There's something quietly poetic about a thread on declining cognitive performance where one of the top comment is "here's a video if you don't want to read."

The workforce and country in your proposed system will be pretty dysfunctional if “nobody speaks the same language”.

The reality is there’s no single way to learn, but there’s plenty of good-enough ways.

I agree with you in principle to an extent, but many would argue that standardized cookie-cutter education produced what gains we had and education policies which tried to accommodate diversity of thought are responsible for the declines due to lack of rigor and any real standards. "Reading by vibes" [1] directly led to declines in literacy, and there are attempts in math to accommodate different styles of thinking which may be undermining rigor there as well.

I suspect teachers are caught in a catch-22 of only being able to teach what's on the curriculum and nothing else, so they have no room for flexibility to engage students, while also being under pressure to produce high grades; but when the curriculum is garbage and the students aren't interested...grading standards tend to be what's compromised. The schools and parents are happy their kid has A's, teachers get to keep their jobs, and students may graduate highschool without having ever read a book cover to cover. [2]

1: https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-education/the-rise-...

2: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/11/the-eli...

Isn't it the opposite?

I don't know if you've seen curriculums recently but they are totally about individualized education. Between IEPs and 504s, accommodations are made for nearly anything now. Students are put all into one large class, no more AP, Advanced, Standard because this caused hurt feelings for kids that could not make the advanced class. Students are pooled and the rationale is the more advanced students will help the less advanced students (!).

What this means in the classroom is teachers can not go as fast, advanced students get bored, every person has their own INDIVIDUALIZED test (3 instead of 4 questions, no write in questions, landscape instead of portrait, etc). This drives teachers absolutely insane and they cannot teach at any efficient level. Grading is so bad, teachers structure their course to have less exams because grading ten different quizzes and exams cannot be optimized.

A lot of this is parents disbelief that their little Johnny is not the next einstein so they torment teachers via policy hacks to give their children advantages. Admin doesn't care because they'll just fire "low performers" lol.

There is the above problem, and then there are the revisionist math ideas that common core and friends produce better outcomes instead of "rote" math. Well, math has been taught via rote for decades, possibly centuries, and people under that scheme learned math in a way that they became draughtsman and scientists, so maybe there is some proof in the pudding. My friends who did common core are barely math literate, can't calculate a tip even if you give them the hack: move decimal left by one place and times by two.

Before you come at me for being ableist, remember that this means even with these accommodations people are doing worse.

Also, no phonics?! Wtf?

People <25 in normal jobs (retail) cannot do simple fractions of 1/2 and 1/4.

Something is wrong. I'm not saying these guys are right but don't blame standardized education which was systematized in the 70s-90s just yet. I would posit that hostile admins/policy, dumb revisionist ideas that have no basis in history, and NO NATIONAL CURRICULUM. Why we do not have a national curriculum seems crazy to me, but there must be some reason. Surely we can agree on that at least.

I agree with you that right now is the best time for individual augmentation for education, and we should wield that power for good. But I do think it can be in service of a system.

EDIT: just realized this is a blog post length, sorry. It is one of my pet issues, n=3, mom works with people at deli that cannot do fractions (they get fired, up to 20 so far), teacher friend 15y in history has to make custom exams, and publisher friend who sees young writers (<25, n=??) can't sound out words.

If old teaching styles / standardized testing / standardized schooling represent this moribund, stagnant thing that haven't changed at all and haven't kept pace over the past century, why wouldn't you expect measured learning performance to hold steady as well instead of declining? The students basically have the same brains that they've always had. There isn't as much lead in the water as there used to be, in the atmosphere as there used to be, and parents take prenatal vitamins. They're starting from the same raw stuff that they've always been starting from, if not better. So why would they be getting worse? Children one generation ago didn't need individualized curricula and testing to achieve the performance that they got. Why does the current generation need that, and by what mechanism would that improve their performance?

> By 2050 no student in the school system should speak the same language.

That's a hard cap a ~7000 students world wide unless we start inventing new languages.

I can't tell if this comment is sarcasm