They teach cursive in elementary school, whose primary function is socialisation and childcare, not education. I taught kindergarten (in English) to children wh

They teach cursive in elementary school, whose primary function is socialisation and childcare, not education. I taught kindergarten (in English) to children who were native speakers of Chinese for four years. I know you can take a six year old with minimal exposure to English to grade level reading fluency in 50 weeks of 30 minute lessons 5 days a week because I’ve done it. I’m reliably informed by Chinese teachers that you can take a child who speaks Chinese (Mandarin), from illiterate to within the normal range of writing skill within three years, at more or less any age from elementary school to the end of high school. I regret I lost the citation but John Taylor Gatto writes in one of his books that you can teach a nine year old to read English in 40 hours of instruction. I believe it, and the experience of teachers in Sudbury schools is that you can teach the entire elementary school math curriculum to a 12 year old in under 40 hours. The lowest figure I’ve heard for that feat is 20 hours. Homework in elementary school is just a waste of time, theft from children and their families. The research is clear that it’s ineffective in aiding learning prior to middle school at the earliest. An institution dedicated to teaching children would look very different to elementary, middle or high schools in any country’s public education system. They’d use mastery based learning rather than age based progression and spaced repetition at the most basic. Those particular educational techniques are more than a century old and used more or less nowhere. On a less iconoclastic note German elementary schools are mostly half day and French ones full day. There is no real difference in their graduates readiness for middle and high school. And kindergarten as mostly play systems have no worse and often better results than kindergarten as school lite systems. In Finland they don’t even teach kindergarteners to read. They do fine in the end. Elementary school is not primarily about education. Homework is not about education at all at that level.