I do think that we'd do better if we just offered all the bureaucrats in the Department of Education very attractive early retirements. But whether you want to abolish the department is another matter. Maybe there's room for recruiting a lot of visionary people who would do very good things: develop new techniques, new ideas, foster innovative models, disseminate those ideas.

Nothing enrages me more than when people criticize my criticism of school by telling me that schools are not just places to learn maths and spelling, they are places where children learn a vaguely defined thing called socialization...I think schools generally do an effective and terribly damaging job of teaching children to be infantile, dependent, intellectually dishonest, passive and disrespectful to their own developmental capacities.

Rather than pushing children to think like adults, we might do better to remember that they are great learners and to try harder to be more like them.

Often kids in a computer lab learn about word-processing, but if they want to write an essay, they write it by hand. This is exactly the opposite of what you want them to learn. They're approaching the computer as just another abstract school subject.

You can't think seriously about thinking without thinking about thinking about something.

Our goal in education should be to foster the ability to use the computer in everything you do, even if you don't have a specific piece of software for the job.

You can't teach people everything they need to know. The best you can do is position them where they can find what they need to know when they need to know it.