>"A pass should be 100%/A+. You should not be able to progress until you understand the subject matter 100% as future learning depends on you having a complete understanding of previous content."
As much as I can see the value in that, it'll never fly. Because, as I'm sure you know, we live in a society of "equals". Therefore, the system you propose will violently shatter that illusion for the general public and mainstream collective-thought.
And this will happen because you will very quickly see so many fail miserably and a few plowing through the material. Both due to innate general intelligence, affinity for particular skills/topics as well as plain old determination. We don't all have equal amounts of all, no matter how much we get told otherwise by individuals blaming externalities.
And I'll just go ahead and add that I believe I'd be one of the many that would very quickly fail in such a system. At least, until I realized the seriousness of the situation and decided to sit my ass down and study with determination and not rely on any supposed inner ability/gift/talent.
I addressed this in a comment above but i'll repeat some of it. What I am imagining is a system with a much more granular assessment model that can be done at the student's own pace, and retaken until they get 100%. If you failed an assessment, it's not a problem. You can spend the next 10min relearning the content and retaking the test. This way you actually learn the content that you didn't know, instead of just getting a grading and moving on.
Your idea seems to be based on the fundamental assumption that the idea in school is to learn facts that can be tested easily.
IMHO the idea of school is to teach students how to learn. Knowing when a certain battle happened isn't important, understanding how to view the world through the lens of history is. Knowing how to study the historical background of a culture or society should be what the student learns.
Likewise, the goal of English class is not to memorize the parts of speech or memorize famous poems. Learning how to write prose, master communication with the written word, and coherently communicate their thoughts, loves, and desires upon paper, are the ideals towards which students should strive.
If the idea of school is to teach students to learn, why aren't there courses on learning itself and the framework of things around the act of learning that enables students to efficiently do so?
Essentially, why aren't good study skills explicitly taught and practiced?
What I've experienced through school is that whilst there is some implicit teaching of such skills, a lot of study skills are either found by students themselves through experimentation(random), or passed down from their parents. More often than not, these are attrocious for students that did not have enough parental involvement OR parents that don't know how to study efficiently either. My personal hypothesis is that these are affected by and also affect socioeconomic standing. Just like wealth, education also perpetuates through generations.
Personally, through highschool my aproach to studying involved cramming, keeping almost no note of due-dates and very messy planning of long term academic projects. In fact, anything that took more than 2 weeks of foresight would leave me scrambling to finish at last minute.
What's worse is that this did not occur to me to be a problem until well into 10th to 11th grade, which put a dent into my college prospects to say in the least.
Since then, I've been working on aquiring these skills on my own, playing around with things like holistic learning, spaced repetition, learning how to structure projects and aquiring organizational tools such as org-mode or even something as simple as using a calendar habitually. And it helps immensely.
And whilst now I'm starting to put these things into place, I keep asking myself: "Why was this not pointed out to me back in ,say, 6th grade?". General education is a great social equalizer, but the assumption that these neccesairy skills are simply passed down seems to go against that very idea. My personal opinion is that teaching these skills would have an incredible impact, since often intelligence is not the problem, but methodology is.
You are right that students should know how to learn. This should to taught outside of this assessment model.
But the assessment doesn't have to only assess facts. The assessment can also include complex problems; it would however require that an answer be an absolute value. This teaching method would not be appropriate for all learning material. But it might be good for 70%. Even English has fundamental/structural "facts" that could be assessed this way.
Frankly, I do not see value in it, especially when it comes to things like history, geography etc. Even in math you do not need to be able to solve those super-hard triple star olympiad like exercises. You just need to be able to solve normal ones.
The only other option is that the weaker or average student will not even see those hard exercises exist and I not sure how would that help him.
That approach makes sense only if you mean to become expert in that subject. It does not make sense to demand that in everything.
As much as I can see the value in that, it'll never fly. Because, as I'm sure you know, we live in a society of "equals". Therefore, the system you propose will violently shatter that illusion for the general public and mainstream collective-thought.
And this will happen because you will very quickly see so many fail miserably and a few plowing through the material. Both due to innate general intelligence, affinity for particular skills/topics as well as plain old determination. We don't all have equal amounts of all, no matter how much we get told otherwise by individuals blaming externalities.
And I'll just go ahead and add that I believe I'd be one of the many that would very quickly fail in such a system. At least, until I realized the seriousness of the situation and decided to sit my ass down and study with determination and not rely on any supposed inner ability/gift/talent.