I’m probably a radical, but I’m open to not forcing children to learn things that someone deems “important to learn” which they are not interested in.
I think it’s great to give kids a taster of many subjects, but from my education I’m pretty sure that 90% of what I was taught was useless. The STEM stuff I would have done anyway because I loved it. And I have later come back to full in blanks in history etc. (Though I do acknowledge it’s hard to tell whether school builds a substrate or pattern for general learning, even if the raw facts were useless at the time.)
I had peers that were forced to learn languages, English lit, maths, etc, and then left school to be tradesmen or musicians, where they used approximately zero of what they were forced to learn. (And trade school starting earlier could have taught them the trigonometry or scales they needed very quickly).
The problem is we are trying to manufacture high school graduates rather than crafting or sculpting them.
I agree that the existing classroom model doesn’t work for this new way of thinking about learning. Siblings have done a better job of arguing for specific options than I could. But yes, I’d rather try something with different structure. For example, can you stream kids by interest rather than by age group? 30 kids all into history, with varying ages, might learn better than 30 7th-graders all trying to learn the curriculum on WW2 or whatever was decided is “important they know” and which most don’t care about.
Everyone has their own pet definition of what is “important to learn” in school, mine is the meta-level “learning is easy and fun if you care about what you are studying”.