I never thought much about my education and what my parents were trying to achieve until recently. After all children have no basis for comparison, so whatever circumstance they are in seems normal to them.
I was born in the midst of the push for "progressive" education which was spearheaded by people such as John Dewey. My parents apparently bought into the philosophy and as a consequence I was sent to a progressive private school from age five to nine. There was only one class per grade and things were informal. We were wearing bluejeans (which we called dungarees) while everyone else was in a school uniform. Some things that I remember were projects to build skyscrapers out of blocks and then wire them up with a battery and light system. Remember this is in the second and third grade.
In the first grade I was interested in construction and skipped all the reading activities. I just went into my own corner of the classroom and did what I wished. Sometime in the second grade my teachers said it was time that I learn to read so in a period of two or three weeks I not only caught up to my classmates but pushed ahead. The motivation was a couple of adventure stories that caught my fancy.
My family moved when I was eight and for the fifth and sixth grades I went to our local public school. The contrast was dramatic. We were required to wear a white shirt and tie and had to pass an inspection every morning for dress and cleanliness. In addition the principal had his own program of forcing all the students in the fifth and sixth grades to memorize portions of important civic documents. One I remember was the preamble to the US constitution. So from a loosely structured environment I was put into a regimented one. I hated it.
In middle school I was put in the accelerated program which compressed three years into two. As this was a special program the rules were once again more relaxed and my group was also preselected to focus on music. So part of our time was spent learning instruments and playing in the school orchestra.
In high school I got into Stuyvesant, a selective NYC high school. It's focus was science and for most of the time things went smoothly. We did have an autocratic principal, but most of the teachers had figured out how to work around him. During my time in high school the Russians launched Sputnik and this threw the entire US educational system into a panic. Over the next few years a real effort was made to improve science education and I went along with the tide.
In college I majored in physics and this, once again, put me into a very small group and kept me away from most of the regimentation. The same thing happened in graduate school.
So with the exception of two years in grade school I had little experience with mediocre education.
Later on I went through the same issues with my kids. They went to good suburban schools where my main issues were letting them move faster than the standard curriculum expected. A few battles with the school administration worked most of the time, but there were a few failures. I can't speak for their college experience, but my impression is that it was satisfactory, but not great.
My daughter is now teaching herself and I hear stories about current educational practices. It doesn't sound pleasant. The ideals of a progressive education seem to have been replaced by the methods that it swept aside. Programs like NCLB stress regimentation and rote learning and discourage students to move at their own pace. It's as if the educational advances of Montessori, the Waldorf school and similar programs had never taken place.
Dewey's constant theme throughout his career was to stress that democracy requires educated citizens. He didn't mean the type of education where students learn facts, but rather where students learned how to evaluate material for themselves. In addition they needed to learn how to educate themselves throughout their lives. In a democracy citizens are expected to participate and, without the skills to obtain and evaluate new information, they can easily fall prey to demagogues.
During his long life he saw the swings in the US as well as the disasters in Europe. In the end he came to realize that his dream that education should lead society to a more progressive future was too idealistic. Schools don't lead, even when the teachers have progressive ideas, but instead are the creatures of the society which controls them and appoints the school boards and administrators who set policy.
Over the last several decades (especially in the US) the purpose of education has shifted away from training self-reliant individuals. Now the emphasis is on acquiescence and docility. Young children enter school not only knowing the ABC's from Sesame Street, but the names and features of a huge number of consumer products. Many infants can identify corporate logos before they learn the alphabet. The goal is to train a new generation of unquestioning consumers. The push to incorporate religion into schooling is another aspect of this trend. Religion is the ultimate discipline where independent examination of the premises is discouraged. In many cases parents feel that the public schools allow their children to be exposed to too much information and thus, take explicit steps to limit this. Hence the popularity of parochial schools and home schooling.
In a democracy people need to be exposed to all sectors of society. Being educated in a limited setting makes one ill prepared to judge the issues that affect some sectors with the right degree of expertise. A democratic society needs a core set of skills that all children master and socialization is perhaps the most important.
As we move into an era where the challenges facing the world are of an unprecedented nature, having a highly trained, self-reliant, citizenry is more important than ever before. To my mind bringing back the "progressive education" promoted by Dewey and his colleagues should be an immediate priority. NCLB in the US and the rise of sectarian education in Europe and elsewhere is counterproductive and must be addressed before the world slips back into clannishness and jingoism.
Societies get the kind of education they demand. The underfunding of education in much of the US and the lack of concern by parents seems to indicate that the system is not as broken (in the minds of most) as the critics paint it. Unfortunately this is untrue, China and India now produce more scientists and engineers than does the US. This can't be good for competitiveness in the long run.
[An interesting recent factoid:
I just got a newsletter from my graduate school's physics department. In the past year they granted 12 Ph.D. degrees. Judging from the names, only one or two of the students were US born. When I left in 1970 there were no foreign students (although there were several foreign-born professors).
Three indicated that they had taken jobs abroad (I assume back in their home countries), in several cases it was not specified.
So not only has the level of advanced scientific education dropped off, but much of it is being sustained by immigrants and students just using the US educational system. This can't be a good sign.]