[From Seth Godin, Stop Stealing Dreams http://www.squidoo.com/stop-stealing-dreams]
 

I need to come back to this again, because deep down, the educated people reading this aren’t sure yet. The argument for rote, for primers, for drill and practice, and for grammar is made vivid within ten seconds of checking out YouTube. Here’s a sample comment:

NOW UV STARTED READIN DIS DUNT STOP THIS IS SO SCARY. SEND THIS OVER TO 5 VIDEOS IN 143 MINUTES WHEN UR DONE PRESS F6 AND UR CRUSHES NAME WILL APPEAR ON THE SCREEN IN BIG LETTERS. THIS IS SO SCARY BECAUSE IT ACTUALLY WORKs

We’re all going down the drain. Too much profanity, no verb conjugation, incomplete thoughts, and poor analysis, everywhere you look, even among people running for President.

I don’t think the problem is lack of access to role models, or to Strunk and White, or to strict teachers.

I think the problem is that kids don’t care. Because they don’t have to. And if someone doesn’t care, all the drilling isn’t going to change a thing.

The way we save the written word, intellectual discourse, and reason is by training kids to care.

Only 3 percent of Americans can locate Greece on a map. (That’s not true, but if it were, you wouldn’t be surprised, because we’re idiots about stuff like that.)

The question is: Will spending more time drilling kids on the map of the world solve this problem? Is our apathy about world affairs a function of a lack of exposure to the map in school?

Of course not.

No, the problem isn’t that we haven’t spent enough hours memorizing the map. The problem is that we don’t want to.

Teachers aren’t given the time or the resources or, most important, the expectation that they should sell students on why.

A kid who is into dinosaurs has no trouble discussing the allosaurus/brontosaurus controversy. A student interested in fixing up his dad’s old car will have no trouble understanding the mechanics of the carburetor. And the young Hilary Clintons among us, those who are fascinated by the world, understand quite clearly where Greece is.

If you’re running an institution based on compliance and obedience, you don’t reach for motivation as a tool. It feels soft, even liberal, to imagine that you have to sell people on making the effort to learn what’s on the agenda.

I’m not sure it matters how it feels to the teacher. What matters is that motivation is the only way to generate real learning, actual creativity, and the bias for action that Open book, open note

Futurist Michio Kaku points out that soon, it will be easy for every student and worker to have contact lenses hooked up to the Internet.

One use will be that whatever you’re reading can be instantly searched online, and any questions that can be answered this way, will be answered this way. Already, there are simple plug-ins that allow you to search any word or phrase in the document you’re currently reading online.

Forget about futurists and contact lenses. This is something we can do right now, on any text on any screen on just about any computer.

What’s the point of testing someone’s ability to cram for a test if we’re never going to have to cram for anything ever again? If I can find the answer in three seconds online, the skill of memorizing a fact for twelve hours (and then forgetting it) is not only useless, it’s insane.

In an open-book/open-note environment, the ability to synthesize complex ideas and to invent new concepts is far more useful than drill and practice. It might be harder (at first) to write tests, and it might be harder to grade them, but the goal of school isn’t to make the educational-industrial complex easy to run; it’s to create a better generation of workers and citizens.