At first I thought you were talking about the two invaded countries, silly me, I guess they will keep recieving those cluster munition with the bomblet painted to resemble dolls or UN food packets, real classy.
Kids don't have the attention span needed for 'quick learning' that is why the early grades have so much material that falls under 'reviewing what has already been covered. All 12 grades could probably be done in 5 years (10-15).
Increasing the number of school days is not the same as increasing the number of hours in any given school day. Yes, I agree that children have a limited attention span and that having them attend excessively long school days would be a waste of money. I'm not talking about lengthening individual school days though, but rather the number of school days. There is a difference.
Also, there is always the option of reviewing the content taught at school so as to reduce the quantity needed to be taught. For example, replacing looped cursive with joined Italic, which has been proven to be more quickly learnable. Besides, more European countries are shifting in that direction already. For example, some Britains and Belgians today would have difficulty reading standard North American looped cursive since they'd been taught joined Italic.
Replacing the American system of weights and measurements with the metric one would reduce some of the learning burden too.
The Spelling Society too proposes spelling reform. This should not sound too strange when we consider that Turkish, German, and other languages have undergone spelling reform too in recent years, as has China with character reforms so as to increase literacy. In fact in history, the Korean King Sae Jong even appointed a committee to create a new easy to learn script, now the official script of Korea and among the easiest in the world to learn (a European could learn the entire Korean script in a mater of days if not hours)!
Honestly, though, I'm hesitant about supporting spelling reform myself simply because it would also mean having to either make a break with the old books or having to republish them in the new spelling for the next generation to understand them. Again, this has been done before so it is doable. But I'd still be hesitant about supporting spelling reform, but it is something worth considering anyway. It's also worth considering that research shows that British children take an extra two years to learn to read and write compared to children in most European countries simply because of our chaotic spelling. An extra two years per child in a public school system every year likely adds up to at least millions of dollars.
One challenge with English though would be to get more than one country on board, a problem some other governments did not face in implementing such reforms.
Of course other kinds of reforms are likely possible too so as to reduce the learning burden on the student body.
There has to be an economy to support all those trades, if it doesn't have a military application there is going to be little demand for other products that are more expensive than the products already available.
But is it up to the government to dictate
what jobs to create? Yes, the government is responsible to ensure all have employment, but it is not responsible for hiring everyone. It can create jobs in the private sector precisely by spending more on education. Introducing such a voucher system with increased education funding would likely lead to an increase in school construction, teacher training, jobs in the multimedia and publishing industries etc.
