In my opinion, the standard English/Math/Science that we expect elementary and high school students to learn are not difficult. I mean this as more than just “they were easy for me”; I think that with good teachers, the right motivation, curiosity, clear relations to other knowledge or interests, and paying attention, any reasonably intelligent child can learn them with far fewer hours of class time dedicated to the task than the current average. This would free up a lot of time to learn such “supplementary” material.
In fact, I think that the supplementary material is really, really helpful for developing interests in the core subjects. Reading and writing are, to a fairly large extent, the practice of thinking. If someone has had experiences facing discrimination and wants to relate their experience or what they think is going on societally, they will generally (or can easily be led to) learn to write well to express this. If someone is puzzled by what’s happening with the population of some animal around their house, they will be willing to learn basic ecological models and the associated math.
Of course, actually implementing any of these—especially good teachers—would require rather large changes to education as it is currently done, which seems difficult, to say the least.
In my opinion, the standard English/Math/Science that we expect elementary and high school students to learn are not difficult. I mean this as more than just “they were easy for me”; I think that with good teachers, the right motivation, curiosity, clear relations to other knowledge or interests, and paying attention, any reasonably intelligent child can learn them with far fewer hours of class time dedicated to the task than the current average. This would free up a lot of time to learn such “supplementary” material.
In fact, I think that the supplementary material is really, really helpful for developing interests in the core subjects. Reading and writing are, to a fairly large extent, the practice of thinking. If someone has had experiences facing discrimination and wants to relate their experience or what they think is going on societally, they will generally (or can easily be led to) learn to write well to express this. If someone is puzzled by what’s happening with the population of some animal around their house, they will be willing to learn basic ecological models and the associated math.
Of course, actually implementing any of these—especially good teachers—would require rather large changes to education as it is currently done, which seems difficult, to say the least.