Think bigger - what kind of 12-year-olds will come out?
Consider 8-hour school days: 3 hours in lunch/PE/hallways leaves 5 hours of group lectures. If the teachers spent the whole time in tutoring individual students in their 30-person classrooms, that's 10 minutes for you each day.
What happens when you get hours of individualized learning alternated with deliberate practice? Years of school compressed into months. With half of every day left over for socializing, athletics and exploration.
Its not really hard to imagine a better system - almost anything would be better.
I agree, but I suspect we'll discover that while we may indeed be extending childhood for no really good reason under the current regime, that it will also never really be feasible to have 12-year-olds that are ready to be high-functioning members of our society and call them "done" with schooling. (And I didn't even say "independent" high-functioning members of society.) But they could certainly be much further down that road than they are today.
I meant the 20-year-old more as just as an arbitrary line in the sand, not that everybody will be "in the system" all the way up to that date necessarily.
Consider 8-hour school days: 3 hours in lunch/PE/hallways leaves 5 hours of group lectures. If the teachers spent the whole time in tutoring individual students in their 30-person classrooms, that's 10 minutes for you each day.
What happens when you get hours of individualized learning alternated with deliberate practice? Years of school compressed into months. With half of every day left over for socializing, athletics and exploration.
Its not really hard to imagine a better system - almost anything would be better.