If the school would only increase the workload, some children could not pay attention, and some might commit suicide.
Increased difficulty is not the same thing as increased workload. I always found that I learned best in classes which had difficult material but did not necessarily place huge demands on your time. That way I could always pick one or two things that really interested me and put a lot of extra effort into them, because I would have time and energy to spare.
For example, in a computer architecture class in college, we were supposed to design and simulate a miniature MIPS-like processor. We were given considerable head-starts and hints, and diagrams, and so on. I found that class particularly interesting, and I had some spare time, so I ignored the hints, invented my own instruction set, a stack-based CPU architecture, made an assembler and simulator for it, and designed the hardware. It worked, and I got a nice grade—but more importantly, I learned a lot from this, and had a good time doing it. If my classes had been loading me down with large amounts of work, I never would have had the chance, and my education would have suffered.
Later, when I did teaching, I always offered my students alternate options that were harder, but potentially less work. The ones who voluntarily took me up on the offer learned more than they would have otherwise, and generally had more fun. A lot of them ended up doing quite a bit more work than they had to, apparently just because it was interesting.
Increased difficulty is not the same thing as increased workload. I always found that I learned best in classes which had difficult material but did not necessarily place huge demands on your time. That way I could always pick one or two things that really interested me and put a lot of extra effort into them, because I would have time and energy to spare.
For example, in a computer architecture class in college, we were supposed to design and simulate a miniature MIPS-like processor. We were given considerable head-starts and hints, and diagrams, and so on. I found that class particularly interesting, and I had some spare time, so I ignored the hints, invented my own instruction set, a stack-based CPU architecture, made an assembler and simulator for it, and designed the hardware. It worked, and I got a nice grade—but more importantly, I learned a lot from this, and had a good time doing it. If my classes had been loading me down with large amounts of work, I never would have had the chance, and my education would have suffered.
Later, when I did teaching, I always offered my students alternate options that were harder, but potentially less work. The ones who voluntarily took me up on the offer learned more than they would have otherwise, and generally had more fun. A lot of them ended up doing quite a bit more work than they had to, apparently just because it was interesting.