re: Smug PhD gets put in her place

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So do I, which means we waste a shotload on public education for people who shouldn't be in the system.

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Absolutely.

IMO this is how it should go:

1. Public school is not obligatory. At any age or grade level. It's a public service offered but not required. It has standards that must be met to stay eligible to attend.

2. It's not a mechanism to be used for babysitting, welfare distribution, social engineering, etc. It's there to teach academic subjects. You go, learn, and go home. Should take maybe 4 hours a day.

3. It should only exist in its current form (well, it's current form minus the above) through maybe 5-6 grade. Once students have learned to read and mastered basic math, the structure changes.

4. From approximately grade 6 through high school, the only subjects that require face to face teacher to student interaction would be certain STEM subjects. Everything else is available online and students can access it and work through it at their own pace. One standardized national curriculum, everybody knows what's in it. If students want to cheat on online tests, fine. Because there will be a graduation test to graduate (given in person) at the end of the curriculum, so they're only delaying the inevitable.

5. Schools could be MUCH smaller and require MUCH less staff/faculty. In addition to the STEM classes still taught in traditional manner, there could be some teachers standing by to help tutor students having trouble in the online curricula.

6. The graduation test would be like the current SAT/ACT—given in person, changed every test cycle.

Even if taxpayers paid for every student in the country to get a new laptop every three years AND paid for internet access for every student in the country, we'd still save a giant bucketful of money doing it this way in the medium to long term. We'd have to develop the online curriculum and that would be a job, but after that it would only need to be updated every so often and would just run by itself.

And I am convinced that the quality of education and learning (for those who chose to avail themselves of it) would soar far above what it is now.