This is one of the main reasons why Ciro Santilli invested in Write free books to get famous website.
Ciro believes that the only thing students must be forced to learn is to speak read and write English and that a teacher's main job after that is to help students find their next big goals and also ties into the backward design philosophy.
Everything else, the student must choose.
This idea is generally known as self-directed learning.
This is most notable in University entry examinations of poor countries, where students often have to waste one extra year of their lives to go through preparation for the useless university entry exams. And then, surprise surprise, if they actually get in, they find that this is not what they really wanted to do, and they just go through to the end miserably because they understandably they don't want to risk another year of their lives.
Ciro saw this first hand École Polytechnique which was way freer than his university in Brazil.
Steve Jobs's university dropout stories from Steve Jobs' 2005 Stanford Commencement Address also come to mind.
Interesting projects:
- Brown University's Open Curriculum concept sounds exemplary:
- Advanced Placement
- Cirism | 66, 11k, 28
- Ciro Santilli | 516, 60k, 193
- Ciro Santilli's Homepage | 262, 222k, 4k
- Advanced Placement | 31
- École Polytechnique | 2k
- Free gifted education | 1k
- How to diagnose a genius by Wilhelm Ostwald (1909) | 127
- Self-directed learning | 17, 27, 1
- University entry quotas | 884