In education, "progress" ordinarily means doing better what's always been done. That's not good enough.

Real change—meaningful change in learner intellectual performance—will come when it's finally realized that the primary educational task isn't, as is now supposed, to “cover the material.” Transferring existing knowledge from those who know to those who don’t has its uses, but today’s answers won’t fit tomorrow’s questions. The young must adapt to an unknown, unknowable future. That requires continuous construction of new knowledge, and the most useful tool for that purpose is an understanding of the knowledge-constructing process.

Long before they come to school, the young are making routine use of a comprehensive,  sophisticated process for making sense of experience and creating new knowledge.  Helping them lift that process into consciousness, and elaborate, refine, and make routine use of it, is the most important task of a general education.