I am relieved that, in my own teaching, I don't have to moderate between high stake teaching and education for the virtues. If I did, I would give students the tools to take the tests but not spend an inordinate amount of time on test prep nor on 'teaching to the test.' If the students, or their parents, want drill in testing, they'd have to go elsewhere. As a professional, my most important obligation is to teach the topic, skills, and methods in ways that I feel are intellectually legitimate.

I want to understand how best to create and preserve a form of higher education that we value but that is in jeopardy for many reasons.

In roughly the last century, important experiments have been launched by such charismatic educators as Maria Montessori, Rudolf Steiner, Shinichi Suzuki, John Dewey, and A. S. Neil. These approaches have enjoyed considerable success[...] Yet they have had relatively little impact on the mainstream of education throughout the contemporary world.

The biggest mistake of past centuries in teaching has been to treat all students as if they were variants of the same individual and thus to feel justified in teaching them all the same subjects the same way.

Much of the material presented in schools strikes students as alien, if not pointless.

But once we realize that people have very different kinds of minds, different kinds of strengths -- some people are good in thinking spatially, some in thinking language, others are very logical, other people need to be hands on and explore actively and try things out -- then education, which treats everybody the same way, is actually the most unfair education.

'Til 1983, I wrote primarily for other psychologists and expected that they would be the principal audience for my book.