> 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.
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.