I still struggle with what the purpose of school is. I would have agreed that just showing you know the material should be sufficient - if the only focus of school for K-12 was to learn subject matter and show you know it, regardless of how you get there and if you continue to learn new subject matter.
But... it just seems like schools' role has greatly expanded beyond just subject mastery. As my children start their journey, I really do struggle with what I really want from school. It just seemed so much simpler and black/white when I was a child, and it just seems to have gotten so out of control with what I sometimes think is trivial nonsense that school admin get so hung up over.
So - is school just to teach academics, or is the schools' role to prepare a child for the outside world and life skills they need for college and beyond? Skills like managing time, organizing themselves, responsibility, leadership, team work and so on... seem to be increasingly more and more emphasized in classrooms and grades than pure mastery (until college, when the bucket of cold water tends to hit students that depended on the micromanagement style of so many "top notch" schools through high school)
so... I don't know - I still struggle with trying to figure out what I would consider "best educational setting" for my kids would be and balancing their strengths with weaknesses that needs to be dealt with early on and my expectations over whether school is to be focused on subject mastery and making sure the child is working towards their potential and whether those non-academic "skills" should be so critical to the environment or not.
and when I look at parents in my DD's daycare, I find so few parents really asking about what role they want educational institution to play in their and their child's life... and yet I know I would have never even second guessed our public school system (we live in a highly rated district) - until we had our 3.5 DC reporting boredom, and his testing result that stunned (and scared) us. And so now, I find myself really trying to answer this question.
as for boys vs girls, it always seemed like it favored girls... even when I was a kid, I recall boys always being sent to the principal's office because they could not sit still. It does seem to trend towards average girls' strengths - even at daycare/preschool level, it already seems like the environment is slanted toward the average girl (and "calm or mellow" boy).
