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> I've long wondered why education isn't just a bunch of different ladders that people can crawl at their own pace.

Just a guess: as far as I understood US parents are very good at lobbying schools administration, and a lot of them would hate to see that some kids are smarter or more advanced than theirs.

Now regarding your ladder idea, in some cantons in Switzerland and some Bundesländer in Germany the school system is split in 3 lanes:

- a "gymnasium" lane that prepares you for university, mostly focused on theory and go further into technical topics

- a "general" lane that prepares you for white collar apprenticeships, more general knowledge courses

- a "labour" lane that prepares you for blue collar apprenticeships, provide more practical courses and learning support

Lane names don't really matter as they are different from place to place, but that's the general idea. Also apprenticeships opportunities are not locked based on the lane you went to, that's just the general idea. And you have multiple ways to move from one lane to another at any point during your school life if you don't fit for some reasons, with some conditions (for example you need quite good grades to move from "general" to "gymnasium").

The difference I've seen between the Swiss and German approach is how early kids are split. In my swiss canton that was after our 6th grade, so roughly at around 13 year old. In Germany that's around 10 year old.

PS: keep in mind that both Switzerland and Germany have high level of autonomy for cantons/Bundesländers, so things can be drastically different from place to place.

When I grew up (in Malaysia) our high schools were like that: split into two general streams - arts/humanities streams and STEM streams.

The problem was there is a glamour to the STEM streams and so parents pushed kids towards that. If you got into the arts stream you were looked down upon

Yeah, we have similar issues with each lane becoming a way to judge people. And as a student you feel that you’re failing if you’re not in the one considered “the good one” by parents. I don’t know if that can be avoided.

This is not quite what I had in mind, though. I lived in Switzerland as well, and it seems more like a traditional education system where everyone in the academic stream still needs to learn a broad range of subjects at the same pace as each other. Also having a single cutoff time at roughly age 12 seems quite harsh to me.

I'm more thinking that you could learn English at an age-average pace while being ahead in math and physics, if that's what you wanted. Or vice versa. Qualifications would simply be a number of progressions that people could advance at their own leisure, perhaps with some sort of minimum so that you don't totally neglect certain core subjects.

Yep, I understand. I'm not aware of school systems going as far as what you describe. That's an interesting concept, though I'm not sure how practical that would be.

A set of random thoughts:

- I would expect that would require more teachers which is already a scarce resource in a lot of places

- Also, you mention mostly individual learning and progression, but I would also expect part of school to be about group learning, with topics such as languages that becomes more of an issue if you have part of the students ahead in English, some ahead in French, while other at average level for everything

- I guess that would make school classes a more fluid concept, where you are with your advanced math friends for 2 hours, then with kids from the average English course for 2 hours. So you don't have a common group of kids spending their school time together. I'm wondering what social environment that would be, e.g would that result in more or less bullying? More or less social cohesion? More or less difficult to build friendships? If you come from a disadvantageous background, won't you have more difficulties to mix with the ones who can access more advanced courses thanks to their parents? Of course they are open questions.

> I guess that would make school classes a more fluid concept, where you are with your advanced math friends for 2 hours, then with kids from the average English course for 2 hours. So you don't have a common group of kids spending their school time together.

This is typical of the current American education system, at least from middle school or junior high onward, where you tend to have roughly six different classes per day with different students in each class. Although math is the only class where they will typically move advanced students ahead. You definitely lose the social cohesion that is present in elementary/primary school where you spend the whole day with the same group of kids.

That’s interesting, I wasn’t aware that was a thing. Thanks for sharing

The problem with that its in large part class based - come from a working class background or have learning disabilities you get pigeonholed into the lower tracks - with less resources.

Jumping tracks is hard and before the EU intervened almost impossible.

Yes, that's definitely an issue. I had 3-4 different version of the system I described during my school time as my swiss canton was struggling to find the correct balance, each time you could see kids finding themselves stuck because of a lack of parental resources or other reasons. Moving from one stream to another is possible, though of course that varies from place to place, but that definitely requires a strong investment from the student in both time and effort if they want to switch to a stream with more opportunities.

I would agree. The testing used to stream kids is noisy at best and systematically biased at worst against kids with educated parents.

The other way around I think you mean

That's fair, but I don't think that's a critic against streams. Even without stream kids still face the same issue. Kids with available and educated parents always have an advantage compared to others.

there is a lot of social nastiness in school. Kids may be prodigies academically, but likely they are simply not equipped to handle older kids emotionally or even physically.

The truly gifted are rare enough that the system probably would be mostly like it is today. Public schools are essentially factory production lines. You can get what you are looking for but not in the mass production factory.

My daughter is going into 7th grade in private school. There are several kids who are 3 years younger than her in her class. The small class sizes and flexibility of a private school makes it possible.

My daughter was in an excellent public school in 3rd grade with a lot of asians. There were kids doing long division in kinder. The school's solution was to create 5 tracks in each grade and each track was only around 4 weeks. The kids took a test at the beginning of the track and got placed in the appropriate level for their ability in just that subject area. The good thing was that kids didnt get permanently tracked, they could move up or down depending on their level in a particular area.

There were five 3rd grade classes and when they split for the tracks each teacher took one level.

This wouldnt really help the exceptionally gifted that would need to be more than a few grade levels ahead. But I think the topics that I was aware of were probably 2 levels ahead of grade level.

> What is the rationale for keeping everyone together, other than timetabling issues?

That's exactly the issue, together with too many children per teacher. Unless you can adequately replace a teacher with digital learning solutions (still very sparse; even worse in non-english speaking countries), any increase in "own pace" would result in an increase of teacher-student time.

Or just fund public schools at the level that private schools do and have reasonable class sizes.

Or just normalize school funding at a national level and get rid of the racist classism our predecessors built into law. Good schools should stand out for their teachers not how much tax the residents pay.

Or attach funding to each kid and let schools compete.

I am not suggesting a be all end all fix for education. Obviously, school choice has its place in any healthy system.

The curriculum in New South Wales, Australia, is changing to be like this.

Students of a certain grade (and thus their teachers) are currently assessed on if they have a certain competency or not. This means a student coming into Year 7 (first year of high school) is expected to know all pre-requisites and is taught only the new content. Depending on which primary school they attended, and their own learning, this can be very hit-and-miss.

Now the intent is facilitate teaching students what they need to learn, but this becomes a lot harder to measure (and to measure the teachers).

A program called "Maths Pathways" is being used in some schools, that isn't tied directly to the new curriculum but is very similar in intent.

It's a computer based program which is self-paced and focuses on progression through the different ideas rather than teaching everyone the same thing this week.

Putting aside stupid cultural bullshit logistics are a non-trivial issue. If you or your parents get involved with Medicare you get to see that it is a mess of different subtley different options. The information overhead isn't free.

It seems like an area where urban areas could do better in general via supporting specialization yet in practice they often wind up infamously mixed in quality in ways totally seperate from specializations. Digitization has been attempted but hasn't had the best of luck.

While we can certainly do better solving it would be non-trivial even if we in the societal sense gave it appropriate resources in funding, oversight, and intellectual effort.

The rationale is to make good soldiers for 19th century warfare.

For that goal, discipline and conformity are more important than maximizing individual achievement.