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johnlawrenceaspden comments on Two More Things to Unlearn from School - Less Wrong
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My education was not like this. My teachers and lecturers delighted in asking tricky questions to people who thought they understood because they had memorised gibberish.
School systems may be mainly rubbish, and school is slavery for children, but just routinely bashing it ignores the fact that we're the most knowledgeable generation there has ever been, and no-one knows how to do it better.
Yes. Sometimes in discussions about school system I am not sure whether the message is "schools are imperfect" or "schools are obviously worse than X" (and what is this X specifically). Because I fully agree that school system should be improved, and in my opinion we should try many experiments and measure the outcomes. (Also there would be some discussion about goals, like: do we want the best education ever, or just a decent education for a reasonable price? how much utility do we give to kids having knowledge versus kids feeling happy -- I agree that both are important, but what exactly is the desired exchange ratio?)
Only when people start suggesting their improvements, then most suggested improvements would actually make things worse, because they ignore some existing constraints, such as: human nature, limited budgets, lack of "perfect" teachers, limited time, etc. As the article says: "Most possible changes are for the worse, even though every improvement is necessarily a change." That's also true for changes of education. So we have a meta-problem: how to teach people to think rationally about learning?
One can start cheaply by comparing outcomes.(There's a huge amount of not-invented-here bias in politics). Unfortunately, it is likely to turn out that in order to have a good public education system, you need to spend money).
Comparing outcomes of existing systems would be good, assuming that you have multiple systems used by the same population. Some countries have this data, other countries don't. For example, if majority of schools in a country follows a government blueprint, and only a few alternative schools are allowed to coexist, it is not obvious whether the differences between their results are caused by different education, or simply by a selection bias (alternative schools are chosen by parents who are more interested in their child's education). So if you already have data, definitely use it; but many countries don't.
A decent quality requires some financial treshold, but mere money does not guarantee quality. You can't have a great school if most teachers need to take a second job to pay their mortgage, or if the school cannot afford to buy any educational tools or any trivial extra expense which could solve problems. On the other hand, it is possible to burn huge amounts of money without getting any improvement. (For example you spend the money on thousands of education-related government employees, and expensive fasionable educational tools of dubious quality, and the schools get only a small part of the budget.) In my experience, when someone proposes giving more money to education, they usually have a very specific idea about how that money should be spent, and it usually requires mandatory buying of something they produce. (This part may be country-specific.)
If one is trying to improve the public education system in one country, one can compare it to the public systems in other countries, which will take in a broad swathe of the population.