If you recall your schooling and you watch the trends in society you know that being educated isn't actually seen as something "cool", or desirable during the periods that education is supposed to be occurring. There are exceptions, but I am talking about the norm, the majority.
Step one to fixing educational problems is to fix that.
We went from a time when books were rare and considered luxuries and people taught themselves and became philosophical scholars. This describes the majority of those we call the Founding Father's of the United States.
People still studied science and might even be considered scientists. They simply followed the scientific method.
The concept of Universities existed but they were not common. This would change rather quickly.
It was a time when people valued knowing how to read and being educated.
One common thing about these great minds of the past is they loved learning. That is actually where the word philosopher is derived from. The love of knowledge, the love of learning, etc.
I personally think that getting people to like learning, and even love learning should be the number one goal. If that goal can be achieved then the rest of any goals become much easier to accomplish.
At the moment the push seems to be to make people not want to learn.
We are heavily in a very corrupted version of the Prussian Education system model where the word "School" comes from. It standardized a lot of things but some of its creators noted as positives its ability to create obedience, and conformity of thought.
That may sound good to some but it is not that far removed from the concept of indoctrination which very much describes the education system today.
It no longer seems to be so much about the love of learning. It seems much more focused on lowering any barriers to resisting the programming they want to use on the minds of people.
Part of doing this is to make people less skilled at critical thinking, reason, research, and long term thinking patterns. If you can reduce those it becomes easier to make them think that repeating what someone they perceive as an authority figure says is equivalent to them being educated.
Being a puppet mouth piece of someone else is not a sign of education.
It is a sign of indoctrination.
They also increasingly are encouraging people to be enslaved by their emotions and to let their emotions reign. They put a lot of emphasis on finding things to choose to be offended by. Yet they also haven't educated people well enough so the majority of them don't even realize they are making a choice. They could just as easily choose not to be offended.
Yet this type of thinking helps them. If people are divided and fighting over petty things that don't actually matter in the grand scheme of things (like skin color, and pronouns) then they won't have much time to spend paying attention to what the authoritarian agenda is. They will be too busy being offended to stop and question whether what the authority told them was true actually makes sense or not.
The first step I think is to make people love learning.
That is the first stepping stone on the path.
There are many things to do after that but to me I consider that one of the most important. I also think the current education system works to rip any such love out of people. Many people only discover that love after they have graduated and managed to operate outside of that system for awhile. Get away from the programming, and be exposed to the right information at the right time and you might start to think. The seeds might grow.
We need to not be putting so much of this in the hands of chance.
Job #1, stop beating the innocence and wonder out of children.
Education is not even in the top 10 of things that school is designed for.
It is amazing how stupid stuff is taught (forced down children's throats) by govern-cement schools. Complete waste of a child's time and brain cells.
These low security prisons should be abolished from the face of the earth.
I teach at the university level.
Unfortunately, many students today have zero desire to learn.
My instructor evaluation scores are often bimodal. I get high scores from students who enjoy learning and low scores from those who are merely wanting to check boxes (with minimal effort) so they can purchase a degree.
Yes. There should be no purchasing a degree as far as I am concerned. Those people depending upon the degree get hired at a higher wage and often can't actually do the job.
That's what I did for my kids. I rolled my own version of unschooling because I know that kids are vacuums, designed to acquire the necessary knowledge it takes to succeed as an adult during their childhood years, and I considered my role as a facilitator of their self-directed educations. My boys are adults and successful today, as well as remaining readers that know how to learn things they want to know.
I reckon that is a successful education.
Thanks!