6th Musing: School Systems

Random daily update: (Two of them actually. One, today I repeated something that sounded very familiar to my friends and then I realized it's because I wrote it, but it was quite true. The friend who reads this laughed at me, but I realized I should just have stock-phrases from here in my head now :/ )
(Second: I just finished an amazing (beautiful!) book called Brave Story by Miyuki Miyabe).

So I guess since I haven't had many ideas, here's one that tends to circulate in my head sometimes, especially because one of my friends is really bent on changing it. And that would be the school systems of...well, more than one country. And this will be a shorter post too.
I'll be simple.
Here's what's wrong:

Standardized testing
Grades
Favoring memorization over free-thinking and opinions
Forcing students to learn certain subjects past certain grades.
Required reading (by board members, most of whom have never been educators) and have you read The Song of Solomon? Besides emotionally scarring its victims--readers--it teaches me nothing except that the author has mental issues. To be fair, the last two pages were quite good. And I will never forget the time we had to read 150 pages about a man in prison and it consisted of him talking about what he ate at his meals and how grueling and mind-numbing it was to lay bricks for hours. For a few pages he would talk about his family and how they thought he was a spy, but the rest discussed what I wrote a sentence ago.

There's more, but those are the biggest problems as far as purely education goes. So I think there should be a mass reform.
1. Once students know that they hate math or language or any other subject besides writing (because they'll have to do this their whole life anyways), those subjects should not be required because that time otherwise wasted could be devoted to refining their real skills.
2. There should be no grades. Tests are a terrible way to measure intelligence, which renders grades irrelevant to a person's skill. Einstein failed math.
3. A council of current teachers will decide what books to read and they're not all terribly boring, they know books that are both enjoyable to read and those which contain valuable teaching material.
4. Just get rid of standardized testing, it's a waste of time, energy, and really just to fuel America's place in the worldwide competition of "which country has the best students?"

Just some of my thoughts. Also...I lied about this being a short post.