Accident by Design

• Teaching B students calculus is like teaching your cat to do your taxes. They should be learning entrepreneurship. Some students engage in entrepreneurial activity in school, but they are exceptions. The top entrepreneurs are often dropouts. Even the head of MIT’s Media Lab is a dropout. Since you can teach everything, efforts to create a common curriculum dictates what students are exposed to in the form of textbooks, classroom instructions, assessments, and homework. In short, the goal seems to take the range of human diversity and turn out a homogenized result. The aim is to prepare students for jobs when we don’t know what the jobs of the future will be.
• The alternative is to individualize education with a focus on student interests. The result would a more diverse population in terms of knowledge and skills. Instead of creating an education for the future, we are busy perfecting a 19th century system (Daniel Pink). Schools focus on producing good tests takers at a time when the world needs more creative and innovative talents. We measure the worth of a student by a few test and IQ scores.

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