Smartcuts: How Hackers, Innovators, and Icons Accelerate Success

Finnish education reflects that: it focuses on teaching students how to think, not what to think. That, says Wagner, is core to making school both interesting and valuable. As the saying, attributed to Dr. Seuss, goes: “It is better to know how to learn than to know.”

What this research tells us is that as the world evolves, so too should we constantly rethink our educational conventions in light of the new platforms we have. For example, today’s children should be taught to use Excel spreadsheets—and all their calculations—instead of times tables. Rather than teaching a mile wide in every subject, we ought to f

an age of platforms, creative problem solving is more valuable than computational skill.

And while we may need deep expertise in our industries to become innovators, we actually need only higher-order thinking and the ability to use platforms to do everything

Dyson says, and Papert confirms, that to get kids to become interested in an academic subject on their own, they have to play. Building with LEGOs, visiting museums, experimenting with tools.

“Mathematics is a way of thinking about problems and issues in the world,” says Keith Devlin, Stanford executive and World Economic Forum and American Mathematical Society fellow.

This is what that MIT mathematician Seymour Papert calls constructionism, or learning by making and manipulating objects. It’s incredibly effective for concept mastery and recall, and it’s almost always aided by platforms.

“I hate repeating myself.” (He almost spits on me when he says it.)

Sometimes the questions are complicated and the answers are simple.