by anderson » Fri Sep 09, 2011 4:32 pm
Well, there's going to be a complicated sort of Gantt chart for the project of "preliminary education of the young person." (A person acquires a certain set of knowledge, skills, and attitudes that prepare for post-secondary education, whether university or vocational training, as well as for life in general. When the physiological/neurological limits are worked in, and the pre-requisite inter-relationships of knowledge/skills(mental and psychomotor)/attitudes that influence sequencing of curriculum content across different subject domains, I'm not sure how much the project time line can be reasonably compressed for most people.
But I do agree that there is a lot of surplus time in there.
So, while it might not be reasonable to expect to get the whole task done before the age 17/18 it finishes at typically now, I think it is fair to say that there is not enough solid learning material there to justify the 180 days a year X 7 hours a day of instruction each day X 13 years of instruction received by each child.
Would probably be more productive to have the students go to class maybe 3 hours a day and then spend the rest consolidating with some sort of realistic practical or creative activity that furthers the child's ability to be a useful healthy member of the world. Unfortunately a lot of the scheduling is worked around the constraints of the normal workday as it applies to parents and educators. I.e. Teachers want a normal workday and parents need/want their kids to be usefully supervised for most of the 9-5.