@futurebird I found that a lot of things in school, especially in maths, were far too oriented towards specific goals, which become obsolete long before the curriculum is changed. In the UK and USA, a lot of the mathematics curriculum was a reaction to Sputnik: we needed people who could do calculus to build rockets. Now, if you’re building a rocket, you’ll formulate the differential equations but on one will ever solve them by hand. And, in the rush to get people to practice applying some mechanical rules, you don’t teach them the underlying theory that lets them understand why any of it works.
So the big thing I’d want from any curriculum is for the learning outcomes to be clearly articulated and motivated. You need to know this to understand taxation, you need to know this to understand the judicial system, and you need to know this because it’s a huge area of knowledge and you might later want to explore some of it are all valid reasons (and not an exhaustive list). But ‘before mechanical calculators were a thing, it was vitally important to national security that we had a few thousand people who were really good at this’ is not.
I’d want to focus a lot more on foundations and teaching people to learn. We live in the Information age. It’s really easy to find out information about any subject. The key things I want people leaving school with are the ability to think critically, to evaluate sources, and to place new knowledge somewhere in their own taxonomy. And a solid grounding in Haskell, of course.