In my view, your last paragraph has the word I'd like the Education Minister to recognize as a key to improvement. That word is "thinking", critical and otherwise. I think our technological society has unwittingly put all the elements in line to produce a thinkless generation, super convenient access to information, deluges of trivialities, laptop software that brings the authority of neatness to vapid ideas, and the democratization of opinion then wikied as fact. We need more bohemians and iconoclasts, fewer pedants. More turmoil, less rigid assessment, more argument less acquiescence. I like the options idea you have, for an IB program, cooperative learning etc. Screw literacy, it's thinking that's died