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latanius comments on Education control? - Less Wrong
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Possibly relevant: Sudbury schools, with the curriculum of "do whatever you want, as long as you're in school, surrounded by interesting stuff". Also, http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/freedom-learn. It really seems that we are doing quite bad by default...
As it turns out, for example, kids are quite good at learning stuff from each other (including things like reading... "I can't always get the big kids to read me stories, so I'd better go and learn this <<reading>> thing from them"...)
Now, find a way to prevent that from happening. Sorting kids by age and separating the groups? Perfect.
Your second point is very important.
It's not just about lost opportunities to learn.. well, it mostly is, but consider socialisation. Kids are supposed to learn how to act in society from.. who, exactly? Obviously not the teachers, they aren't around enough of the time to do it, and socialisation isn't really in the curriculum anyway. So. Parents, typically, and hope you have good ones.
Historically, you'd learn from older siblings or friends, but families are smaller and age-sorting has almost entirely eliminated cross-age friendships. That's bad; eliminating that problem might be a good start towards fixing schools.
Nominated for largest understatement of the day.
From my own experience of criticizing the school system in meatspace, people think you're supposed to be socialized by your classmates. This is often claimed as the "real" purpose of school, usually after you've demolished any claim that they, y'know, educate kids.
IMO children being socialized by each other is one of the problems with schools. It's surprising most people turn out as well as they do...
Apparently someone did an actual study to see if homeschooled kids were poorly socialized. They weren't.
I don't think they checked for antisocial behavior, just social skills and, I dunno, maybe friends? It's been a while since I saw it.
EDIT: Actually, I think there was a note about homeschoolers being less vulnerable to peer pressure, however they measured that.
IIRC, when public education was first debated, the arguement was that it would create good citizens. Hence the focus of social studies and history.
And I concur, the main purpose for school seems put children into a society and let them develop from there. Not that it does its job particularly well, but there you go.
A little dubiousness about Sudbury-- basically a claim that the democracy aspect means that you need to be good at small group politics.