Here's a crazy idea: What if we raised our children to process their difficult emotions instead of suppress them and stay active and move freely while working and studying (instead of sitting in a chair at a desk)
For the older students - some FPS (multi-played by the whole class or school against school) with math and other problems to unlock new more powerful weapons/etc. should work too - anybody who didn't do the homework and thus fails to solve the problems fast naturally becomes a bad teammate and the peer pressure is the king at that age.
And of course, what else could maths education value other than speed of figuring out problems? After all, Cauchy was famed as the fastest differentiator in the west, wasn't he?
1. Folding floor desk(ideally taller and wider than a breakfast tray so there is leg room)
2. Lap desk for peripherals. This makes computer interactions ergonomic, no more hunching or reaching.
3. Floor chair/backrest so you can recline and get some back support in long sessions.
Plus all of it can fold compactly so it works well in a limited footprint.
Actually, this already falls flat in the first section. At least 90% of adult fail on that one. How are they supposed to teach something to their children that they themselves don't even understand? And teaching is usually much more difficult than understanding something yourself.
Which brings us to "school should teach that". But schools are not designed for that and teachers are not qualified for that. Hell, it's already an exception to meet a teacher who can properly convey the meaning of "1+1=2", not to mention a teacher who can teach children, who are not their own, how to process difficult emotions. Good luck with that
And that doesn't pair well with children's insatiable "why" requests, even if they don't utter them. Teaching children is actually harder than teaching adults, because most adults largely gave up on the "why" and just settle on "I gotta remember that, if I want to pass the next exam" (school did a good job with them I guess).
So why 1+1=2? There is a lot of depth in that that is left unanswered and children are forced to memorize the answer. From then on, a sharp decline of cognitive ability follows as they "graduate" through our excellent school systems...
One on his channel is to explain to kids how the determinant works, why matrix multiplication is done in that specific order, etc. Check them out sometime esp his Friday 'ask math anything' live lectures.
Less flippantly: pedagogically, there's a big difference between "here's your addition tables, memorize them" and "if I have 1 of _anything_ and another 1 of that same thing, I now have 2 of that thing." The latter offers way more opportunities for further thought: by that logic, if I have 2 things and I take 1 away, I now have 1 thing! If I have 2 rocks and 2 sheep, I can count the sheep by laying out 1 rock per sheep! And since I can add more things, maybe there are more numbers for those amounts of things too? And what about differently-sized things? Or parts of things? Or...
That's the difference between getting "1 + 1 = 2" across as a literal by-the-book fact, and getting it across as an invitation to build / connect ideas and ask further questions.
Compare that to a friend's son, who is the same age as ours but has some developmental delays of some type (I assume). Their teacher told them that they had to "get this dealt with"; in other words, "fix your kid so I don't have to deal with him". Not exactly a welcoming and comforting environment for a child who needs to be met halfway.
I mentioned this anecdote to our son's teacher and her first comment was "wow... is she an older teacher?" And yes, she was. She's been working with kids for 30 years, probably isn't as flexible in terms of learning strategies as younger teachers are, and, probably even worse, has been underpaid (and under-respected) for that whole time, so she's surely just burnt out and waiting for retirement at this point.
Maybe if teaching paid decent money we'd have more teachers who could put in the time and emotional energy to nurture their students, rather than just putting them through the pipeline, and who wouldn't get so cynical and short-tempered by the end of their career.