Radical education reform -- needed and possible

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As noted elsewhere, in another thread, there are now lots of educational videos on YouTube that do a much better job of teaching than most schools do.

I believe that traditional classrooms are obsolete and that schools need to be radically re-envisioned. My proposed reforms would benefit all children, especially neurodivergent kids, but also NT kids as well.

With the advent of today's computer technology, education can and should be radically individualized. At least for MOST parts of education, there is, in my opinion, no longer any need to keep an entire classroom full of kids in lock-step with each other. Instead, kids could individually watch videos that vastly surpass the teaching abilities of the average teacher, and, for each video, there could be an accompanying individualized problem set for the student to work on.

In-person teachers would NOT be obsolete, but their role would radically change. Instead of lecturing an entire class, they would meet individually with each student (and sometimes their parents) to give feedback on their problem sets, and to help the student select a lesson plan for the coming week, and to provide supplemental tutoring as needed.

A more traditional style would still be needed for anything with a hands-on component, e.g. a lab course, an art course, and probably most vocational courses. Also, for many kids, learning to read might best be done in a small group of kids (led by an adult) who take turns reading aloud.

But, for most purely academic content, there is no reason not to allow students wide latitude as to the order in which they learn stuff. And, for each topic (especially each math topic), the student could choose from a wide selection of videos and problem sets, depending on what the student finds most interesting. (For example, students who are into sports could get lots of math word problems involving their favorite sport, whereas students who are into dolls could get lots of math word problems involving things like the amount of cloth needed to make some particular doll's clothing.)

The reforms I am proposing should NOT be sold as a way to save money on teachers. They aren't. Teachers would still have plenty of work to do -- it would just be a different kind of work, some of which would be more labor-intensive than traditional teaching. For example, grading highly-individualized problem sets is a lot more work than grading the same problem set for an entire class.

The point of my proposed reforms isn't to save money, but to improve education, by (1) replacing lectures with videos that are far more excellent than the average teacher's lectures could possibly ever be, (2) making education more fun for students, by tailoring lessons and problem sets to their individual interests, and (3) harnessing the student's individual strengths in ways that can't be done in a traditional lock-step classroom.

Ideally, education would become fun enough that most kids with ADHD would no longer need to be medicated to hold their attention.

Also there would no longer be any need for "quiet hands," "whole body listening," and other such banes of special ed as practiced in today's world.