on high school level math but ultimately ended up with a math minor in addition to my CS major because I enjoyed the subject so much.
The K-12 school system is fundamentally broken but I don't know what the solution is.
Personally, I think we should:
- abolish most tests (especially standardized tests) until high school - encourage more electives - run classes like a democracy, not a dictatorship (students choose what to focus on next) - separate introverts from extroverts instead of forcing introverts to learn like extroverts - grade based on engagement, whatever that means for the student - pay teachers based on the number of students they can handle, and let students select their teachers
And to top it off, we should be encouraging and facilitating trades in high school so students that would prefer to go that route anyway can skip college.
We should also try to eliminate the private sector's obsession with degrees and instead find better ways for people to showcase their qualifications.
These are all fairly radical changes, though I think we need to fundamentally change how we think about schooling to improve it. At the very least, we should be encouraging experimentation by making it easier to run a charter school.