The way people are educated should be restructured. Learning should be a lifelong achievement, not something that is done just to get a better job. If everyone always continued to learn in a structured manner, we would be better able to help humanity.
We should all be learning languages as children before we even enter grade school. Our brain learns languages best about the time we are learning to crawl and speak. There should be a system in place for parents to take babies to learn other languages. Then they would speak it to their social groups as they grew up. After a few generations everyone would be a polyglot. If it were free it would be a lot easier to accommodate. In a generation or two people would be able to teach the languages in their own home and just get reinforced at grade school.
Grade school is where we learn a great deal of the knowledge we will employ through our lives. K-8 is more than just what is in a schoolbook it is also rules of society. As it is we focus on teaching kids the base knowledge of what they will need to learn in high school. This is where kids learn how to read basic math and science and that is not a bad thing. People need to be educated, but the rigorous way we go about it takes away from childhood. Kids shouldn't have worries about homework or fears about tests. They should be more worried about figuring out who they are and what path in life they want to follow.
Around the end of eight grade kids should have guidance sessions with people who are trained to help them find a career. The kids would be able to tour around and pick the area of interest they wish to pursue. Instead of following the traditional path of high school, kids would try out what field they were interested in. If a student wanted to be involved in the sciences at eighth grade they would start touring the possible fields and looking into what they field entailed. Then they would start to study in their field of choice for two years. If they wanted to change their field at the end of two years they could, but this could only be done a limited amount of time. They would have to work for a certain amount of time to pay back for their training.
Once the training was paid back the kids could try a new field to work in if they found the field they choose wasn't what they wanted. If it was what they wanted or they wanted to progress in that field they would continue education in that subject. If the teens wanted to though they could choose to switch fields every couple of years until they found what was right for them. I do not know what limits should be imposed or if any should be when it comes to people switching fields.
This is a basic idea of how to restructure the education system. I look at I now and it is adequate, but it could be so much more. Learning is great and should be done for more than just bettering social status, it should be done to better everyone's lives.
