"You are a human."
"You are on this planet."
"This is what this world is like."
"This is what humans have made so far."
"This is what's out there."
and then let people be free from 10-20 to figure out their own goals instead of just funneling them into the endless capitalist churn.
"You are on this planet."
"This is what this world is like."
"This is what humans have made so far."
"This is what's out there."
That's basically what school is. Many of these topics can't be explained in reasonable detail and complexity until after 10 years old.
Before I realized this world is just as interesting, but school does everything to make you bored of it before you can explore it.
In a sense, the most important thing school does is to build up within students a tolerance of boredom and an appreciation of the fact that most work is potentially boring.
You can plow through boring work if the end goal is exciting. For example, when developing a game that you yourself want to play :)
Not that most people like games, but everyone has their own goal, even if they haven't discovered them yet, even if it's just to chill in a nice place and do nothing all day, they can still find better ways to be lazy! (build better furniture, explore the search for the ideal climate etc.)
What is with all this defeatist give-up-by-default attitude? There's NO fucking way that the current common system of human education, which has been pretty much the same for hundreds of years, is perfect.
Just enough to get you hooked into the "game" you've just spawned into.
We already have people say they wish they'd learned how to do their taxes or balance budgets - imagine what 12 year olds might think is uninteresting that comes up later, right?
"Here's the refrigerator."
"Here's a cell phone."
That'd be a much better way of teaching multiple subjects that are boring and irrelevant on their own.
You're not supposed to have phones or computers in class but you're supposed to somehow be interested in the math and other sciences that make those things possible?
You go home and your life there is much more entertaining than in school, but you have no idea how what you're being taught in school ties into the things at home.
Even using computers in class, which I endorse, involves acceptance that many of the uses will seem boring.
Making everything as entertaining as commercial media is too much to ask.
For me for example, a lot of the work in developing the game is mundane boilerplate and looking up solutions to solved problems, but I can bear through it because I really want to play the game I'm trying to make.
Education should optimize for finding such "goals" for each individual person, instead of just finding a "use" for each person to be put to, as another poster put it.
This "capitalist churn" is how we get things done for society. While some exploration makes sense, the vast majority of people are not gifted in the arts or endowed with genius. They must be prepared for life with basic skills that can be put to good use. Even under communist "utopian" regimes, children are forced to do basically the same stuff they do under capitalist regimes, because people and their needs are the same under both.
There are 8 billion people. Not every single one can be ""put to good use""
We have enough technology now to let people slow down and fucking chill a bit.