so about that point

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/194005/classless-education/5

I found this a useful diversion. But I really found something interesting on this page, after several pages of discussion as to the enlightened purpose of educating socially aware persons for the practice and engagement of democracy and the expansion of opportunity.

"In athletics, at least, the coaches are expected to develop only promising material. No one complains if his undersized son with awkward legs does not become a football hero. Some fathers, however, seem to demand the intellectual equivalent of such a miracle. We expect our college health departments to direct each student into that form of sport which is suited to his physique and power. We need a parallel form of educational guidance in both schools and colleges to assist the development of the skills of brain and hands."

It's funny how people can so easily use the Michael Jordan account to make a point about the relative tools people have for the acquisition and use of education.
"I see signs everywhere of enormous strides forward in such matters. Our educational pattern is becoming daily more diversified; a recognition of the need for a radically different type of education is growing."

That was the key point though. Note the that the practice of education was becoming more diversified, not standardized. We have taken a badly wrong turn over the decades in between this article and today. I think, as the article suggests with Jefferson or Franklin relating to his own time, the author would find today's world has somehow ended up in an intellectual utopia (by which I mean no place, not the idyllic paradise). Educational aims are to be diverse, schooling in the traditional sense has no utility for all people. But to presume that it does makes certain accommodations as to the actual development of some critical skills virtually impossible. Severe emphasis on flagging mathematics and science scores has undermined the original premise of social functionality (namely the ability to discourse with fellow men on the topics of the day with originally arrived at conclusions, not sound bytes and buzzwords). We will soon find that our standardizing approaches will defeat the relative subjectivity of writing, History or other social sciences at the cost of educating a class of people who have little capacity beyond computational skills and the regurgitation of scientific theory (and not the research abilities to expound upon it, nor the ingenuity to take it in new directions or make practicalable inventions of it). I shudder to think what this current generation of 'educated' children will be incapable of, and what new costs this will impose on the rest of us.