I think we still think about College with too much "baggage" in our minds.
I am wondering if there's an even more revolutionary approach - for example, continuous education, where evaluation/tests are performed continuously.
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I took a class which had a short quiz/test at the beginning of each meeting. It was just a handful of questions that covered the assigned reading for that date. The reading in question wasn't out of a book, but was always a single review article, or 2-4 smaller academic papers. Together these quizzes represented a significant chunk of your grade.
I learned more, and more quickly, in that class than probably any other I've ever taken. It was mixed between grad/undergrad (I was undergrad at the time), but because everyone "had" to do the reading for each class everyone was on a more or less equal footing, and the discussion was fantastic.
This is a fantastic way to teach courses, and is in some sense the canonical seminar.
The model works very well for upper-level courses, but not so well at the first 2 or 3 years, which is where most drop out of college.
edit: the short pre- and post-tests are pretty effective, if you can afford the time, at every level of the curriculum. I'm not sure why they aren't more prevalent, except that it's very time consuming for the course staff.
This works for more than just discussion based classes, as well; one of the best classes I ever took in college was a CS Theory course; every single day, the class started off with a quiz on the material we had covered in the previous class. Immediately after finishing the quiz, we'd go over the answers in class together.
The end result was that you were constantly getting immediate feedback about how well you understand the material; if you thought you knew what you were doing and you were actually totally lost, you found out the very next day and were presented with an opportunity to ask for clarifications. And since there were so many quizzes, there was no need for larger tests (because the professor constantly felt like he had a good handle on how people were understanding the material) and you never got stressed out about bombing a quiz or two (because there were thirty other quizzes that would go into calculating your grade, plus the workshop scores and homework scores).
It really removed the stress of the class and gave me an opportunity to focus on the material itself, instead of worrying about how I would do on the tests. Weirdly, when every day was a quiz, it seemed like there were never any quizzes.
>'The end result was that you were constantly getting immediate feedback about how well you understand the material...It really removed the stress of the class and gave me an opportunity to focus on the material itself, instead of worrying about how I would do on the tests.'
Interestingly, this is exactly what I like so much about the best MOOCs I've completed. Assigned exercises typically allow multiple attempts and provide immediate feedback during and after completion.
This is in stark contrast to my local University experience where everything is single attempt with the exception of papers where a single draft submission might be allowed.
Needless to say, I find the former far superior for learning.
The market demand is hyper focused on reactionary credentialism fundamentalism. So good luck with suggesting something new.
In true doublespeak fashion you can name something an "education system" all you want, but that doesn't mean it necessarily educates or even does vocational training.
Edited to add:
The weirdest lifestyle of my entire life has to have been school related, both K-12 and college. It is like visiting a very foreign land. Its just bizarre, compared to real life. For a weird alternative history mind bender experience imagine trying to re set your current home and work life into the lifestyle and culture of high school or freshmen year of college. And I'm not talking about trivial things like music fads or drug experimentation but basic things like interpersonal relationships and the social structure both among the students and "authority". And slavish devotion to the factory clock although the factory closed and moved overseas in my dad's generation. I would imagine literature like this already exists, but it would be so weird as to be unreadable.
This is what makes intense credentialism so weird. The way we prepare our youth for life is to have them compete against each other in an RPG where the rules and stats are in constant unknowable flux and the goal is uncertain but may be academic or sports or drug experimentation or sex experiences, with a little binge drinking, then the winner (which seems to depend mostly on inherited genetics and luck and stamina) gets handed the controls of a nuclear reactor. It makes the hazing that .mil basic trainees go thru seem calm, wise, and rational. Everyone agrees its time to fire the GM and replace the whole RPG with a sane new set of rules. No one can agree on which rules, and the guys in charge, who happened to be pretty good at the old game, want nothing to change other than at most a reskin of the game art, if that much.
And in true reactionary fashion, you'll find that everyone shows up for the revolution, but no one agrees what should come next.
Coming up with a workable solution is a lot more difficult than throwing out the old, both objectively and politically.
edit re: parent's edit:
see Ivan Illich's Deschooling Society.
While I agree with your premise of wanting a revolutionary approach, I think your solution is in the wrong direction. I think continuous testing would lead more to "teaching to the test". If anything, I think the revolutionary approach would not involve standardized testing but rather a more qualitative approach, though Im not sure what that would look like.