There are indeed. And there are certainly good and bad ways to evaluate students; I fought my way through high school arguing at every turn that the requirement to turn in a "rough draft" of papers was silly. (I wrote all my papers on a word processor -- my father was a very early adopter of technology -- so I would be continually revising and rewording sections and never had a paper at any stage that was complete enough to call a "draft" until it was nearly finalized and no longer "rough.") I also fought my way through math class arguing that I shouldn't have to do all the odd-numbered problems from 1 to 47 because I had picked up the material in lecture and didn't need the practice. Some teachers agreed, others didn't.
But I think the baby-to-bathwater ratio of your proposal is a bit high.
You're conflating two very different things; what a student needs is usually exactly the opposite of what interests that student, precisely because students will learn (by themselves) what interests them. Your first son may not like reading and writing, but he'll be a piss-poor architect if he doesn't master them. Which is why core curricula exist at every level; if he can't fight his way through high school English class, that doesn't bode well for his ability to pass college level freshman comp, which in turn doesn't bode well for his ability to write a persuasive description of how the building he wants to design/build would work or understand the journal article about the revolutionary new uses for Cheez-its as building insulation.
Unfortunately that's total ********. My son gets As on all his papers. I caught him once using Cliff notes to read up and he wrote a paper in 20 minutes and got a 98 percent on it. Your condemnation of the ethical issue with this (which I agree with) is based on a flawed premise. That is that teachers can always tell who is doing the real work. Ask any student on this thread if they've ever ********ted their way through an assignment and received high marks and I would wager almost everyone has done so. This stems from the patronizing idea that educators promote that there is some sort of "high art" aspect to standardized education and that it's about learning to learn. In reality it isn't. It's about learning how to beat the system.
I've watched scholarships be handed to students that had straight As on their report card in high school because they cheated their way through it. And before you go on to say they will eventually get busted, not really. Many academic institutions have turned into business ventures rather than halls of learning. The president of my high school class freely admitting to cheating on every exam she could in order to keep her 4.0 and get scholarships. It's also classist to make assessments about high school performance in order to give out scholarships because many poor families keep their kids at home to baby sit siblings or need them to work after school in order to put food on the table. The fact that they have straight Bs has nothing to do with their capabilities in real life.
Pretending that education is some sort of sophisticated ideal is just not facing the fact that the majority of people who have college degrees these days just slid through the school and have a diploma to show for it. It has nothing to do with really learning.
My son however who isn't doing well in the system is learning on his own and with the guidance of school. But the school is not directing the learning, only the system.
Let alone write that article.
Actually, that would be much worse from the employer's perspective. They don't just want someone who can program. They want someone who can program well. Out of the twenty or so applicants, they want the single best one, not any of the top fifteen chosen at random.
Because I want to know how good this person is. I have, for example, two scholarships at my disposal this year, scholarships that will pay for a student to help me with my research. I want to pick the best of the candidates. I want a student who got top marks in her relevant classes, a student who brings knowledge and creativity and a strong work ethic into the group. I want a student who will be able not only to participate in the research, but who will be able to help train the next generation a year or so from now (when I have another scholarship or two to give away). I don't want a C student, I want an A student.
