Nice article. I think an essential point to make could be Get out of the way. As Sugata Mitra's hole-in-the-wall experiment in India has shown, if children have the rudimentary tools - in this case an old outdoor computer - and are challenged in an unorthodox way to teach themselves about something, they can learn much more than one would anticipate. He has also done some interesting work on collaborative learning. Watch his TedTalk, he is a very charming speaker.

I appreciate the emphasis you place on critical thinking, and to accompany it I would also suggest another point teach children how to learn systematically without supervision.

• I personally am continually shocked at how many students I see that don't know how to use a dictionary properly, or have never even opened one thanks to smartphones.
• Taking notes in class below the university level has practically vanished from our public schools, and often when told to kids just don't know how.
• Further, real library skills are fading, researching in a library is essentially obsolete below the university level thanks to the deification of the internet. If the electrical grid fails in the future, entire generations of people won't know how to find a book in the library on how to fix it.

This is the reason there are so many courses at the universities that are about teaching students how to research and learn on their own in the first two years, because they don't learn it beforehand. Even these introductory courses are fading at the undergraduate level and being rescheduled for graduate students instead.

I am in what my colleagues call 'the trenches' of public education now, and I taught at the university level for many years, so I am under no illusions as to the successful nature of public schools today. Nor are many of my colleagues. It is surprising how many teachers view educating children to be successful in the world as a kind of battle against ignorance and apathy. Most of them however absolutely balk when I advocate home schooling . Upon showing them the research however, many changed their tune. That is a scary concept for teachers and teacher unions however, because it basically advocates getting rid of a ton of jobs. Even though in a complete home school world there would be room for professional teachers, there would by necessity be far fewer than there are today. And any attempt to reform the education system in many countries has to go through the unions sooner or later.

As to solutions, as it has been noted in the discussion here, inside of the present system any real reform is highly unlikely. The Waldorf schools and their kind have made some inroads in providing alternatives, but public education is modeled on the Prussian early-industrial nationalist model that instills obedience to the state and "manufactures" children into conformist laborers. And the government likes it that way, especially thanks to the oligarch industrialists who provide politicians with financial incentives to produce laborers. Never ever let it be forgotten that John D. Rockefeller funded and supported the push for compulsory public education in the USA with his advisor Frederick T. Gates who said:

"In our dream we have limitless resources, and the people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hand. The present educational conventions fade from our minds; and, unhampered by tradition, we work our own good will upon a grateful and responsive rural folk. We shall not try to make these people or any of their children into philosophers or men of learning or of science. We are not to raise up among them authors, orators, poets, or men of letters. We shall not search for embryo great artists, painters, musicians. Nor will we cherish even the humbler ambition to raise up from among them lawyers, doctors, preachers, statesmen, of whom we now have ample supply."

That said, I enjoy the idea of a return to the agora (Platonic Academy mixed with homeschooling and independent learning. It does not appear to be a coincidence to me that debate forms of education among learned men are more effective than lectures taken from dusty books, frontal instruction and memorization techniques. It would be a fantastic thing for me to see something along the lines of a football stadium repurposed to be full of professors circulating and debating and discussing with each other and students. That would enable people to follow ideas in a more interdisciplinary manner. Uff, I have to get up early and it is very late here.

Thanks for the thought-provoking post dwinblood!