If it were possible to implement an optimal educational program for children and young people—one aligned with their psychological development and attentive to what human beings actually need in life—it might look something like this.
First would come mathematics, the natural sciences, and basic technical literacy. These should be taught gradually, moving from a naïve, childlike understanding to more advanced forms. This stage is decisive for shaping the brain. Moreover, anyone who fails to acquire the foundations of these disciplines at an early age is unlikely to make up for that deficit later in life.
This phase should also include basic skills for managing one’s own mind: how to use its capacity effectively, how to protect oneself against depression, how to regulate attention and emotional states, and how to maintain psychological resilience.
At the same time—or with only a slight delay—there should be rigorous and demanding instruction in the mother tongue. This is just as crucial, because language is the medium of thought. The richer the linguistic repertoire we command—including archaisms, unusual grammatical forms, and complex syntactic structures—the better equipped we are to think clearly about complex matters. Teaching children a simplified, impoverished version of their own language, and then adding equally simplified and primitive versions of foreign languages, is less an act of education than a kind of intellectual bludgeoning.
Only in a later phase—say, from the age of twelve or fifteen—should additional foreign languages be introduced in a systematic way.
And then, around the age of thirty, that is, alongside full participation in working life, would come history, civics, and the broader humanistic disciplines. At that point, the individual approaches them with a mind already well formed by scientific study and tempered by real-life experience. This produces a fundamentally different—and more critical—mode of engagement, and offers at least some protection against the peculiar arrogance that so often accompanies the humanities when they are taught too early. These are also subjects that can, and should, be studied throughout one’s life.
Would this mean encountering “primitive” twenty-year-olds? And do we not already encounter them—despite the fact that many are enrolled at faculties of humanities? The most intellectually curious will pursue humanistic subjects from adolescence out of genuine interest. The rest will catch up later. Life is getting longer, and so is its active phase.
It is worth noting that this model is almost the exact opposite of what contemporary schooling is built upon.