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Young children are not famously good decision makers, and it's easy to imagine them making very limiting choices that they would later come to regret.

Also some kids are pushed hard by their parents while others will do whatever they can to not look nerdy

Young children are also famously voracious learners. That is, until institutions like schools get in the way.

Plunging young children into an anarchical learning environment with nothing but YouTube to guide them won't end well. But if you add guidance that encourages their strengths and tolerates their weaknesses, I speculate that net learning will exceed that of today's school system.

The challenge in public education reform is doing anything interesting/useful without doubling teacher headcount and increasing salaries (at the very least, to increase supply without decreasing quality).

All sorts of approaches are possible with 5 students per teacher, but not 10, and with 10, but not with 20—let alone 25 or more.

Student-to-student mentoring is a part of the solution. Empirically shown to work really well. I don't know why more schools don't do it.

I do not know if it's the case for this particular approach, but it's often the case that very effective reforms that don't require increasing teacher head-count do rely on having very good teachers and admin.

Which means that a wide roll-out would require one or both of: more spending on training; more spending on salaries to increase the quality of the candidate pool.

A top-quintile teacher may be way more effective than a middle-quintile teacher, to the point that entire education frameworks and strategies are viable for them that aren't for the middle quintile, but the trouble is only 20% of your teachers are top-quintile. Ditto admin. You'd be amazed at how mediocre admin can completely ruin a good plan.

> That is, until institutions like schools get in the way.

I wouldn't be so quick to attribute those two events, which happen around the same time, as causal. I know a few teachers of young children and the things they love about their jobs is just that curiosity you're talking about. Unless you think it just takes a few years for the system to really beat them down, it's not exactly synchronous.

When thinking back on sitting through all the boring classes on subjects I wasn't interested in feels like it was a lot more of a me "problem". I find most of that stuff interesting now or at least appreciate that I had the exposure to it. It seems to me that I was much more interested in play and/or social development at the time.

> Young children are also famously voracious learners

That really depends on the environment a child grew up in. When I see parents who delegate their child rearing to an iPad with Cocomelon on 24/7 I'm quite sure that kid won't benefit from unstructured self-paced anything.

> Year groups are still important socially

After you left High School, was there ever a time in your life when you hung out with people of exactly the same age? The fact that everyone spends 13 years of their youth doing it now is an artifact only about 100 years old.

> I've long thought that schools should just let people go at whatever pace they want.

I'm pretty sure Montessori schools do something like this.

I found that it expanded a lot as I got older. In the early years people in the year above and below were like strangers. By the end of high school, I knew all the people in adjacent years, plus siblings. At uni there's only a few years there, so I guess it doesn't really count. Once I started worked it all stopped mattering, I have retired friends as well as ones that have just started work.

But for little kids, it seems to matter a bit. You can tell kids change fast, so plus minus a year at a young age matters.

montessori groups children into age ranges spanning 3 years. 3-6 year olds are in one class and the older kids teach the younger ones. there is absolutely no indication that the age difference is a problem. so no, plus or minus a year does not matter even for a 3 year old kid.

I'm not saying it's a problem, just that you're gonna tend to have similar kids in a clump. That clump is gonna have some people ahead and some behind it. But the clump is gonna move at some sort of pace.

> so no, plus or minus a year does not matter even for a 3 year old kid.

Anyone who has kids is going to disagree with this.

i have kids.

the age difference matters for the development of each individual kid, but it us rather useless as a measure to compare the development of different kids.

in the first few years, the development of each kid is so different that no two kids of the same age are alike. you can have a four year old with the maturity of a two year old, or a three year old going on five. a wider age range allows children with the same level of maturity to play together regardless of the individual age.

also younger kids learn from older kids with allows them to mature faster.

this difference in maturity continues, but as the kids are older it just matters less, because the material being taught in school does not depend on the level of maturity but only on what they already learned regardless of how mature they are.

This I can agree with. I benefited a lot from having older cousins around.

At the moment I have a kid who is asking me about chemistry, and I can't just wait 5 years for him to get to that age where they teach people specifically chemistry (as opposed to general science). There's no reason I can't tell a 9 year old about valencies and that kind of thing, so why does school wait with it?

i think once you go beyond the basics of math, reading and writing, the problem is to order all the remaining material into some sort of sequence, but it matters less what the actual sequence is. you could start with chemistry earlier, and anyone homeschooling may do just that, but this is going back to the exact problem that started this sub-thread: schools being designed to teach everyone at the same pace.

> There's no reason I can't tell a 9 year old about valencies and that kind of thing, so why does school wait with it?

Not enough staff (teachers) to differentiate instruction that finely.

A lot of stuff sounds like a great idea until you're looking at a classroom of 18-28 students and everyone else around you is trying to deal with a similar-sized class of their own. Special-ed kids might get help down to having one entire adult just to help and follow around that single kid all day (!) but there's no stomach for spending that kind of money to help kids who are ahead, or to reduce class sizes so regular classroom teachers can realistically do a better job of differentiation. Best most places get are very-part-time gifted programs.

If GP meant "there's no difference", they're certainly wrong; a four-year-old is obviously 33% more advanced than a 3-year-old. But the question here was about socialization -- can a 3-year-old and a 4-year-old satisfy one another's needs for peer socialization? Is a 4-year-old who socializes with 3-year-olds and 5-year-olds but no other 4-year-olds being socially deprived somehow? I think the answer there is clearly "yes" and "no", respectively.

a four-year-old is obviously 33% more advanced than a 3-year-old

that would require that all children develop at exactly the same pace which is simply not happening like that.

see my other comment.

i do agree with the socialization.

The Montessory philosophy isn't that the age doesn't matter. It's that it matters and children of different ages benefit from mixing.

montessori does exactly that. the kids are grouped into batches of 3 years, and each child can study the material at their own pace.

i don't know how they handle the transitions from one group to the next though. maybe an extra slow kid that hasn't mastered the whole material in 3 years will tack on an extra time.

and i think that faster kids will spend the extra time teaching younger kids.

i also expect that in a 3 year period is is more likely for kids to catch up because they are probably not continuously slow. (keep in mind that montessori originally developed the material for kids with (learning-)disabilities) so learning at a slow pace is actually less of a problem, if it is a problem at all.

I have never seen anybody implement the exact Montessori idea for anybody that isn't very young children. For the very young, the answer is that the material isn't exclusive to the classroom so they will learn it sooner or later.

There are plenty of people that adapt it to older children, but the 3 years batches are the first thing to go away.

At the other extreme, I've seen attempts to get ride of the synchronicity at university undergraduate courses. It's almost trivial there and seems to have no downsides.

the 3 years batches are the first thing to go away.

the term "montessori" is not protected, so many schools claim to use montessori, but aren't really.

from https://montessori-ami.org/about-montessori/montessori-12-18

The school for adolescents is for young people ages 12 through 18. Sometimes the young people are divided into two groups of 12 to 15 and 15 to 18 and sometimes all six years interact in one environment, depending upon the size of the school.

so in fact instead of the batches going away, they may grow to an even wider age range. the same for elementary.

At the other extreme, I've seen attempts to get rid of the synchronicity at university undergraduate courses. It's almost trivial there and seems to have no downsides.

that's how universities work in austria and germany. and it makes a lot of sense. the older you get the less the actual age matters for what you learn.

What you're describing is called "mastery learning," and it is a thing. Essentially, you can't progress from one module to the next without a certain minimum score on the current module (that's the "mastery" part). It works well in subjects like math, where there are a lot of dependencies between later and earlier modules.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastery_learning

Where can I do a (respectable) on-line degree in this structure?

While I'm fantasizing, the second unrealistic requirement is affordable. ;-)

The Open University. It’s reputable (although by no means in anyone’s top 10 rankings), let’s you go your own pace and the tuition isn’t too bad.

>although by no means in anyone’s top 10 rankings

It's always vying with Cambridge for the top place on student satisfaction.

Also there is limited ability to vary your pace according to difficulty. Once you start a unit there is a schedule you need to follow to be ready for the end of period exams. In fact I'd argue that without that schedule pressure many people would struggle to complete each unit.

You can vary the number of units you take in a year but that's before you really know how difficult the work is. I had to abandon one unit so I could focus on Topology as it was much harder than I expected. It would have been nice to just take a bit longer but that option wasn't available.

WGU. Online, accredited, self paced (must maintain a minimum pace though), and relatively cheap.

Wish they had math degrees.

> Year groups are still important socially

Disagree. Year groups perpetuate immaturity. They are also very socially unnatural, a mere byproduct of going for scale in the education system. That is fine, but if we can achieve scale without year groups (which we could under your proposal), that would be better.

Is everything we do not socially unnatural though? Remote work? Video calls, social media, online forums? What, other than living in hunter-gatherer societies is not socially unnatural for humans?

How are kids being around their peers "socially unnatural?" At the very least it's not more "socially unnatural" than posting on hacker news.

It's socially unnatural because as soon as you leave the schooling system, it stops happening.

This is incredibly ridiculous and nonsensical reasoning. In that case breastfeeding is unnatural because you stop doing it after infancy.

Beyond that, kids are around mixed age groups plenty. For me it was at afterschool programs, summer camps, dance classes, bowling, family (sibling, cousins), and playing with neighborhood kids.

School is glorified babysitting until university. Actually learning is just a convenient but ultimately secondary use of that time.

> School is glorified babysitting until university.

This is true, this is a harsh truth.

You can see the effect in actual (real world) consequences: no one cares if you learn nothing at school and no teacher is ever fired for low learning outcome in their students. But the immediate moment a student gets hurt, for any reason, then hell is unleashed on the teacher, lawyers get involved, a the teachers is now actually risking something.

School is glorified babysitting, until university when you're on your own, age brackets mostly don't matter, and the burden of learning is onto you (professors don't care).

In US maybe. Other countries might have or had better systems.

> School is glorified babysitting

as a parent of a 12 and 9 year old i mostly agree. You really have to augment and reaffirm the material being taught in school outside of the school setting and with a different approach. It takes a lot of work to nurture and grow a love-of-learning vs just "did you do your homework? yes? good.". No parent is perfect though, it takes a lot of effort and trial/error to learn what works and doesn't work with your particular kid.

This has been evidenced by the big push to get kids back into face to face school during the pandemic. It is very rare for any discussion promoting this to even mention education let alone propose that face to face education is better than what has been happening over the last couple of years.

WGU is an online, fully accredited college that does exactly that. You pay for 6 months at a time and can do as many classes as you're able to complete within that time frame.

I just started at the beginning of February and have already knocked out an entire course in the past 10 days, it's honestly the best experience I've ever had with schooling. I like to work at my own pace because my motivation to get things done comes in bits and spurts, so I like to take advance of the upswings of my motivation levels and will manically get as much done as I can it fades and then take a week off to just chill, which did not work very well when I was enrolled at a more traditional university.

And WGU is short for what?

Western Governors University sorry

>fully accredited

None of their degree programs ABET accredited, if that matters to you.

I've long thought that schools should just let people go at whatever pace they want.

Great for high achieving, high conscientiousness kids, but it isn't going to work for a lot of kids, especially those without academic support at home. The last two years have been an approximate experiment in this; in the sense that kids who didn't want to participate had an easy out. What we saw is the bottom fall out.