I think that there are likely some problematic aspects to this idea. One is that the general "I learned X, therefore I can learn Y" seems really strongly applicable to all STEM-types of classes, but I think it would likely falter in English, History, and related subjects to some extent - for example, in history, there's a lot of problems trying to organize how and what to learn that mean making a simple graphlike structure seems problematic. All events have preceding events and resulting events necessary to place them in their proper context. You can't really understand World War 2's causes without understand World War 1 and it's resulting effects, and you can't understand that without understanding.... etc. And while you could start all young children at "billions of years ago, the Earth ..." and progress until you are teaching them recent history at the end of highschool, that will necessarily mean they will understand all the earliest stuff at a very low level of sophistication; and you can't really teach the entire history of the world at varying levels of sophistication each year, or even every 3-4 years. And finally, there's really no way to test "Does this student understand the history of the Opium Wars?" in an automatic way that is resistant to cheating and allows retries without being heavily proctored by actual physical humans standing over watching the testing and writing very carefully and doing the marking of essays, which rather defeats the benefits of a lot of this flexibility stuff for those fields. Also, these fields have a lot of required skills that all should be advancing together - history and politics and economics and so forth inform one another a great deal, for example. I have no idea how I would apply something like this to literature and reading skills, etc. either - the dependencies for these fields are far more fluid and less obvious than "Before you can learn subtraction you must learn addition", and necessarily involve a variety of skills in. e.g. vocabulary, grammar, spelling, composition, and the like all rising in somewhat non-discrete ways. The extent to which learning how to spell "definitely" allows you to write memos is extremely non-obvious, to me at least.
Secondly, people don't necessarily know and understand things perfectly because they passed a test on it some time ago. I personally have a very strong memory, and didn't need to be retaught how to find the roots of a quadratic equation after the first time. However, I was personally taught that particular concept at least 3 times that I can recall in public schools, and even the third time I would say that more of my classmates NEEDED it than not, which is depressing but important to realize. I am not immune to it myself - I only retained permanently "how to invert a matrix and why it matters at all" on the second go-round of that concept, and I saw it at least half a dozen times. You have to try to deal with that sort of thing - perhaps retesting before each new concept? Or some time-based decaying proficiency individually for each student based on their history? Regardless, however you attack this problem it is going to be a problem for this sort of approach that ought to be considered.
However, those are sort of nitpicks, really - there are several more fundamental problems. Overall, I don't really see that this project will significantly advance the field of pedagogy relative to the resources it requires to even begin to attack it. A lot of your categories have no suggestion that I consider reasonable for even beginning to attack the roots of the problem as I see them. For example, your section on writing merely states that we should teach people to be good writers somehow, and your rationality section that we should teach them rationality somehow. I found personally that the majority of my teachers in school were not fundamentally extremely competent writers and powerful orators who were able to pass on their gifts of persuasive composition effectively, and similar limits applied for logic and rationality - there is a fundamental chicken and egg problem where you want a lot of people to learn X but there aren't any teachers who currently even know X and little reason exists to suggest that they would be particularly good at teaching X*. And there are a huge number of students who learn best from a teacher, and whom I suspect would make little real progress if left alone. Independent learning works best, so far as I know, for prodigies who are very self-motivated by long-term goals, which characterization I suspect applies to rather less than 1% of the general student body of a typical modern school - Lesswrong's audience is, I suspect self-selected for the sort of people for whom this idea might not be terrible, but there are a huge number of students who would quite simply cheat if left to their own devices with a system such as you suggest, or do minimal real learning but instead cram for tests immediately before taking the tests and then forget them. You could enforce proctoring of official tests to advance, but that seems like it would quickly become a bureaucratic nightmare and loses a lot of the flexibility and so forth you wanted in the first place.
Anecdotally: I personally went to all of my scheduled my classes through all my undergrad because I already knew by that time that I learned best by going to a class where I could listen to a presentation and ask questions, even when the class material was adapted directly from a book I already had in my possession from the first day of class and I had complete sample problems sets similar to those on the final exams as well as solutions. I rather suspect more students are like me in this regard than not, because the regular attendance rates of those classes was >90% even during extremely nasty weather, and they all had the book and problem sets too.
Problems
Problems have bottlenecks. To solve problems, you need to overcome each bottleneck. If you fail to overcome just one bottleneck, the problem will go unsolved, and your effort will have been fruitless.
In reality, it’s a little bit more complicated than that. Some bottlenecks are tighter than others, and some progress might leak through, but it usually isn’t anything notable.
Education
There is a lot wrong with education. Attempts are being made to improve it, but they’re glossing over important bottlenecks. Consequently, progress is slowly dripping through. I think that it’d be a better use of our time to take the time to think through each bottleneck, and how it can be addressed.
I have a theory of how we can overcome enough bottlenecks such that progress will fall through, instead of drip through.
Consider how we learn. Say that you want to learn parent concept A. To do this, it’ll require you to understand a bunch of other things first
My groundbreaking idea: make sure that students know A1…An before teaching them A.
The bottlenecks to understanding A are A1…An. Some of these bottlenecks are tighter than others, and in reality, there are constraints on our ability to teach, so it’s probably best to focus on the tighter bottlenecks. Regardless, this is the approach we’ll need to take if we want to truly change education.
How would this work?
1) Create a dependency tree.
2) Explain each cell in the tree.
3) Devise a test of understanding for each cell in the tree.
4) Teach accordingly.
Where does our system fail us?
My proposal
I propose that we pool all of our resources and make a perfect educational web app. It would have the dependency trees, have explanations for each cell in each tree, and have a test of understanding for each cell in each tree. It would test the user to establish what it is that he does and doesn’t know, and would proceed with lessons accordingly.
In other words, usage of this web app would be mastery-based: you’d only proceed to a parent concept when you’ve mastered the child concepts.
Motivation
Motivation would be another thing to optimize.
One way to do this would be to teach things to students at the right times. Lack of interest is often due to lack of understanding of child concepts, and thus lack of appreciation for the beauty and significance of a parent concept. By teaching things to students when they’re able to appreciate them, we could increase students’ motivation.
Another way to optimize motivation would be to do a better job of teaching students things that are useful to them (or things that are likely to be useful to them). In todays system, students are often times forced to memorize lots of details that are unlikely to ever be useful to them.
By making teaching more effective, I think motivation will naturally increase as well (it’ll eliminate the lack of motivation that comes with the frustration of bad teaching).
Pooling of resources
The pooling of resources to create this web app is analogous to how resources were pooled for Christopher Nolan to make a really cool movie. When you pool resources, a lot more becomes possible. When you don’t pool resources, the product often sucks. Imagine what would happen if you tried to reproduce Batman at a local high school. This is analogous to what we’re trying to do with education now.
How would this look?
I’m not quite sure. Technically, kids could just sit at home on their computers and work through the lessons that the web app gives them… but I sense that that wouldn’t be such a good idea. It’d probably be best to require kids to go to a “school-like institution”. Kids could work through the lessons by themselves, ask each other for help, work together on projects, compete with each other on projects etc.
Certificates
I envision that credentials would be certificate-based. You’d get smaller certificates that indicate that you have mastered a certain subject. Today, the credentials you get are for passing a grade, or passing a class, or getting a degree. They’re too big and inflexible. For example, maybe the plant unit in intro to biology isn’t necessary for you. Smaller certificates allow for more flexibility.
Deadlines
Deadlines are a tough issue. If they exist, there’s a possibility that you have to cram to meet the deadline, and cramming isn’t optimal for learning. However, if they don’t exist, students probably won’t have the incentive to learn. For this reason, I think that they probably do have to exist.
My first thought is that deadlines should be personalized. For example, if I moved 50 steps and the deadline was at 100 steps, the next deadline should be based on where I am now (step 50), not where the deadline was (step 100).
My second thought is that deadlines should be rather loose, because I think that flexibility and personalization are important, and that deadlines sacrifice those things.
My third thought, is that students should be given credit for going faster. In our one-size-fits-all system now, you can’t get credit for moving faster than your class. I think that if you want to work harder and make faster progress, you should be able to and you should be given credentials for the knowledge that you’ve acquired. Given the chance, I think that many students would do this. I think this would allow students to really thrive and pursue their interests.
Tutoring
I think that it’d be a good idea to require tutoring. Say, in order to get a certificate, after passing the tests, you’d have to tutor for x hours.
Tutoring helps you to master the concept, because having to explain something will expose the holes in your understanding. See The Feynman Technique.
Tutoring allows for social interaction, which is important.
Social Atmosphere
The social atmosphere in these “schools” would also be something to optimize. It's not something that people think too much about, but it has a huge impact on how people develop, and thus on how society develops.
I’m not sure exactly what would be best, but I have a few thoughts:
The idea of social value is horrible. In schools today, you grow up caring way too much about how you look, who you’re friends with, how athletic you are, how smart you are, how much success you have with the opposite sex… how “good” you are. This bleeds into our society, and does a lot to cause unhappiness. It should be avoided, if possible.
Relationships are based largely on repeated, unplanned interactions + an environment that encourages you to let your guard down. I think that schools should actively provide these situations to students, and should allow you to experience these situations with a variety of types of people (right now you only get these repeated, unplanned interactions with the cohort of students you happen to be with, which limits you in a lot of ways).
Rationality
I propose that rationality be a core part of the curriculum (the benefits of making people better at reasoning would trickle down into many aspects of life). I think that this should be done in two ways: the first is by teaching the ideas of rationality, and the second is by using them.
The ideas of rationality can be found right here. Some examples:
After the ideas are taught, they should be practiced. The best way that I could think of to do this is to have kids write and critique essays (writing is just thought on paper, and it’s often easier to argue in writing than it is in verbal conversation). Students could pick a topic that they want to talk about, make claims, and argue for them. And then they could read each others’ essays, and point out what they think are mistakes in each others’ reasoning (this should all be supervised by a teacher, who should probably be more of a benevolent dictator, and who should also contribute points to the discussions).
I think that some competition and social pressure could be useful too; maybe it’d be a good idea to divide students into classes, where the most insightful points are voted upon, and the number of mistakes committed would be tallied and posted.
Writing
Right now, essays in schools are a joke. No one takes them seriously. Students b.s. them, and teachers barely read them, and hardly give any feedback. And they’re also always on english literature, which sends a bad message to kids about what an essay really is. Good writing isn’t taught or practiced, and it should be.
Levels of Action
Certain levels of action have impacts that are orders of magnitude bigger than others. I think that improving education this much would be a high level action, and have many positive effects that’ll trickle down into many aspects of society. I’ll let you speculate on what they are.