K-8 is primary school, right? Its value is mostly not in education. If it was it would look very different. Mastery based learning would be the norm, not unknow

K-8 is primary school, right? Its value is mostly not in education. If it was it would look very different. Mastery based learning would be the norm, not unknown. Spaced repetition would be incorporated everywhere so what was taught was retained. There would be no social advancement. The school system is enormously wasteful of time. It takes about 40 hours to teach a nine year old to read English and about the same time to cover the primary school Math curriculum with a 12 year old. If we took Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development seriously we wouldn’t spend so much time teaching children things they’ll pick up tens of times faster in three years. I don’t know what primary school would look like if we cared about children learning but it wouldn’t look much like the current system.