You’d be surprised all the things you learn k-8.
If you ask a current PhD student how hard things are and then wait 10 years and ask how hard their PhD was you will get totally different answers.
The school system is enormously wasteful of time. It takes about 40 hours to teach a nine year old to read English and about the same time to cover the primary school Math curriculum with a 12 year old.
If we took Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development seriously we wouldn’t spend so much time teaching children things they’ll pick up tens of times faster in three years. I don’t know what primary school would look like if we cared about children learning but it wouldn’t look much like the current system.
ZPD works, but nobody has been able to implement this at-scale, let alone in the K-8 public school system.
I'm not sure this is true. From my own experience studying math, I often heard people remark upon how hard it must be and how only a small subset of people would ever be able to understand the concepts in a graduate level math course. I don't agree with this at all.
In my opinion, the reality is that learning is incremental, and everything new builds upon something that you've previously learned (hopefully). This is particularly true with math. I don't think that I had to work any harder to learn linear algebra in undergrad than I did to learn differential calc in highschool. I think the delta in difficulty between geometry and algebra, pre-calc and calc 1, diff eq and real analysis, is basically the same. But that is only true if you have a solid understanding of whatever came before.
This is of course a minor nitpick with your last point, because I agree with your overall point that k-8 learning is important. I think it's important precisely because of the reasons I mentioned before: you need to have a strong foundation in 'last years' concepts if you are going to succeed in learning this years.
Very much depends on the school district. In many urban school districts, it's better than being in the house, but its hardly enriching.
Nobody is suggesting the end of classroom education. The question is whether doing the best we can with distance learning for a time and postponement of classroom eduction until better treatments and/or vaccines come on line is a better choice. It is really not a big sacrifice to ensure the safety of about 4 million teachers and maybe another million or two staff persons.
Assuming the death rate is optimistically only 0.2%, that is about 12,000 teachers and staff deaths. Ignoring the thousands of other deaths originating from these cases, are you really saying that 12,000 deaths is a realistic price to pay so your child can go back into the classroom NOW rather than next year? Really?
The fact that this would be a very bad choice seems an "obvious fact and not open for debate."
Unless most of your teachers are living in nursing homes, your numbers are way off.
Similarly, whatever factor you apply to count deaths, you can only count deaths above the baseline when considering the change in school policy.
It’s quite far from your side of “obvious fact and not open for debate”, IMO.
Not with that attitude, nope sure isn’t.
It is up for debate. I know for a fact you’re wrong. I was educated outside of any schooling system until the 9th grade. I learned basic math and was a voracious reader. I walked into 9th grade without missing a beat.