> pedagogy is borderline quackery
A lot of it is, I would agree, and I think the increase in homeschooling is partly motivated by that belief.
The basic question that needs to be asked: what is education for? What is its intended aim? The answer given will vary depending on the anthropology or vision of the human person that a particular culture has absorbed or that a culture has been organized around, though usually, I don't think this question is explicitly asked. It is a dangerous question, because it makes a person realize that perhaps better aims exist.
So, in capitalistic societies like ours, education has been reduced to what the capitalist class wants it to be, which is the production of cogs for the machine (and secondarily, a method of extracting money for what I take to be a mediocre education). This much is obvious. What do primary schools say college education is for? To get a "good job". The job is the primary focus of education in such a society. Test results are more about funneling workers into industry than helping students attain intellectual maturity and to gain insight into discerning their vocation.
(This is not an endorsement of collectivism, btw. Both hyperindividualism and collectivism are founded on a fantastically wrong vision of the human person; solidarism is by far the best account of the proper norm.)
But this is not the classical view of education whose aim was the formation of the person so that he can be free to be more fully human, of which the ability to known and understand the truth and to reason about life and the world are central. Intellectual formation presupposes moral formation as well (of which parents are taken to be the primary and first educators). This realization has caused an increase of interest in curricula such as classical liberal education which draws from the trivium/quadrivium tradition.
The biggest takeaway here is that we need to start asking fundamental questions questions again. We need to be Socratic again. We need to pay attention to first principles and to reconnect with our traditions to see what they have to say about them. The idea that you can do a better job by throwing inherited tradition overboard and starting from scratch is not only patently arrogant on its face, but has been demonstrated empirically to be disastrous.)
In this case, I cannot understate the importance of asking what it means to be human. Every society, every political order, every culture is guided by some anthropology, however implicit.
A quote for thought:
"Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about."
― G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy