Liberalism is fundamentally a universalist idea. I mean "liberal" in the original sense: the cultivation of free and indepdendent human beings capable of governing themselves. A democratic society can't survive for long without universal liberal education.

We need to distinguish between education and the education system. You make good points that the system as it is today doesn't scale as much as we might like. Unfortunately, I think the solution to universal education requires something much broader and deeper than anything fitting into the box of "school." It requires a culture that values learning and independent thinking, parents who instill those values in their children, and institutions (beyond schools) that uphold these values in society.

In Germany, the Prussian Reforms refer to what is described in the article and attributed to Wilhelm von Humboldt, this was in the late 18th century.

What you are probably referring to is the Generallandschulreglement by Johan Johann Julius Hecker under Frederick the Great. This was published in 1763, around 40 years before von Humboldt.

As a former teacher I think that's very common, but a fatal error to assume that it's something that it's up to education to achieve this at all. It's up to student to decide what they want to achieve, what their motivation is, whether they are motivated at all etc. The point of education have always been to provide students tools.

Btw, what makes a great teacher? One of my most influential teachers was universally hated by the rest of the class.

a) Teachers themselves went through this system, so if it's so great, it should produce plenty of great teachers

b) Now we are blaming the kids for the failure of the system?

c) Yes, absolutely, but is the bureaucracy really inevitable, or is it even contradictory to the original idea?

Anyhow, Humboldt's humanism was ideology from the start. It was a way to change as little as possible from christian values. Instead of God making humans all great now it is the great human mind and civilization.

By now, most of German academia is a bubble for humanistic fundamentalists, that have long lost their connection to reality.

I am not in Amsterdam, but this seems very unexpectedly wrong. For as much as people complain about the US education system, I’ve been amazed watching how early my kids and friends’ kids at various schools around here have picked up reading and math. They’re learning these things earlier than I did as a child and earlier than I thought they would in the school system.

That’s not to say that every school is perfect, but it’s all been so much better than I would have expected from the extreme negative sentiment that I read online. The only explanation I can come up with is that school quality varies by a wide range from school to school or region to region, maybe more than the tests and statistics can show.

It is definitely appreciated if you actually learn something there, and often required to earn any of the goodies.

I appreciate your comment doesn't try to state if these are good or bad things, just that they are.

1. Free government daycare

2. Inspection/interference with parenting

3. Surveillance towards prosecuting negligent parents

4. Evaluation of conscripts

I think I agree 100%. It is exactly those things, even if I can't be so cheerful as you about it. That's why my children have never stepped foot inside a school.

    It confuses the students. It presents an incoherent ensemble of information that the child needs to memorize to stay in school. Apart from the tests and trials, this programming is similar to the television; it fills almost all the "free" time of children. One sees and hears something, only to forget it again.
    It teaches them to accept their class affiliation.
    It makes them indifferent.
    It makes them emotionally dependent.
    It makes them intellectually dependent.
    It teaches them a kind of self-confidence that requires constant confirmation by experts (provisional self-esteem).
    It makes it clear to them that they cannot hide, because they are always supervised.[

"Yet over the years, as Humboldt's public education system was adopted, modified and spread around the world, Bildung — the cultivation of our human potential — may well have been the critical piece left out.

Soon, the state's influence on education took hold, with its own agenda. This is explored in part two of the documentary, Humboldt's Ghost."

Despite the fact that the results aren't what they could be in an ideal world where every student is motivated, the results are much better than any place where education is not universal.

A school system I attended when I was young divided classes between academic and social --- social classes were attended at one's age level, academic classes were attended at a student's ability levels, I believe that there were also trade school tracks, prompted by students taking Sloyd Woodworking claseses:

https://rainfordrestorations.com/tag/sloyd/

After WWII, and observing how it could occur despite the recent occurrence of WWI, it was decided to put extra focus on the horrors of war in Western Europe.

Both on allied as well as axis side, sure, but especially on axis educational systems.

Having grown up in Belgium, I can confirm that the never-ending stream of unprompted details of the horrors of WWI and WWII were not exactly "fun" part of education, but hey at least we haven't been lobbing chemicals at each other for the last ~80 years, so at least it seems to work, here, locally in Western Europe, despite all the side-effects of such an education.

That said, I don't feel confident that any insights that may truly improve education in Western Europe (without losing the pacifying -as in peace generating- benefits somehow) would apply well to educational systems elsewhere, because a large fraction of negative side effects in Western European education stem precisely from the educational pivot after WWII.

And this is not only my personal anecdote, There are numerous studies on this. One for instance, that really shook me, reported that around 1/3 of graduates from the “practical level” of secondary school cant tell you what a newspaper article was about after reading it. And this was not the case “back in the days”.

Germany has the same problem btw. They perform less and less well at all kinds of standardized tests. Just like the Dutch.

So there is sth seriously wrong!

Which is to say, the vast majority of students are not different. There are some much below average kids who need a lot of help but never will reach anything, but the vast majority are very close to average and we don't need particularly anything better for them than anyone else. What we need is to give the programs we give to the most gifted students to the less gifted students because they would benefit from the same attention

I feel like this has more to do with motivation than lack of understanding. They could, but that would require them to actually read it, and that is effort that is better spent elsewhere.

Allowing anyone to vote that can color in lines was when the patients started running the place.

When words lose their meaning, people lose their freedom.