> I think about three strata of students. The stubbornly unwilling, the coaxable, and the eager.

I have a real issue dividing kids up along these lines. I've found that virtually all young kids love to explore and learn things, and if anything schooling can extinguish this innate desire when it becomes a source of stress.

It's hard to convince kids why they should learn advanced abstract math, beyond what is necessary to calculate the tip on a restaurant bill. The number of high school students who will use advanced math beyond high school is very small, but those that do will have high impact, which is both in society's interest and their own interest as high earners.

The kids that study and apply themselves, I don't think it's so much that they can see they understand the benefits of linear algebra at the time, it's that their parents and the social network they're a part of sends them signals that this is what they should do to be successful and they're rewarded for doing well in school.

Having multiple parallel tracks for different types of students is controversial. Schooling tends to be cyclical with periods with more tracking is popular shifting to periods of less tracking and more classroom mixing. It really depends on what you want to optimize for. More tracking benefits the highest achievers. Less tracking raises the bottom and the average but at the cost of not maximizing the outcome of the top.

If you had the budget for two teachers, I’d utilize them as one teaching in the traditional way, and the other spending 1:1 times with each student (20 students in a class → 1-1:30 hr / student).

Why is it obvious to you that children should be coerced into learning something?

Let's say that you have some curriculum C that you think is vital for children to learn, and you want as many children as possible to learn C.

Even ignoring ethics, it's not obvious to me that attempting to coerce all children into learning C is the best way to accomplish your goal!

Here's the thing. Learning is hard. There's no going around it. You'll need to grind through practice problems, write essays, memorize facts, etc.

And you need to do that. It trains your brain. If you simply rely on calculators, LLMs, and Google Search, then you likely can forget about doing advanced science.

It doesn't mean that you have to _master_ everything. Far from it. But you need to apply real effort to various subjects to train yourself.

>figuring out how to move a student from an unwilling participant to a willing participant.

I've been giving chemistry lessons since I was a teenager, and quite early this became my first order of business after that alone was responsible for turning a D student into a B student in one session.

For that first non-mathematically inclined student who was having so much trouble, this had to be accomplished before any of the specific concepts and problems could be properly addressed in the course they were enrolled in.

All that was accomplished in two hours was gradual but progressive reversal of attitude, not unlike what I was accustomed to in ramping up to more advanced subject matter, but we never got around to that during the first session.

The next week they had a very positive attitude and were going to call me later with some challenging equations for some help.

Wasn't necessary, the very next week they got a B on their own initiative, were so excited and passed everything after that with no further problems. It was probably the most thankful student I ever tutored.

The answer is, as it's always been, aggressive tracking. Easier said than done because most school administrators and education policymakers base a lot of their self worth out of being "good people" and being liked by everyone. Having to give up on some kids is unthinkable to them. Simply giving up on all of the kids in a way that decouples the outcomes from their direct actions is much preferable and lets them sleep easy.

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I agree this is the fundamental question and disagreement. I certainly don't think coercion is ethical.