once again - straight from Linchpin...
The essential thing measured by school is whether or not you are good at school.
What they should teach in school:
1. solve interesting problems
"Interesting" is the key word. Answering questions like "When was the War of 1812?" is a useless skill in an always-on Wikipedia world. It's far more useful to be able to answer the kind of question for which using Google won't help. Questions like, "What should I do next?"
School expects that our best students will graduate to become trained trigonometricians. They'll be hired by people to compute the length of the hypotenuse of a certain right triangle. What a waste. The only reason to learn trigonometry is because it is a momentarily interesting question, one worth sorting out. But then we should move on, relentlessly seeking new problems, ones even more interesting than that one. The idea of doing it by rote, of relentlessly driving the method home, is a total waste of time.
2. lead
Leading is a skill, not a gift. You 're not born with it, you learn how. And schools can teach leadership as easily as they figured out how to teach compliance. Schools can teach us to be socially smart, to be open to connection, to understand the elements that build a tribe. While schools provide outlets for natural-born leaders, they don't teach it. And leadership is now worth far more than compliance is.
We need to reorganize our schools to free the great teachers from tests and reports and busywork, and to expel the lousy teachers. I know that sounds like a pipe dream, but why should it be? When schools were organized to produce laborers, lousy teachers were exactly what we needed. Now, lousy teachers are dangerous.
Don't blame the teachers. Blame the corporate system that is still training compliant workers who test well.
click below for our collection of rich ideas/examples
Here's what we're teaching kids to do (with various levels of success):
Fit in
Follow instructions
Take good notes
Show up everyday
Cram for tests and don't miss deadlines
Have good handwriting
Punctuate
Buy things the other kids are buying
Don't ask questions
Don't challenge authority
Do the minimum amount required so you'll have time to work on another subject
Get into college
Have a good resume
Don't fail
Don't say anything that might embarrass you
Be passably good at sports, or perhaps extremely good at being a quarterback
Participate in a large number of extracurricular activities
Be a generalist
Try not to have the other kids talk about you
Once you learn a topic, move on
The key questions:
Which of these attributes are the keys to being indispensable?
Are we building the sort of people our society needs?
The problem lies with the system that punishes artists and rewards bureaucrats instead.
see John Taylor Gatto's, I quit I think
