I think some parents and kids have realised that much of that slog is ever less about the education and more about using children as tools for buffing the school or district stats in the best case or it's just riot control in the worst case.
Miss a day or two of school and now you're "behind" because you don't know some trivia¹ that's on your next standardised test. Mostly irrelevant to the student, but highly worrying to the school. The real things you need to learn, things like curiosity, scientific thinking, critical thinking, practical intuition, complex problem solving, unstructured information retrieval, team work and so on aren't easy to measure, so they're not really measured and then they're not optimised for. Which, when everything is minmaxed to death, means they're optimised against. That's the charitable, non-paranoid interpretation, at least.
I did a homestay in Germany decades ago and the kids left school at about 1pm and spent the afternoon in woodland unsupervised, co-operatively building a sprawling multi-storey "treehouse" that was about 25 metres on a side. I wouldn't be surprised if the skills acquired in that part of their childhood mostly came from there rather than bullet points about carbon bonds in benzene or something.
1: Sure trivia provides "pixels" for a hoped-for complete picture eventually, but the broad substrate you place these pixels on seems de-emphasised compared to just hammering decontextalised details that are easy to test until everyone is heartily sick of the whole subject.
You are missing forest for the trees - states dont want to raise a generation of alpha males with big ego and unsatiable drive to success.
Thats not what the core of any population is, and hence not much catered for, not in public state funded institution.
Now another topic is whats good for any individual kid and society long term, those can be quite different matters.
I see those points in same way you do, but consider them more a parental responsibility and a way to give your kids a head start if you actually care. Look at what kind of folks stay teachers and how they are paid - dont expect miracles. Sad state of affairs, but it is what it is
> states dont want to raise a generation of alpha males with big ego and unsatiable drive to success.
It's unfortunate because regardless of what you think, the so-called 'alpha males' with an insatiable drive for success are the ones representing the vast majority of the tax revenue.
In that case, that "core" of the population also doesn't need to know about benzene molecules, river erosion processes, history of some ancient kingdom and all the other trivia they load you up with at school. So, to me, it doesn't really follow that the curriculum is designed deliberately to churn out low-to-mid skilled workers. If anything it seems like it was intended to produce people along the road to being relatively highly-skilled people, but the implementation is as if by people who think that advanced skills are just the result of coagulating enough trivia (though I think it's actually an iterated "you get what you measure" outcome, rather than educationalists who actually think that).
Just like sometime who "learns" a language by drilling only vocabulary, this ends up serving no one particularly well - many people who would otherwise end up in trades have few practical skills taught and couldn't care less about benzene. Many people who would end up being PhDs in organic chemistry are bored rigid by the tedium of the process.
As you say, it is a parental responsibility. But the school system has spent decades telling engaged parents that the correct way to fulfill that responsibility to provide rounded education to their children is by sending them to school, and it's becoming clear to some parents that the school system isn't actually upholding that promise.
Miss a day or two of school and now you're "behind" because you don't know some trivia¹ that's on your next standardised test. Mostly irrelevant to the student, but highly worrying to the school. The real things you need to learn, things like curiosity, scientific thinking, critical thinking, practical intuition, complex problem solving, unstructured information retrieval, team work and so on aren't easy to measure, so they're not really measured and then they're not optimised for. Which, when everything is minmaxed to death, means they're optimised against. That's the charitable, non-paranoid interpretation, at least.
I did a homestay in Germany decades ago and the kids left school at about 1pm and spent the afternoon in woodland unsupervised, co-operatively building a sprawling multi-storey "treehouse" that was about 25 metres on a side. I wouldn't be surprised if the skills acquired in that part of their childhood mostly came from there rather than bullet points about carbon bonds in benzene or something.
1: Sure trivia provides "pixels" for a hoped-for complete picture eventually, but the broad substrate you place these pixels on seems de-emphasised compared to just hammering decontextalised details that are easy to test until everyone is heartily sick of the whole subject.