Much as I admire and follow everything you write here on Medium and elsewhere, this analysis - and our educational system - starts from several fundamental assumptions that are not simply flawed, they are dangerously wrong.
One of the first and foremost is that literacy and number sense are a kind of universal current that humans use to power all other achievement. That on some profound level these skills can be reduced to basic instruments everyone can learn, like electrons harnessed to power fans and lights and screens and everything else. Reading and writing and the language of numbers may well be fairly similar in form and application and construction for most 5-year-olds, allowing for a somewhat homogenous educational template for the very young. But interests and applications and development and million other factors almost immediately send everything in different directions. The language of a repair manual is nothing at all similar to an accountant, not in structure, purpose, or content, much less interest to an individual reader. Same for the math. You have to go back to elementary school to find the split.
Yet standardized tests and Common Core Standards reflexively operate from this assumption all the way to 12th grade. And since the designers and gatekeepers of primary and secondary education come from the Academic world of universities, nearly everything 'standardized' is mostly shaped to that very narrow and particular outlet (to borrow your 'plug' metaphor.) Consider how different any high school class would be if guided by just about ANY other human endeavor, from journalism to cooking to soldiering to farming to sports to medicine. And then ask if the skills and content and concepts learned there would be just as applicable in their fundamentals to any other field. Yet this is exactly what our Education Departments and curriculum designers and test makers insist and assess on.
Literacy and number sense are nothing at all like anything in the mechanical world. Minds are not motherboards and our thoughts are neither programs nor the current that propels them through metal.
