RE: The inherent contradiction of RBE style philosophies
That's a really good way to look at it. School should be, if anything, entrepreneur training, above all else. Value is not just money, it's subjective. A central understanding of the basics of operating a business, and understanding how one's entire life is precisely an economic decisionmaking process (will I watch the football or shag the wife, can't do both at the same time!). These are things that I think even a 6 year old child could grasp at a usable basic level, and be in the process of beginning to learn how to account and negotiate.
With this backbone to the education system, the rest should be driven by the student. If the kid loves polymers, psychotropic drugs, magnetism and fractals, that should be their subjects of study. This idea that children should not work has to be thrown out as well. The education process can be economic reward driven as well, part of the fees paid to put students into a school, is allocated to a pool that distributes according how all are staked in the system (A child could save their money to raise their stake) determines how their rewards are given, and encourages children to even teach each other things in order to mutually boost their results. Making school into a race to the number one position and get the biggest reward at the end, will end the boredom of school. Kids would be trying to one-up each other in the quality and originality of their work, forming little competing factions, all that.
It would be the awesomest thing that could happen to education. But I am sure it is coming because the mind-shift that is taking place.
That is a really radical idea, there are so many issues involved with implementing this kind of thing however. I would say that I don't quite agree yet with turning schools into a competition ladder, only purely because it seems very game-able for the more affluent kids. Continuing this thought, it seems that there wouldn't be much incentive for the more affluent kids to even go to school anymore, assuming their parent/s are better teachers and have a better learning platform than the schools. Inducting them into their business seems to make more sense.
After thinking about it for a bit I guess that this kind of system wouldn't actually be that bad as there is always ways to innovate on many different scales. The richer kids will probably be doing it on a much larger scale than others.
Yeah, it turns learning into a two way market. Students' costs are low and often they have a great deal of financial support. But their performance, if it is incentivised by winning money not just a great mark, it brings a lot more people into it. Even the 'i dun care about money' crowd will still aim at their own personal performance targets and get what they deserve regardless of what they think about the system.
The amount of money to pay the teachers also then becomes directly relatable to the performance of their students as well. A leaderboard for teachers will be part of it as well, and the more successful they are at warping the bell curve to the benefit of all, the more highly regarded are those who helped acquire the qualifications. It would be an incredible boon to education. It is something Steem could adapt part of its functionality to as well.