Having progeny of my own wending their way through 'education' and exams, I am struck by how little it has changed since I was their age, apart from the expected standards of writing/grammar and language learning being clearly lower these days than, say, 30 years ago.
Why is this? Various reasons.
Schools and universities are inevitably traditional places. They evolve slowly and laboriously, as they are full of fairly clever people capable of arguing to and fro about anything for months on end. They respond a bit to what customers want, but in this market the customers are typically parents, not the students themselves: "If it was good enough for me, it's good enough for Johnny too!"
Another factor is organised knowledge. Once upon a time there wasn't much knowledge at all, except in a tiny number of universities and religious establishments. Then came mass production of books and knowledge spread much faster.
But books take you only so far. Apart from anything else, you have to read them, which means that they have to be available at home or somewhere else. In such circumstances it made sense to emphasize learning - you carried around chunks of knowledge in your head.
Now knowledge in dizzying quantities is immediately available to anyone anywhere with a cheap smartphone. Even books themselves are on the smartphone, not on your shelf or weighing down your bag! What precisely is the reason now for learning anything at school, other than how to find and manipulate information sensibly (and perhaps strong ethical guidelines, and how to make and manage money)?
Governments pile on the misery, doing everything possible to rule out real competition as a driver for innovation. This makes some sense in 'fairness' terms. Children only have one shot at learning stuff during childhood, so there is a strong impulse not to experiment and so to make every child have roughly the same education (hence the feuding over private education where clear long-term advantages are seen to be bought outside the one-size-fits-all ethos)
Yet fairness and standardisation come at an increasingly high price in terms of innovation and change. They mean piling on process and reducing creativity in thinking, just when flexibility and creativity are the key skills needed for children to flourish in the emerging world.
In short, the current education model is dying on its feet. This is most obvious in the higher education sector around the world, where students themselves have some say (via loans) in what they study or even if they study in that way at all. Universities especially in the USA (but also here) have piled on costly bureaucratic process, driving up student fees to absurd and unsustainable levels. Why borrow so much money for a fancy degree when the likely jobs outcomes at the end of the course are so unclear?
For a superb smart look at the distortions and waste caused by current teaching practices, check out this essay by Alex Tabarrock. Why should he use precious time going to teach a class of 30 when his Internet videos can reach hundreds of thousands?
Yes, the teaching experience of a 'live' class may be better, and in some ways should be better, even if often it is pretty dismal and mechanical. But what about other advantages in terms of time, flexibility and focus - can't they be captured in new, utterly different ways, to overall benefit for everyone?
What is unsustainable won't be sustained.
And the squealing in this case from all those vested self-indulgent academic interests who thought they had indefinite job security will be truly horrible.
