I meant "conservative" as in "actually changes very little", not as in politics. Like, I am not suggesting to change what should be learned, when, or how; just to make the textbooks (also) digital, and free to use. Sorry for confusion.

Also, I had a situation in Slovakia in mind, where textbooks already are centralized, probably more than in most countries. (As far as I know, in most European countries you can have multiple competing textbooks certified as being "compatible with what the state wants you to learn". In Slovakia, you can only have one. Like, two authors could write almost identical textbooks, only one would be allowed for use in schools, the other would not.) Making the approved book free would strictly improve things.

Then again, you could have multiple competing free textbooks. Plus an option to upload your own ones on the school tablet.

… merely delaying the school start time by 1 hour …

[…]

The truth is, education isn’t about learning new things. It’s about separating students based on how conformist and intelligent they are.

Does it really strike you as plausible, that the reason why school start time isn’t delayed an hour, is that education is about ranking students by conformism/intelligence?

If we grant the premise (and I do, more or less), still it seems like such ranking could as easily be accomplished an hour later as earlier; more easily, even, since you wouldn’t be artificially depressing the performance of the students—which you obviously don’t want to do if you’re trying to measure said performance! And if, indeed, a later start time reduces teen mortality and crime, while at worst having no detrimental effect on ability to accomplish the main goal (ranking students), then pushing the school day forward an hour seems like a no-brainer. We should see parents, public officials, etc., advocating for it; we should see politicians adopting it as a campaign platform; and we should have, by now, seen it widely implemented.

Yet, with minor and insignificant exceptions, we don’t see this. Why not?

Because if you pushed the school day forward an hour, then, on average, many fewer parents would be able to take the kids to school on their own way to work.

Because while ranking kids by intelligence/conformism/whatever is one major function of public schools, another, and also very important, function is simply the fact of keeping kids attended, confined, and “out of trouble”, while their parents are at work.

(See also “after-school programs”. You cannot feasibly extend the school day past ~3 PM—the students will stop paying attention, teachers’ unions will revolt, etc.—but you’ve got to have some plausible reason to keep [at least some of] the kids in the building until their parents get off work and can come pick them up.)

Okay, I see that my idea does depend too much on the situation in my country. (Well, the question was, what crazy ideas are we thinking about. I was thinking about how to improve the situation in my country. But now I see that the solution would not generalize well.)

In Slovakia, the situation is more like "there are no good textbooks" rather than "there are multiple decent textbooks competing on the market". For example, after computer science was added as a high-school subject, for the few following years there were still no textbooks for the subject; teachers had to improvise. (Which was okay for me, but not for everyone.) For some other subjects, there are textbooks teachers complain about, but it's all they have.

My guess (I may be completely wrong here) is that writing the entire book is simply too much, even for teachers who are good at what they do. It would take you the entire year, I suppose; and maybe even this would turn out to be a planning fallacy. Maybe it would be better to generate the textbook wiki-style; perhaps start with an inferior product, and keep fixing bugs. In Slovakia, the government dictates which topics need to be taught, in which order. For this project, this could be an advantage: the list of chapters is already given, all you need is write them one by one. Not necessarily each chapter by the same person.

Having multiple versions and choosing from them, that would be a nice problem to have. But even then, I suppose, paying the first author a fixed amount of money in return for giving up copyright would have the advantage that the author no longer can (nor has an incentive to) prevent later improvements by volunteers. I mean, teachers often prepare texts for their classes, and they don't get paid extra for that; some of them probably wouldn't mind contributing to the common project.