School Is Not Enough

Doing all of this—curating an exceptional milieu, providing dedicated tutoring and opportunities for apprenticeship—is hard work. You could pull it off if you put your mind to it, I trust. Though, like everything pursued to excellence, it would demand serious sacrifices. Particularly of time. It is ok not to want that.

A lot of it does not require s

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Students need more exposure to the way everyday things work and are made.

“Making mathematics mandatory,” wrote Hacker, “prevents us from discovering and developing young talent. In the interest of maintaining rigor, we’re actually depleting our pool of brainpower.”

In a paper titled “A Mathematician’s Lament,” Paul Lockhart rails against the modern ... See more

through curiosity can reveal people to themselves. But formal education largely remains a vocational enterprise in which, Sir Ken argues, we are being steered away from the things we love “on the grounds that you would never get a job doing that.” Love has been rationalized out of the system of education, but it is central to the deeply personal an

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education has largely stopped serving its primary purpose, preparing young people to thrive and giving them the skills and the hunger to continue a lifelong journey of learning.

Now consider our current situation. Despite all the language professing otherwise, in general the education system of the United States is based entirely on genetic determinism. A child is born assumed to have innate traits, including, for example, a preference as to what they want to be when they grow up (somehow just waiting fully-formed inside o... See more

In fact, international research that studied thousands of workers—more than three-quarters of whom did not have tertiary education—produced findings that resonate with a major theme of the book: that sometimes the actions that provide a head start will undermine long-term development, whether that is choosing a career or a course of study, or simpl... See more