I'll probably post more elsewhere...or maybe just write my magnum opus and sell it...
I think the main problem with public education, which we've somewhat touched on, is conflict-of-interest. A lot of different characters, including the Puritans, John Dewey, Benjamin Bloom, the Rockefeller Foundation, the US Supreme Court, and numerous others, stirred up the pot with their own agendas. I think the basic problem was that the temptation to use school for indoctrination was too great.
If school shouldn't be indoctrination, what SHOULD it be? I think this is a question on which a lot of educational traditionalists have gotten lost. Seeing that "educational reform" has been a disaster, they've tried to return to what the school system used to be--back when it was little more than finishing school for rich boys and girls.
MnJRutherford touched on the issue of practical skills. What I perceive is too much "WHAT" and not enough "HOW".
0110 1101 1100 0110 0001 1001 1110 0100 1010
Data isn't terribly meaningful unless it RELATES to other data...that relates to other data...that somewhere along the line relates to something you care about. Too much "education" is of the form "a cow is a quadruped". Essentially useless information. Useful information, that actually relates to something, would be something like "to milk a cow, do this...and this...then this...".
Instead of filling their heads with information, useful or otherwise, I suggest filling their heads with process. Start out with the process for learning new information! That way, you bootstrap the process.
For example, teach them how to read. But that's not good enough. Why not teach them how to "speed read"? That's when you read about as fast as you can think, because you stop subvocalizing and also because you start chunking in bigger and bigger chunks of text, until you can read a whole column of data using your "peripheral vision" (not really--but the point is that you don't focus on a narrow bit of text, but spread your vision over the whole column of text).
Supposedly some people can do a whole page at once. Howard Berg takes roughly a second to scan a page and summarize it.
But that's not good enough! Why not teach them how to prime their brains to pick out specific information? For example, if you go to the problem set following the chapter and read the questions BEFORE reading the chapter, you will tend to pick out and retain whatever information is needed to answer the questions with significantly higher accuracy than if you do it the usual order. That's why some advanced textbooks ask questions at the beginning of the chapter as well as at the end.
But that's not good enough!
We can improve his retention significantly. At the very least, teach him to imagine elements of the material he is being taught. "Visualize"--or better yet, represent it in all 3 major sensory channels. I would also teach how to make stories out of information. Our brains remember a story better than abstractions. I would also suggest certain synesthesia-like training, to map information in one sensory channel to another at will, to translate information in a hard-to-remember format, such as digits, into another form that is easy to remember.
Which is how I can easily remember that
pi = 3.14159265358979323846264338379502884197169399375105820974944592307816406296208998628034825342117067
off the top of my head. Might be overkill to memorize pi to 100 decimal places, but think of all the physics constants that kids could easily memorize. Or historical dates. Or long lists, or sequences of events, in perfect order. How about mathematical rules, such as integration and derivation rules? Synesthesia (mapping one sensory channel to another one, either voluntarily, or not) is how Daniel Trammet learned to speak Icelandic in 1 week.
What if Johnny is bored out of his wits with the reading material? Guess what...we can fix that too!
Oddly enough it actually helps if Johnny is reading at the same speed he thinks, because it cuts down on mind-wandering problems. And it helps if he is visualizing, because for one thing it sharpens attention. But we can do better than that...we can train Johnny to control his own mood!
We could train him to make the mental and emotional connections between boring material, and something he's more interested in. Like say he hates math, but wants to be a rocket scientist. We can connect the excitement of one to the other, and squash the boredom. This by the way is one of the most useful things you are ever likely to learn in your life. Imagine being able to psych yourself to do something you feel like you HAVE to do...because it's a step on the path to what you really want...and coming out with more motivation and enthusiasm.
So one possible strategy would be for the "teacher" (parent, grandparent, sibling, other community mentor) to teach the student strategies for learning, and then have the student take the lead on acquiring information.
