Fundamentally I think that we have to get rid of the concept of a teacher and replace it with person who helps you when you get stuck. I think that fundamentally, the school should just teach you to read as soon as possible and from there on it should just give you things to read. You should also have much more freedom in what you want to study, e.g. if you want to check out idk, optical engineering in high school (even if for the reason that it sounds cool), the high school should be able to somehow assemble a path for you.
I think that just about everyone has dreams that can be solved with more knowledge and skill. The path to achieving these isn't always very clear though. The school should be the organization that gives you that clarity and supports you.
> I think that fundamentally, the school should just teach you to read as soon as possible and from there on it should just give you things to read.
I fail to see how this won't devolve into parents that have more time to devote to their children's education through encouragement, steering, tutoring, or paying for the same having a better outcome. And since I think having more money is causal for having more time, I think that's just a way to make the problem worse, not better.
You replace teachers with tutors. You encourage study group work. You use better educational tools. In Mindstorms, Papert talks about how the computer is fundamentally the best educational tool. This reflects my experience but for some reason computers are barely used in education and if they are, they are used in all the wrong ways.
On some level, I think that if the kids need tutors, the system is broken.
What you describe only solves the problem of wealthy parents providing an advantage when the tutoring and/or computer system is perfect with respect to what is available otherwise. At any point where it could be improved wealthy families will be able to take advantage of that improvement for their children. This is a natural consequence of how we value our young and their future.
What you describe would be good to reduce the advantage of wealth on outcome, but it's also papering over how hard the problem is. The real problem is getting from here to there. It's akin to saying "well, just eliminate racism." Sure, that's a good idea, nobody should object to that. But it's not like we'll wake up a year from now and say "problem solved!". As a simple example of this, we probably can't make good computer tutors for kids without somewhat good AI. That's not exactly an easy problem to solve.
That's an idea, and I've seen your other comments and think that they are interesting. I don't see how this would fix the phenomenon of wealthy parents being able to support their children better than poor parents.
Wealthy families will be able to pay a better "person who helps", or send their children to a better high school to study optical engineering. Fundamentally, wealthy people will always have access to better services.
