Don't sort children into different schools or tracks by grades or disability during compulsory education
In short
- Until compulsory education ends, schools stop splitting children into schools or classes by grades.
- Children with disabilities learn in the same classroom at a nearby school as the basic rule.
- Money for special support and special teachers go with each child into the regular classroom.
- Public schools and schools that receive tax money can no longer pick children by entrance exam.
- Families and children can still choose a separate setting, such as a school that teaches in sign language, if they want one.
If this comes true
In a middle school in a highland town, a boy who takes a long time to read words reads science experiment notes aloud with the friend at the next desk, in a year when he would once have been moved to another school.
Perhaps
A girl who is good at math might grow impatient with lessons paced for everyone, and watch from the side as only friends who can afford cram school move on to the next unit.
Water so far 💧 0
The proposal in detail
This covers schooling up to the age each society sets for compulsory education, generally fifteen or sixteen. During this period, public schools and private schools that receive tax money can no longer select children by entrance exams or grades, and admit them by methods unrelated to academic ability, such as home area or lottery. Inside a school, fixed classes ranked by grades across all subjects are not allowed. Small groupings meant to build up or extend a particular skill can be used, provided they last for a set period and are regularly reshuffled. Children with disabilities are, as the basic rule, enrolled first in a regular classroom at a local school. Existing special schools gradually change their role into bases of support, sending specialist teachers, therapists, sign language interpreters and others out to local schools. The budget for support is tied to each child, so that it reaches the classroom the child attends. As exceptions, freedom of choice remains for places that share a language and culture, such as a school where deaf children learn in sign language, and for cases where, after hearing the child's own opinion, the family wants a separate setting. Private schools that receive no public money can keep selecting students, but they cannot receive subsidies. The transition takes about ten years, and during that time class sizes are reduced and classrooms with many children who need support get a second teacher.
BenefitsA test at age twelve no longer sets the course of a life
Children grow at different speeds, and it is not rare for a child who did not stand out at the end of elementary school to improve greatly a few years later. If sorting is delayed until the end of compulsory education, children who bloom late are protected from having their path closed early. By ending selection at an age when family resources easily show up in scores, the pattern in which the home you are born into decides which school you can attend also loosens. When many kinds of children share a classroom, teachers can no longer assume a single pace, and there are more explanations tried in new ways and more moments of helping one another. Strong students gain too, since teaching deepens understanding. For children with disabilities, spending ordinary days with local friends becomes the foundation of a place to belong as adults. For the other children as well, sitting at desks with classmates who are different from an early age builds the ability to live and work alongside them in workplaces and communities without prejudice. A system in which support money and specialists reach the classroom spreads its benefit to children without a diagnosis and to children who stumble only for a while.
DrawbacksChildren who want to move ahead and children who need more support both have to wait
If children whose learning speeds and needed support differ greatly are gathered in the same classroom, it becomes very hard for one teacher to give a lesson that suits everyone. In theory individual adjustments are possible, but in a real classroom lessons tend to be pitched at the middle, so children who could go far ahead get bored, and children who need strong support may not get enough care, and both may fail to develop their real abilities. Special schools bring together teachers trained in small settings with specialist training, and they hold skills built up over many years. If these are scattered across local schools, the quality will unavoidably be diluted, and for children who find a noisy, large classroom painful, it may even become a heavier burden. Furthermore, wealthy families unsatisfied with public schools that do not select may move to private schools that take no subsidies or to expensive cram schools, and as a result the divide by family wealth might deepen in a form that is even harder to see. Smaller classes and a second teacher require large budgets and many people, and if the transition goes ahead without them, the most vulnerable children will be the first to pay the price.
Learn the background
In many parts of the world, systems remain that use an exam taken at ten or twelve to divide children into schools for those headed to higher education and schools for the rest. But what shows up strongly in scores at that age is less the child's potential than family circumstances: whether they can attend cram school, whether there are books at home, whether parents understand how the school system works. Once children are separated, less experienced teachers tend to gather on the non-academic side, expectations around the children drop, and the gap widens year after year. International comparisons of academic performance have also repeatedly pointed out that the earlier a society sorts children, the more strongly family background affects results. Children with disabilities, too, lose their ties with neighborhood friends when they travel to a distant separate school, and often go on living separated from society as adults. Those who suffer are children from poor families, children from immigrant families, and children with disabilities. Even if budgets are increased or the entrance to support is widened, as long as the system of separating remains, inequality comes back in a different form.
Choose them ready to accept their drawbacks too (up to 5)
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This proposal was written in Japanese by AI (claude-opus-5-5, policy version 2026-10-20b) and translated by AI (claude-sonnet-5-5). Nobody has checked the facts. Read the original (日本語) How the AI writes