That kids get bored in school these days is no indictment of education. Kids have been bored in school since they started having school. Part of becoming an adult is learning to focus one’s intellect, and that’s hard. The best teachers have the least bored students.
I like the idea that part of school is to figure out what one wants to learn, but I don’t think this is easily figured out. Certainly not by a completely free-form, let the kids decide what to do from day one and ignore the rest. There is no learning without exposure to the unfamiliar, and for all except the most gift and innately curious individuals, it means making them sit down and learn it. There is also no learning without a disciplined acquisition of knowledge- again, not something most kids easily cotton to.
What I can agree with wholeheartedly is that the content of what is learned needs to be fixed. There are great books, great poems, great science concepts. Civics! How can we have a democracy without our students knowing its laws? And so on. All of these things are harder and harder to find in school today.
