Alternatively, this has nothing to do with an outdated curriculum and is about removing a distraction that impacts learning of anything!
30 kids having to sit still 6 hours a day and do nothing more than listen and take notes? That's boring as fuck. Even worse as a lot of the stuff they learn is something they'll literally never even think about once in their life and they'll have to forget again after the test to make room for more useless crap. And every attempt to innovate gets shot down somewhere, so the teachers aren't really willing to adapt either - when I went to school a decade ago we had more than one teacher who used the same transparent sheets on an overhead projector that he made (and copied) decades ago, written on a typewriter.
Smaller class sizes, more teachers, interactive and engaging lessons... that's all stuff that only the private schools (Waldorf and friends) provide and it actually works out even with conventional metrics, but these are expensive and have issues on their own (e.g. the tendency to attract pedos and weirdos, of which there have been a fair share of scandals).
Yes, I'm fed up with the sorry state of our education system.
Meanwhile, Asian countries continue to excel... but at the cost of hundreds of thousands of broken young souls, of families going into absurd debt, and of suicide.
At the same time, Western politicians rarely seem to listen to the scientists and instead prefer to do nothing at all - this is extremely dangerous for the future of our economies.
To me, the most important thing is to give schools and teachers the resources (staff, funding, proper and maintained buildings) they need to give every single child the best education they can without falling victim to the horrors of Asian education culture, because otherwise our economy is getting fucked.
Once you start to demand that schools become more entertaining than the most addictive thing the world's entertainment technologists can dream up, you've kind of lost sight of the mission of a school.
> 30 kids having to sit still 6 hours a day and do nothing more than listen and take notes? That's boring as fuck.
Also not how school works, at least not in the Netherlands. There are lots of group projects and multidisciplinary lesson arcs and so on. Maybe in China?
> that's all stuff that only the private schools (Waldorf and friends) provide
Waldorf is an available option for public education in the Netherlands. Likewise Montessori, at the secondary level as well.
Maybe it's time to put the world's best entertainment technologies to use for our educational systems instead of fucking Candy Crush.
> Also not how school works, at least not in the Netherlands. There are lots of group projects and multidisciplinary lesson arcs and so on. Maybe in China?
I did my Abitur in Bavaria, Germany in 2010. My 13 years of school life and ~60% of my 2-year stint in academia were precisely what I described, and the generation after me that profited from the infamous "G8" reforms for Bavarian Gymnasium schools reported just the same. New books, finally (one of mine still had the fucking Soviet Union...), but same old teaching methods. Something like smaller classes would have been impossible due to a lack of teachers.
> Waldorf is an available option for public education in the Netherlands. Likewise Montessori, at the secondary level as well.
Kids shouldn't have to hope their parents know that this is an option or have the money for that to receive good education. Education is a human right and the only chance societies have for a survivable future.
People aren't idiots. Kids aren't idiots either. They want more than mindless entertainment. A school computer with Scratch can easily compete with a platformer on the phone. School in general is in a good position to be empowering, but the system prefers to be oppressive instead.