Standard Schooling v. Human Diversity

Psychology professor and "quantified self" proponent Seth Roberts says of Occupational Specialization as Far Back as the Bronze Age that

The more you see the centrality of occupational specialization to human nature, the more you will see how modern schooling malnourishes almost everyone who undergoes it — which is almost everyone. Human nature takes people at one place and time — such as Mycenaean Greece — and pushes them to become adults who do all sorts of different things (woodcutter, herald, beekeeper . . . ). It takes people who start off the same or almost the same — same place, same food, same weather, similar genes — and creates diversity among them.

Modern education tries to do the opposite: Take a diverse set of students and make them the same. One example is No Child Left Behind. Another is that in almost every college class, all students are given the same material, the same assignments, and graded on the same one-dimensional scale. We don’t need everyone to be the same; in fact, we need exactly the opposite. The more diverse we are, the sooner we will find solutions to pressing problems, because they will be attacked in many different ways.

He has written occasionally about educational methods at the university level, and of course as a champion of self-experimentation he's focused on results that vary from one individual to the next. It happens to be Father's Day; if I were a father (rather than grandfather) of young children now, I do believe I'd start a notebook for each, each notebook titled What Works For Me And How I Know It, with a major section on How I Learn Best and How I Learned That It's True, with subsections about...well, never mind.

Or then again, maybe not.