The first step would to rid a schedule based off of agriculture. Do year-round schools. With this in place, it is understood that the average homework load would be decreased. But after a summer vacation I got back to school and we had to waste a good portion of school time getting it all back.
We also have this view on education that spawn back to The Renaissance. The philosophy is an educated man is educated in all areas of life. But we have to admit. There comes a point in our studies, in our intellectual endeavor, where certain credits or classes are utterly pointless, yet we are forced to study them. Why? Because that is the way it is. Why? Because of the renaissance, and the incentive for profit. Why don't we do something about it? It seems political attention is spent on the middle east, obamacare, gay rights, and quite frankly, the way it is is good business. If you change it, you have to change the players so that eventually there will be people making big bucks on the new system. People don't want that.
Also....
"I want a nation of workers, not thinkers." -John D. Rockefeller
Nothing like an uneducated mass that thinks they are educated. That is the best citizenship to take advantaged of.
I say year round schools. I say we rid ourselves of this renaissance ideal, it is too old and out dated. Knowledge is a network, that interlaces with other things. For example, scientists are finding Buddha was right with some of his philosophical statements. "In order to understand the leaf, you must understand the tree." What I am trying to say, is knowledge isn't compartmentalized into different subjects. If you had a truly educated teacher, he could talk about all points of that tree, organic chemistry to the mathematics of it all. We probably aren't there yet. But we need teachers with that deep of a knowledge pool to educate our students. And just make them think. I view modern education as a teacher, students, and books that they picked to read. Then when the student has a question about something, the teacher aids the student in understanding what they are reading. The student, picks what they want to read. Eventually, if left to read, concepts of all disciplines would emerge in the studies. And, if a student desires full understanding (like I did), he would have to delve into mathematics.
My point is we shouldn't compartmentalize knowledge. That's so Enlightenment. We shouldn't have a summer vacation. That's so agriculture. We should put the education in the hands of the students, not to people who knows "best." You would be surprised how smart kids get if you let them play. If you took group A of kids, and they didn't get to play but study, and you took group B of kids, and you let them play - who do you think would score better on the intelligence scores? Sure, the kids playing wouldn't have a clue about the revolutionary war. But having kids in their early years just play, makes their brains into these monster sponges.
Playing is a mental exercise, like our current educational system. Video games do what school does. It just doesn't deal with the facts of life. Use video games, physical playing to exercise the mind, and then use reading to fill up that empty cup with whatever interests the student. This will increase the likelihood that whatever they are reading about will be remembered. And knowledge is inter-connected. If reading enough, they will have questions about chemistry, biology, physics, math, writing. You wouldn't have to teach grammar from all the reading they would be doing. They could read their books in groups, or whatever makes the student respond the most.
This to me is the direction education should go. The problem is really powerful people are making a lot of money now, and they don't want it to change. People always say that Capitalism innovates. But you have to be consistent, and realize what it is. Capitalism creates innovations; it halts innovations. I honestly don't think we will get any serious changes to education for a while.