The high school curriculum is overloaded and unwisely values mere coverage more than mastery of intellectual skills. Its division into academic subjects, while hallowed by age and tradition, functions poorly.

The quality of professional staff is higher than today's media would have us believe, but many teachers and principals are angry and frustrated. Many are also seriously underpaid.

The current trend toward more centralized direction of schools increases staff demoralization and even lessens the opportunities for principals and teachers to adapt their programs to real and pressing local needs.

Schools are largely judged on the basis of data which happens to be easy to collect and to manipulate statistically. Taken alone, such data can produce strikingly misleading assessments.

TESTING: Most teachers could not pass the tests their students are taking outside their area of teaching. They would flunk them. John Holt has a great column on this in GROWING WITHOUT SCHOOLING #37 pp 9-10. He relates how teachers do poorly on tests although they once knew "that stuff" and know a lot more than their students (about other things in life, such as how to get along, how the world works, etc.), they have forgotten that stuff because they don't use it and it isn't useful.

A child is not a vessel to be filled but a lamp to be lighted. Anon.

Now what I want is Facts. Teach the boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon "Facts; nothing else will ever be of any service to them....In this life, we want nothing but Facts, sir, nothing but Facts! (Schoolmaster Thomas Gradgrind in HARD TIMES by Charles Dickens.