Great Ideas in Public Education

If you were going to build a school system from scratch, how many of the following ideas and beliefs would you embrace?

1. All children of a certain age are equally ready to learn certain concepts and attain certain skills.
2. All children should be expected to progress through their learning at the same rate and master concepts and skills at the same time.
3. The best way to learn is to read from a book or to listen to a lecturer, and then to write down answers to a lot of questions.
4. The best way to learn is to shift focus from one topic to another every 40-50 minutes.
5. Teachers should be judged by what they cover more than by what their students learn.
6. Individual teachers should have complete autonomy in deciding what students should learn, when they should learn it, and how they should demonstrate their learning.
7. Teacher salaries and incentives should be based entirely on how many years they have spent in the profession.
8. Student progress and graduation should be based entirely on how many years they have spent in a classroom.
9. While virtually everything in our culture and society has changed in the last 100 years, the way in which we organize our schools and teach our children is perfect and need never change.
10. Because virtually everything in our culture and society has changed in the last 100 years, the history and values of the past have nothing to teach our children, and need not be given much attention in school. (Specifically, if certain things that motivated people and drove history are things we no longer believe in or find palatable, we should never talk about them in school. Ever.)