Education in a deepest sense has always been about doing rather than about knowing.

Everything they teach in school is oriented so that they can test it to show that you know it, instead of taking note of the obvious, which is that people learn by doing what people want to do.

There is one very good reason to learn programming, but it has nothing to do with preparing for high-tech careers or with making sure one is computer literate in order to avoid being cynically manipulated by the computers of the future. The real value of learning to program can only be understood if we look at learning to program as an exercise of the intellect, as a kind of modern-day Latin that we learn to sharpen our minds.

Schools in the future will be judged less because of the credentials that they bestow, and more because of the experiences that they offer.

Questions are the important thing, answers are less important. Learning to ask a good question is the heart of intelligence. Learning the answer-well, answers are for students. Questions are for thinkers.

The language of the culture also reflects the stories of the culture. One word or simple phrasal labels often describe the story adequately enough in what we have termed culturally common stories. To some extent, the stories of a culture are observable by inspecting the vocabulary of that culture. Often entire stories are embodied in one very culture-specific word. The story words unique to a culture reveal cultural differences.

Learning is about failure and recovery from failure.