The best take I have heard on this came from John Taylor Gatto, a former award winning NYC teacher who quit teaching and started investigating what was wrong with education and what to do about it.
On of the things he did was look into the elite private schools to see if what they taught was different from the public schools, and what he found was not only was it different, superior, and exclusive, but that it was something that could be taught to anyone for very little money and prepared a person so much better than the dumbing down in public schools.
Basic principles here:
https://tragedyandhope.com/th-films/the-...urriculum/
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John Taylor Gatto’s 14 Themes of the Elite Private School Curriculum (as listed in part in The Ultimate History Lesson)
1. A theory of human nature (as embodied in history, philosophy, theology, literature and law).
2. Skill in the active literacies (writing, public speaking).
3. Insight into the major institutional forms (courts, corporations, military, education).
4. Repeated exercises in the forms of good manners and politeness; based on the truth that politeness and civility are the foundation of all future relationships, all future alliances, and access to places that you might want to go.
5. Independent work.
6. Energetic physical sports are not a luxury, or a way to “blow off steam,” but they are absolutely the only way to confer grace on the human presence, and that that grace translates into power and money later on. Also, sports teach you practice in handling pain, and in dealing with emergencies.
7. A complete theory of access to any place and any person.
8. Responsibility as an utterly essential part of the curriculum; always to grab responsibility when it is offered and always to deliver more than is asked for.
9. Arrival at a personal code of standards (in production, behavior and morality).
10. To have a familiarity with, and to be at ease with, the fine arts. (cultural capital)
11. The power of accurate observation and recording. For example, sharpen the perception by being able to draw accurately.
12. The ability to deal with challenges of all sorts.
13. A habit of caution in reasoning to conclusions.
14. The constant development and testing of prior judgements: you make judgements, you discriminate value, and then you follow up and “keep an eye” on your predictions to see how far skewed, or how consistent, your predictions were.
Video here:
As you can see, this is as much about a personal philosophy of life as it is about subject matter.
He came to similar conclusions in his own teaching, although he had to break rules and sometimes the law to get his students educated. He started with what they were passionate about, and then sent them out, alone, into NYC to research it, and got them to turn their hobbies and interests into serious concerns.
He might have a girl who liked swimming, and so he sent her out to as many public swimming pools as she could get to, had her learn about the chemicals in the water, and what was safe, what was not, had her measure the chemicals in all the pools to find the best ones to swim in, and then write up a report, and then explained to her that her research, as a 14 year old was more valuable than anything the city had, and helped her sell her report to the city for big bucks.
His whole goal was to get the kids out and about and learning all the practical aspects of the things they were interested in, to get them entrepreneurial, to get them able to talk to adults and be respected.
More than that, he found this worked with ghetto kids as well as silver spoon ones, and the only drawback was that he had to be subversive and break laws to get it done, and there was no room for it in modern education as it stands.
Anyone who wants to do some deep background, and has a lot of spare time, should listen to this, a video that changed my own thoughts about education in many ways:
My personal thoughts on all this are that a superior education would involve reading the classics in many disciplines, and these books may be had for pennies!
Find a good teacher and motivated parents, and that is the key, not money or technology.
What would a kid learn more from, the latest iPad offerings, or getting an old Pentium computer and figuring out a way to make Linux work on it?
There is no cost involved to the best education possible.
There are tons of inspirational stories out there of people who used their noodle and the resources available to them to achieve great things in educating themselves and the people around them.
Like this one:
https://www.wired.com/2002/05/from-junki...l-junkman/
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OAKLAND, California – James Burgett is a big, burly biker and an ex-heroin junkie who is building a trash empire from recycled computers.
He has hooked together a cluster of junk machines into what may soon qualify as one of the world's fastest supercomputers.
And he's a leading low-tech philanthropist, giving away thousands of refurbished computers to disadvantaged people all over the world, from human rights organizations in Guatemala to the hard-up Russian space program.
Burgett runs the Alameda County Computer Resource Center, which he has built from a spare bedroom operation into one of the largest non-profit computer recycling centers in the United States.
The business of building new computers may be in a downturn, but the business of getting rid of old ones is booming. There are more computers heading for landfill than are being sold, according to the California Materials Exchange.
A group of parents could get together and hire a retired college professor to educate their kids, and he would probably cherish a retirement spent in the presence of people who actually wanted to learn.
That's where I would start, with Gatto, and modify it to suit the individual needs.
