I agree that in a perfect world, you could progress in each subject individually. It simply does not make sense to say “we will not allow you to learn more math, because you suck at history” (or vice versa).
This does not necessarily imply that minimal requirements need to be removed. I could imagine a school that insists on you attending the subjects you suck at… without preventing you from simultaneously studying other subjects at a higher level.
As Dagon said, the exact distribution is mostly irrelevant for this argument. In a world where skills are normally distributed, the same reform would still be an improvement.
The elephant in the classroom is childcare. Most parents need it. A few don’t. If you provide mass childcare, it makes sense to provide some education at the same time. If you don’t need the childcare, the forced coupling of childcare and education is annoying. Maybe we should decouple childcare from education, starting by decoupling teaching from certification—if children are tested by an external institution, it makes it easy to also test homeschooled children fairly using the same system. (Note: by supporting homeschooling you also support all kinds of experiments in education, which can formally pretend to be homeschooling. This in my opinion is even more important than homeschooling as such.) And if testing is external, it also makes it easy to test each subject at individual speed.
I agree that the positive extremes matter in education. The person who in future invents the cure for cancer, should be allowed to progress as quickly as possible, without being artificially slowed down to the level of the average student; even the average student would benefit from this rule.
I agree that in a perfect world, you could progress in each subject individually. It simply does not make sense to say “we will not allow you to learn more math, because you suck at history” (or vice versa).
This does not necessarily imply that minimal requirements need to be removed. I could imagine a school that insists on you attending the subjects you suck at… without preventing you from simultaneously studying other subjects at a higher level.
As Dagon said, the exact distribution is mostly irrelevant for this argument. In a world where skills are normally distributed, the same reform would still be an improvement.
The elephant in the classroom is childcare. Most parents need it. A few don’t. If you provide mass childcare, it makes sense to provide some education at the same time. If you don’t need the childcare, the forced coupling of childcare and education is annoying. Maybe we should decouple childcare from education, starting by decoupling teaching from certification—if children are tested by an external institution, it makes it easy to also test homeschooled children fairly using the same system. (Note: by supporting homeschooling you also support all kinds of experiments in education, which can formally pretend to be homeschooling. This in my opinion is even more important than homeschooling as such.) And if testing is external, it also makes it easy to test each subject at individual speed.
I agree that the positive extremes matter in education. The person who in future invents the cure for cancer, should be allowed to progress as quickly as possible, without being artificially slowed down to the level of the average student; even the average student would benefit from this rule.