A plan!

For about 9 months now (how symbolic...) I have been looking at the state of education, trying to figure out what is wrong with it and how to bring the education system up to speed with life outside the system. From the very beginning, some people around me expected me to know what I plan to do. But I was only in the beginning of learning the current status, and I was careful not to have a plan too early.

A few months later, I already felt I have some initial level of understanding about what's going on, and even a few opinions about directions for improvement. It was clear that some form of central regulation will be necessary: Probably different than what we have in most countries, but it still has to be there. It was also clear that ongoing systematic research is part of any picture if the system is to keep up with a rapidly changing society. I also started thinking about the need for freedom of choice regarding the types of school we wend our kids to, going towards more of a market economy in education. To the disappointment of some people around me, I still had no plan regarding how to get from the current state of affairs to a more desirable one.

In the past few months, even I started to expect myself to generate a plan - a roadmap - for getting from here to there. The current state is clear enough, and is very far from any desired state I can think of. The desired state seems to have three main pillars: A market economy of school options, a central regulation system which is minimal and strict, and ongoing research supported by all players. Building such a tripod so it's accepted and self sustaining is a very-long-term project: Decades. I don't know how to make a plan for 20-30 years, and so far I haven't found anyone who does know. Still looking.

But one can make definite progress even without a specific plan specifying every step. Anyway such grand plans tend to change considerably through months and years of friction between the plan and reality. Creating a market economy of schools would take a serious change in the attitude of the political system in almost every country - way too difficult without a good plan. Creating an alternative education system may be less difficult, since it's more technical. But there is still much political involvement and social beliefs issues here. The public relations challenge makes it a tough target. So regulation is not a great first target. Research is the third main pillar, and it may be the best candidate.

Research is not a new idea. Universities all over the world conduct educational research. Research journals publish educational research. Education establishments make incremental changes according to research. Frustration about the limitations of such research is being expressed and discussed. Doing something about research would not be like entering a completely new field, and should not generate nearly as much opposition as the other issues discussed above. Another advantage of working to improve research is that doing this doesn't commit anyone to being a revolutionary, which is not in everybody's comfort zone. Research is well within the consensus.

So Research it is.

The plan for the next 2 years is to create FIRE: Facilitation Institute for Research in Education (temporary name; suggestions are welcome), along the lines described in the previous entry. As can be understood from the name, this institute is not in itself a research institute, but it concentrates on facilitating research done by others - those already inclined to conduct research. The aim is to remove obstacles and make it easier to conduct research.

Resources put into the institute will be leveraged several times so they are going to have a great bang/buck ratio: A dollar (Euro? RMB? ounce of gold?) and a work-hour put into the FIRE can help, for example, to validate a questionnaire. This validated questionnaire can help a student convince a professor that a certain worthy line of research is feasible, thereby attracting several dollars and many work-hours for the research itself. If this worthy research, together with others that follow it, has actionable results, it may attract may more dollars from the state in pushing a change in even a small aspect of how education is pursued. If successful, the effect on society is difficult to break down into dollars and hours, but after the several levels of leverage, the potential effect for every unit of investment in FIRE is gratifyingly significant.

FIRE in itself should steer clear of any agenda or opinion regarding education. But we should accept the fact that many of those who want research to be done, do have their agenda. This is fine, as long as FIRE can make sure the research and the results are not bent towards the preconceived interests. To allow parties with inherent interest to support and enjoy the facility, FIRE should provide a mechanism for donors to donate money towards specific research or specific lines of research. The mechanism should include careful accounting to make sure the donation goes in the specified direction, and that the donors get their due recognition for their donation, together with transparent traceability between interests and research supported by the interests.

Creating FIRE as a one-stop-shop for supporting educational research: All of the above under the same roof, or at least in a group of affiliated organizations, sharing information among them. This is the work plan for 2010-2011.

This can also be the subject of the next book.

Education Research - Facilitation

We know that research in education is done in a very different way from research in exact sciences, and practical engineering. I don't expect education to become an exact science any time soon. But it would be nice to allow education research to become a bit closer to the more rigorous disciplines, and to become a bit more practical - potentially leading to action. I propose that it is possible to create an institution that will systematically address most of the problems plaguing education research. The institution will provide such services and infrastructure to researchers, that will enable them to concentrate on their actual research subject, and not on the logistics around it.

An initial set of such services and infrastructure may contain the following:

Pooling of research-related materials, for easy access

• Pooling research questions
• Pooling existing validated research
• Pooling research requiring validation
• Pooling already-validated questionnaires
• Pooling annotated qualitative research, as a basis for proposing more research

Providing common resources

• Access to lab
• Video recording and transliteration equipment and services
• Translation services, to and from foreign languages

Academic support

• Questionnaire validation service
• Peer review service
• Support in designing the research
• Support in publication
• Matching academic mentors

Logistic support

• Financial support for research deemed “interesting” or useful
• Manpower support - e.g., students or school-kids as research assistants

Matching service

• Match researches with industry players for possible cooperation. For example, if a commercial company is looking into methods of teaching using a certain type of computer software, and a student is interested in research in the same area, a cooperation could be beneficial for both the student and the company, as well as for society in general
• Match researchers with relevant respected figures that will facilitate access to research subjects. For example, an anonymous student may have a hard time convincing a school-master to allow time-consuming interviews of pupils at the school regarding their physics studies. But if the anonymous student came hand-in-hand with a Nobel laureate in physics who is genuinely interested in the research... One might expect a more enthusiastic response from the school-master

Raw data collection

A previous blog entry mentioned difficulties in obtaining data about pupils and their environment: Grades, socioeconomic status, etc. The institute can solve much of that problem by maintaining a database with information about students along many years, to facilitate both longitudinal and cross-sectional studies, saving the researchers the bother of collecting the data and the normally prohibitive problem of legal/privacy/ethics issues. These issues will not just go away as soon as the institute addresses them, but the institute will have the focus and resources to resolve each of these problems even before collecting the sensitive information, so by the time a researcher needs such information, it will already be available.

General Public Relations

• Creating an atmosphere among schools, parents, and the media, that is conducive to such research. To maximize the tendency to cooperate
• Encouraging the academia to promote actionable educational research as an important part of an academic career
• Creating an atmosphere where it is ok - and worthy - to research anything, without fear of political incorrectness issues
• Encourage the public to develop an expectation from the education system to function based on research. Brand education as a scientific endeavor

An institution providing such services and infrastructure can be created and supported by many players in society, each with its own advantages and limitations.

The state is a natural source of support for such an initiative, and indeed the US government initiated a body named What Works Clearinghouse, which aims at being "A central and trusted source of scientific evidence for what works in education." That's a very good start and a good source for learning about what works in creating an Education Research Facilitation Institute.

Academia is best positioned to provide an understanding of what difficulties stand in the way of education research. But academia is not very sensitive to how actionable a social-sciences study is. It would take an uncommon cooperation between academics from social sciences and from exact sciences to take a hard look at how education research can be moved towards a more exact culture.

Commercial companies know best the difference between actionable information and merely interesting information. They also have an interest in conducting research and proving their product or service to be great. This, of course can be an incentive for companies to put money into the institute. But it also puts another agenda on the table in addition to finding the scientific truth, which is a disadvantage from the point of view of the institute.

Philanthropists are great potential contributors, since their agenda is more general than that of other players. One can find philanthropic donors who would be interested in advancing a research cause without worrying too much about political implications, academic prestige, or financial implications of the results of a research.

One more, semi-related thought: An interesting effect of involving commercial companies in such an institution, is that these companies work with a different type of time-concept than academia and the state. Commercial companies need results pretty soon after they decided they need them, not next school year, not after a certain publication, and not just before the next elections. This could lead the institute to become more quickly responsive, which can provide an opening for a sense of pedagogic urgency. A very happy side effect.

Education Research Impracticalities

Pure research is aimed at having something to say. Practical research is aimed at knowing what to do. It leads to action.

The hi-tech industry’s research labs generate the type of practical knowledge that can be translated into hardware and software: For example, IBM’s labs kept generating knowledge that enabled IBM to produce a faster, more reliable, less expensive computer hard-disks. Similarly, pharmacological research labs generate the practical knowledge necessary to produce medications with higher impact, lower side-effects, and longer shelf-life.

In social sciences in general, and in education in particular, research is something else. One of its aims is to generate a better understanding of how people behave, learn, etc. Often, though, we settle for just feeling better about our understanding, and don’t necessarily generate real knowledge: The type that can makes predictions that are verifiable and refutable. The type on which we can base action with some confidence. What if we try to cause a larger portion of education research to be of a nature similar to the research described above, used in different disciplines of engineering? We might get more actionable knowledge which will enable us to create educational environments and methods that will lead to better results, in a somewhat predictable manner. What a concept.

One main difference between engineering research and social-science research is that much of social-science research is qualitative, while in exact sciences and engineering, any research that is not quantitative wouldn't be considered research at all.

There are many good reasons for the use of qualitative research in education, and for avoiding much quantitative research:

One reason is that to measure anything, and to make a clear statement about the measurement, one requirement is the isolation of a single variable, or a very small set of variables. In social sciences such as education, this is prohibitively difficult. For example, trying to research a common question of interest to many: What effect does class-size have on the quality of education? There are many aspects of “quality of education”, so we would have to concentrate on a subset so small that it may be meaningless. A tempting, maybe even reasonable, focus may be the grades pupils receive. A quantitative research may analyze the statistical correlation between class size and grades. But how do we make sure other facts (variables) don’t get in the way? Whole classes of variables such as socioeconomic background, quality of teachers, the school infrastructure, pupils’ expectations of themselves and of the school, the social environment outside school, other schools in the vicinity, the characteristics – such as size – of the classes in previous years, the temperature, lighting and air quality in the class, the amount of ambient noise inside and outside the class, etc. It is truly difficult to isolate the interesting variables from all the others, when conducting research in the field.

A controlled lab experiment can do a much better job in isolating variables, but it has its own problems: Putting a small number of children in a lab for a short time experiment will not tell us much. Also, it is quite difficult to get around some legal and ethical issues, and your garden variety doctoral student doesn't want to concentrate on that. If we try to put a meaningful number of pupils (how about 2000?) in a lab, we run into major logistical problems. Then there is the timeframe issue: To make a meaningful statement, we may want to run an experiment for days, months or years. This exacerbates the logistic and ethical problems to a point that makes the notion ridiculous.

One might try to escape to just sending questionnaires and having people – pupils and former-pupils – answer them. Then surely it would be possible to hammer the raw questionnaires with statistical tools and get useful knowledge. Except one would have to first formally validate the questionnaires. This turns out to be such a significant undertaking, requiring expert attention, time, manpower and money, that “one” tends to be rather discouraged from doing it.

Ok, then. How about collecting masses of raw data about people, schools, etc, and analyzing that? Pupils' grades over time; pupils attendance information, pupils families' socioeconomic data, graduates' employment data, etc. Good luck getting the raw data. There are legal problems, privacy issues (some real and some used as a convenient obstruction technique), and the fact that the data is often not collected and stored systematically. It is next to impossible to obtain significant amounts of continuous data. Very few researches succeed in doing that.

Then there is the difficulty and academic disinterest in conducting follow-up research. There is the same problem with research aiming to verify or refute a previous research. There are potential political problems with generating knowledge about issues with social significance: The knowledge may contradict someone's beliefs, and we don't like our beliefs to be challenged. These days it is not such a big problem when researching physics, for example, it used to be - just asks medieval scientists. But it is always a problem with social sciences, which directly relate to our political, moral and religious views.

So, education researchers often fall back on the relatively safe field of qualitative research. And instead of using qualitative research as a starting point that leads to a more quantitative, accountable and actionable research, we are left with this qualitative exploration as the final product.

Assuming that we want to encourage more educational research that will conform to similar guidelines as those used in exact sciences, we would need to deal with many of the above issues. We don't need to make the problems go away completely; it's enough if we make it easier for researchers.

Learning & Knitting

I read a book, and I don’t talk to anyone about it. It goes in through my eyes, and out the same ear that discarded most of what I ever studied at school. The (truly fascinating) material in the book remains captured in its own context, and doesn’t interact much with what I already know, feel and believe. It doesn’t create many associations. The line of thought explained in the book is just hanging there below the plain of my existing state of mind. The slightest damage to that line – such as an idea I don’t understand – and the whole line falls down and disappears.

One remedy for that, is talking about what I read in the book with anyone. It makes me think about the text and paraphrase it – already creating another thread in the line of thought, which makes it more durable. The person talking to me about the book may have a related idea, adding more associations and context. I may have to explain to myself and my companion/adversary why I agree or disagree with something in the book, thereby creating ties between the line of the book and the plain of my own state of mind. In conversation, feelings can come up, creating more ties. The very fact that I hear myself speaking creates extra ties through my brain’s speech center and hearing center. The line of thought offered in the book gets knitted into my own ecology of thoughts. It is not quite as susceptible to being cut off.

This “talking about it” can take many forms: The book-reader may talk to friends in a group, and possibly read together – either by everyone reading the same text and then talking about it, or by each member reading different parts and then talking about it. Another form is that of teaching others, which has similar effects, especially if we allow the pupils to ask many questions and don’t let the teaching degenerate into declaiming.

Even talking to oneself – having an “internal conversation” – can do much of the job. Internal conversation may be done by stopping the reading occasionally and thinking about how the material relates to one’s life, knowledge, feelings, beliefs etc. Writing a blog or a book is another form of “internal conversation”. Even the ancient custom of annotating a book one reads (Yes, writing inside the book), is a useful way to maintain that internal conversation, thereby knitting a new line of thought into one’s existing mesh of thought-lines. For example, if I were to annotate the book on motivation I am reading (Motivation In Education: Theory, Research and Applications – an excellent book), I would have written a note where the book talks about self-efficacy (pardon the jargon), and I would have connected it to Churchill’s definition of success as “the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm.” Where enthusiasm is connected in my mind to the self efficacy. It doesn’t matter very much if the connection is scientifically valid. What matters is that this connection helps me remember and relate to the new information about self efficacy.

This also gives an opportunity to illustrate the ability of conversation to knit new information not only to other academic knowledge, but also to emotional state: I find this quote from Churchill quite inspiring and exciting. Connecting the new idea to an exciting feeling gives the new knowledge an extra dimension. I now like the idea (an emotional statement) of keeping my self-perception and that of others a bit higher than what’s warranted by real capability. I am more likely to do it – act on the new information and make it part of my life.

A major problem with frontal teaching/lecturing, is this same problem of lack of conversation. The teacher’s speech is a long thread of thoughts, which hangs detached from the pupils’ life. Even if the teacher develops the ideas beautifully, they can remain detached from the students and easily forgotten. The more chance the pupils get to associate the new material with existing context, the better they are likely to incorporate the new knowledge into their lives. For this to occur, the conversation – either external or internal – should be quite lively for each student. This may be done best in small groups – 2-3-4 students talking things over. In a classroom, whether it has 40 or 20 or 200 students in it, many individual students will naturally stay out of the conversation, and the studied material will stay out of their mind.

An inner conversation is possible when there are pauses in the speech of the lecturer or when the book-reader pauses often. Otherwise there is no time to make any extra knitting connections, other than those explicitly presented by the lecturer, which are often disconnected from the listener’s state. One way to create such pauses is to allow for questions. An often retold story is that of Isidor Rabi, winner of a Nobel Prize for physics, who was once asked why he became a scientist. He replied: "My mother made me a scientist without ever knowing it. Every other child would come back from school and be asked, 'What did you learn today?' But my mother used to say, 'Izzy, did you ask a good question today?' That made the difference. Asking good questions made me into a scientist." Asking questions does not only create conversation, but the asking in itself indicates an internal conversation is already going on.

One more method for creating an internal conversation, and associatively knot new information into the existing mesh, is to browse the Internet. The individual browsing the Internet leans-forward and naturally skips from one issue to an associatively related issue. An extra benefit of that activity is that it is under the control of the individual, which means they can pause whenever they want, go back and forth, retrace their own thinking (thereby making it more explicit), etc. Internet browsing as a useful learning tool is not yet well understood.

To better understand conversations in general and Internet-internal conversations in particular, and in line with one of the main themes emerging from this blog, here are a few research questions:

• “Does learning using the Internet have different qualities related to the internal conversation?”
• “Does conversation improve learning?"
• Studying without intermissions
• ... With a few intermissions (short/long)
• ... With many intermissions (short/long)
• ... With/Without conversation among pupils
• ... Different types of conversations
• Pupils teaching each other
• Arguing points
• ...
• “Does conversation have a short/long term effect?”

Questions for Research

There are many open questions that are worthy of being studied in formal research. Below, a few very basic questions are asked, each with a simple description of the research. Details about how the research is to be done are outside the scope of this text.

1. What knowledge and skills do we retain from what we study at school? Test for knowledge and skills we got at school, at different ages and professional groups
6-year-old version: Do we remember what we study?

Age-groups:

• 60 years old
• 40 years old
• University graduates in their 20s
• University applicants

Professional groups:

• Hi-Tech
• Administrative / clerical
• School Teachers
• …

Knowledge subjects:

• Algebra - Basic concepts: quadratic equations
• Trigonometry - Basic concepts: Sine, Cosine, Tangent
• History - facts learned in school
• Literature - facts about pieces studied at school
• …

Skills subjects:

• Arithmetic - addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, percentage
• Algebra - linear equations, quadratic equations
• Trigonometry - Basic concepts: Sine, Cosine, Tangent
• Reading
• Writing
• Foreign language studied at school
• Dealing with a historical / current affairs text

Type of questions:

• What is this ? (Sine, quadratic equation, Marshall Plan, …)
• Did you study this ?
• Solve this (arithmetical problem, algebraic problem, trigonometric problem)
• Write a paragraph or two (writing)
• Read and comment on a paragraph in a foreign language
• Listen and comment on a spoken text in a foreign language

Nice to have:

• Correlate with past grades
• Correlate with measurements/indicators of success is life

============================================

2. What knowledge and skills that we studied at school are useful to us outside school setting?
6-year-old version: Why do we need to study this?

The research is similar to number 1 above (and could be conducted concurrently), but the main question type is:

• Did you ever use this skill or knowledge outside school settings?

============================================

3. What skills do we acquire indirectly by studying at school, to what extent do we retain them, and to what extent are they useful to us?
6-year-old version: If I don't need this, why do I still have to study it?

When considering the study of subjects and skills that are of no direct interest to the whole population of students, we hear that by studying X, we learn to do Y, as an indirect side effect, or "collateral learning." It would be very useful to test the validity of this assertion.

Based on the answers to research questions 1 and 2 above, we can ask questions about the types of school study that did not leave a direct impression. A simple approach would be to guess the indirectly acquired skill and try to detect indications for it, based on the directly taught subject. A slightly more sophisticated approach would be to test for many skills, and try to correlate the results with subjects and skills studied.

Some examples of possible indirect learning to check for:

• Check for reasoning skills that may have stemmed from studying algebra or calculus
• Check for space perception that may be linked with studying geometry
• Check for studying skills (dealing with an unfamiliar text) that may have been improved by studying history
• Check for self expression ability in writing or speech that may be improved with studying literature and art
• Check for critical thinking skills that may be developed studying any standard school subject
• Check for scientific thinking habits based on studying physics, chemistry or biology

================================================

There are probably hundreds of good research questions even without drilling down much. The questions above are just a few examples of the most simple questions. I bet the results would be somewhere between fascinating and shocking.

Scalability

When developing the architecture of a technological project, a major consideration is that of scalability: The architecture's ability to increase in size without falling apart, keeping its usefulness across the increased volume or scope. Designing a piece of software to handle 10 users is often very different from designing such software to handle 10,000,000 users. Just ask anyone who created a web application and was unlucky enough for it to be too successful too quickly - It tends to crash miserably.

The same issue comes up when considering a business idea or business process. How few customers and how many customers can the same business mechanism support, and keep fulfilling its duty - making a tidy profit?

The discussion about scalability is not special to any type of human endeavor. But in the context of this blog, we can note that the same issue of scalability is paramount when considering the architecture of an education system. Building a new school, based on great pedagogic ideas, is wonderful. It is done often, but its direct impact is limited to the people who come into contact with that school: Pupils, teachers, parents, families. Building a network of schools will impact many more people. It is done much less often. Building an education system for a whole society, such as a nation, impacts everybody. Many nations do it just once, close to the creation of the state, in great haste.

To illustrate the issue of scalability, let's take a single aspect of building schools: That of finding and training teachers. Scaling from a single instance to a network to a comprehensive system presents not only different orders of magnitude of the quantity of work, but also different quality of the task. When creating a single school, one can call up a dozen or two of the best teacher one knows, and enlist them in the project. When creating a network, one needs hundreds of great teachers. That's probably more than any single school founder knows. This requires a process of finding and screening teachers. Already a very different task than for the single school. When creating a national schooling establishment, finding the right teachers is not enough - there aren't enough of them. It is necessary to get prospective teachers to apply, screen them, then train them, and probably re-screen. Again, very different tasks than for the single school or network of schools.

Beyond the issue of staffing the teachers positions, there is a host of other tasks that are done very differently for a single school, a network, and a national system. For example - at no particular order: Financing, locating buildings, addressing the community, obtaining learning materials, establishing a curriculum, finding students, administration, public health, providing care for special needs, dealing with students at the low end of achievements, dealing with students at the high end of achievements, discipline, legal liabilities, teaching methods and certainly quite a few other issues of which I am blissfully ignorant. This type of scalability issue may be called "Administrative Scalability". (The reader is welcome to suggest a better name)

Founding a school, a network and a system is one aspect of the scalability issue in education. Another aspect is that of introducing a project or any change into an existing environment. Managing change in a classroom, school, network or national education establishment calls for very different type of work, not just amount of work. Promoting enthusiastic involvement in a project to be implemented in a single school, can be done by the leadership of a single person - maybe the principal. For simplicity's sake, assume the project involves only teachers, and none of the other stakeholders. Bringing teachers into such emotional involvement in larger scales requires first the involvement of all the principals to such an extent that the principals themselves will not only follow the lead of the initiator (say - the minister of Education), but they should be so fired up about the project that they can be the effective leaders in their own schools. In a national education system, there are too many principals for a single initiator to appeal to. Replicating the enthusiasm may require one or more extra layers. The transfer of enthusiasm, of emotional involvement, of the belief in "the way", should be complete, otherwise the project will lose sight of its original meaning, which is sadly the normal case. This type of issue may be called "Scalability of Leadership."

There is another issue of scalability which appears in a whole different dimension: The dimension of time. A school is founded, based on great ideals and the great capability of its founder. Great teachers join the school, all full of enthusiasm and competence. What happens after a few years? The founder-leader doesn't stay forever. Some leading teachers may go their own way. The teachers may have new ideas and may not agree with each other. The same goes for parents of pupils. New pressures appear from the ever-changing society around the school. All too often, a great new school loses much of its greatness within a decade or two. We need to maintain the spirit of an educational environment - of any scale - for the long run, maintaining the momentum and transmitting the spark from one stakeholder to another, so it remains alive regardless of the particular persons who leave or remain within that establishment. To do that we need something we can call "Scalability into the Future." Or we can call it a better name if we find one.

When venturing to create an education system, it is imperative to keep in mind the various aspects of scalability. This way the dream stands a slightly better chance to be realized, and to be comprehensive and long lasting.

Arguing About Schools

The intention of this blog entry is to organize my own thoughts so I have a reasonable refuting response to some standard claims. No hard feelings.

The standard curriculum in the standard school of your standard education system contains many subjects and sub-subjects: In Math, it usually goes from arithmetic, through algebra, to calculus. In history, it usually selects a few periods in the history of (white) Europe. In language and literature, it selects certain writers and periods. And so on, in several fields.

One may ask questions about the necessity of teaching everybody all these different bits and pieces of human knowledge, bearing in mind that most of us studied all these subjects until we got tested, then effectively forgot everything. Moreover, most of us never regret having forgotten how to solve quadratic equations - we never needed it. Most of us never need algebra - the last time we needed to find X was when a teacher threatened us with a bad grade. The huge majority of us never thought about the cosine of an angle after the last math test. Just to make sure this text is not a private vendetta: I personally have used algebra and calculus a lot after school, and I often enjoy it. It’s just that I recognize that I am in a small minority in that respect, and would like to alleviate the pain of my fellow humans, who suffered needlessly. Below are a few standard replies to this statement, together with refutations.

Disclaimer: This is not a valid study, but a collection of anecdotes that gives clear impressions. I am not aware of a serious study into these matters.

"School exposes kids to different options, so they can make a more informed decision about what’s interesting to them". It is the answer we got as primary school kids, and many of us still believe in it. I will try to address this claim.

• Person A finished studying the standard curriculum plus electronics and computers (which he chose). Then he worked for a few years in electronics, after having to go through a post-school course with a great teacher, so electronics would make some sense, which 3 years of school couldn't do. Still, the basis taught at school was indeed useful. Then he moved into computer programming. Having studied about computers at school was not very relevant to working: Whatever relevant knowledge acquired during the school time was acquired outside the curriculum. Then he moved into management. Nothing taught at school prepared him to motivating people, teaching, accounting, legal thinking, marketing, etc. Then he moved on to issues even more remote than anything taught at school. So, what he got from school, that served him, was: Literacy, English as second language, Arithmetic, algebra (calculus had to be relearned), and basic Electronics. The rest: Literature, History, Civics, Physical Education, Physics, Geography, etc. were irrelevant at best, and damaging at worst. The issues taught in K12 school which did expose Person A to something relevant to his life were actually chosen by Person A after not having been exposed to them in the standard school
• Person B finished standard school, and went on studying mostly education. Then she started working in the education establishment, working with people, teaching, researching - none of which had much to do with what’s taught in school. Then she moved into alternative medicine - again, irrelevant to school… K12 school contribution: Literacy, English, Arithmetic
• Person C finished standard school, and went on studying occupational therapy. Then she went on working in various paramedical jobs having nothing to do with what she was exposed to at K12. K12 school contribution: Literacy, English, Arithmetic
• Person D finished standard school and worked at a variety of jobs, mostly working with his hands, and occasionally studying what he needed to go to the next level. K12 school contribution: Literacy, English, Arithmetic

… You get the picture. It doesn't seem that school exposed these people to relevant options, though it did spend much time exposing them, to theoretical options which were irrelevant. A serious study would be interesting, but the reader is hereby challenged to conduct an informal review of people around them. I bet the picture remains generally the same.

"School teaches kids to how to study", so it doesn't matter much exactly what is being taught
That’s a great goal. Let’s see how our designated persons did:

• Person A never really learned how to study
• Person B remembers a single high-school teacher who had a positive influence on her ability to study, but she clearly remembers that going into university, learning to study was a shocking experience
• Person C never really learned how to study, even having earned a Masters’ degree
• Person D did learn how to study at school: At high-school he had such a bad teacher for a certain subject, that he had to teach himself to study
• Person E once said that his high-school did teach how to study (terrible statistical practice, introducing a new sample because it is “interesting”)

… This non-study humbly suggests that most K12 schools do not teach how to study.

"Young kids can’t be expected to know, and shouldn't be forced to decide what their future direction in life is"
True. The same is true for not-so-young kids, like 40-year-olds.
This should be used as a reasoning for letting kids follow their interests, giving them truly general skills that are likely to serve them in the future, whatever choices they make.
This should not be used as a reasoning for forcing the kids to learn a specific subset of the vast human knowledge, which will be soon forgotten and not likely to ever be missed.

"Different subjects taught at school are meant to practice general skills, rather than just the specific subject"
For example: Geometry teaches spatial perception; History teaches how to study, and how humanity works; Algebra teaches.... something.

First: Show me. There must be serious research showing such benefit, to justify spending most of the K12 years (13? 14?) studying material which is admitted by this indirect-benefit claim to be irrelevant in its own right.

Second: Spending so much time requires a serious discussion about which general skills need to be practiced indirectly. What about social skills, emotional resilience, the habits of learning, critical thinking, the ability to entertain ideas without committing to them or against them, teaching, non verbal communication, leadership, etc etc?

Without proof that useful skills are being effectively practiced, and without consideration which skills are even necessary, this indirect benefit claim doesn't have much substance.

“School teaches social skills”
In school, recesses are short, and teachers normally don’t take it to be their job to look for opportunities to improve children’s social skills. If we are lucky, the kindergarten teachers do. Looking around, including in the mirror, we don’t seem to be very good at conflict resolution, dealing with frustration, sharing, anger management, listening, being assertive, etc.

Unfortunately, school does not do a very good job promoting social skills.

“School provides general knowledge needed to be a valuable member of society. To converse”
This one may be true. We do want to create a cohesive society, with a common language, background and narrative.
Persons A-D know each other and occasionally meet. They talk about the state of education, about cars, politics, alcohol, raising children, security, money, social justice, management, astronomy and a host of other issues they didn't learn at school. They occasionally do talk about issues that resemble school material: They talk about history, but usually what they found out after graduating from school. They talk about books, but never in the terms taught at school. K12 school does provide a common subject to grumble about, but that’s hardly enough reason to maintain it as it is. Still, it needs to be acknowledged that much of the "commonness" - the indoctrination into society - is not very readily visible to us, and it may be that school provides a lot of it.

Rays of light:

• The “K” of K12 - Kindergarten - often does provide gentle exposure to options, teaching basic patience necessary for studying, practicing social skills and telling stories for the common narrative
• The first few years of school provide an essential basis of literacy: Reading, a bit of writing, Arithmetic, second language
• We can do so much better