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Some comments on Marvin Minsky’s writing on this mistaken ways in which we teach children.  First: his article.

Looking at the systemic failures of the US education system leaves me unable to see a viable route to a high functioning system[1].  This leaves me wondering, when I  have children, how to deal with educating them when even the very best private OR public schools have to conform to a very broken system, and when home schooling might even be illegal.

The only solid answer I can come up with is to move, though I am not sure where to.  I live in Tokyo right now, but the school system there is even worse.

On a different note, I was surprised that Minsky makes the mistake of suggesting that it is a positive thing that subjects other than math are taught by bombarding students with tons of new words to remember (names, dates, etc), saying “[in other areas] each pupil learns hundreds of new words in every term. You learn the names of many countries and organizations, the names of leaders and battles and wars”

The students by and large “learn” these useless data points one week, regurgitate them for the test, and then forget them when the testing is over.  We would do far better to teach people to think for themselves, to analyze information as it comes at them, and to focus, in as much as we really want them to remember history, on the relation of people and events as a narrative story, rather than obsessing on meaningless dates.

[1] world-leading in meaningful terms, not just learned-knowledge tests.