It's not as if our present systems work just fine and there is nothing to improve. On the contrary, we've inherited a lot of clumsy apparatus that institutionalizes forms of learning and training that are not well suited to the demands of our era. In fact, most of the institutional apparatus of education (K-22) was designed roughtly between 1876 and 1925 and has evolved since then. It was explicitly Taylorist, with an emphasis on standardizing what was learned and how, what was taught and how, what was assessed and how, since "scientific management" of knowledge was part and parcel of the assembly-line and corporate-driven Industrial Age. I'm talking about such things as IQ tests and multiple choice assessment; he idea of "deviation from the mea" which evolved into the concept of the Bell Curve; disciplinary silos, majors, minors, distribution requirements and even the ideas of "giftedness" and "learning disabilities" all are developed and systematized at this dawning of the twentieth century. It is about Taylorist "scientific learning management." I'm not sure it ever worked all that well . . . but I am positive it's time to rethink the apparatus of our educational system---and our funding structures to reinvigorate support of a good, purposive, inspired and inspiring educational system--for the world we live in now, not the world in which most faculty members were trained.
