What I know about education is patched together from all kinds of written sources and real-life observations, so I don't have an on-topic and self-contained literature list to recommend. However, you should be warned that this topic is nowadays politically and ideologically charged to an extreme degree, and directly relevant for powerful special interests financed from the public purse. Also, among intellectuals, it is tremendously popular to signal one's sophistication and humanism via nice-sounding but unsubstantiated opinions about it.
Therefore, anything publicly written and spoken about education should be taken with a high level of skepticism and caution, even the most prestigious and seemingly most objective and scholarly academic work.
I actually agree. The academic discipline of "education," as taught in ed schools, is somewhat mysterious to me and doesn't seem to have proven its value. It would be interesting to see if it could be improved on (with actual experimental studies, perhaps?)
Piaget on child development, as I understand, has held up pretty well, but that's not education per se.
I want to learn what's well-understood about education. I expect to launch myself into some endeavors in teaching the first few levels of epistemic and instrumental rationality - ie., critical thinking and problem solving. I'm a little suspicious, though, of the scattered educational texts that I've so far read. In particular, education seems like a field where it's easy to have motivated thoughts, and hard to gather good data.
With my background (Math and CS) I'm a little at sea in educational literature. Does anyone know of good, reductionist-grade or evidential-grade, introductory texts in education?