This is the title of a very interesting article. Let me quote some of the ideas presented by Professor Henry H. Bauer from the University of Virginia.
«What happens in elementary schools, high schools, and colleges is so interconnected that change is needed almost simultaneously throughout. Were colleges to require that students come appropriately prepared, that might eventually persuade the high schools to prepare students for college by training them to study. Yet it may well be that there is not much the high schools can do unless the right ground-work has been laid in elementary schools. Moreover education is so interconnected with other aspects and institutions of society that major change in the educational system can hardly occur without changes in society’s attitude towards education».
«Uses of information technology and the like which is nowadays so prominent as though a panacea were available here. Instead we must start afresh from an understanding of why society requires that schooling occur… «Children in their first few years learn a staggering amount, and they are ready to learn staggeringly more. Elementary schools merely need to reward and encourage learning instead of hindering it by deliberately holding children back from some things that are judged too advanced.»
«The current practice of including the whole range of children in the same class makes it impossible for teachers to give any of the students the attention best suited to their abilities and stages of learning. The supposed (unproven, and on the face of it implausible) social benefits of intellectual diversity in classrooms are surely outweighed by the intellectual crippling for life of all the children: for we know that if young brains are not trained linguistically and mathematically in elementary school, that cannot later be made up for…».
Not that I agree with everything said here… but follow the track and judge by yourself:
http://www.bus.lsu.edu/accounting/faculty/lcrumbley/study.htm
SG.