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Dumb means you don’t know what you’re supposed to know. Stupid means you know it but
make bad choices.
Access to information has radically changed in just ten years. Khan Academy, Wikipedia, a
hundred million blogs, and a billion websites mean that if you’re interested enough, you can
find the answer, wherever you are.
School, then, needs not to deliver information so much as to sell kids on wanting to find it.
Dumb used to be a byproduct of lack of access, bad teachers, or poor parenting. Today, dumb is
a choice, one that’s made by individuals who choose not to learn.
If you don’t know what you need to know, that’s fixable. But first you have to want to fix it.
112.The schism over blocks
Jean Schreiber wants kids in elementary school to spend more time playing with blocks and less
time sitting at a desk and taking notes.
Is that okay with you?
Blocks for building.
Blocks for negotiating
Blocks for pretending.
Blocks for modeling the real world.
Time spent on blocks takes time away from painstakingly learning to draw a six, from memorizing
the times tables, and from being able to remember the names of all fifty states.
Is that what school ought to be doing?
As a parent, you see what seven-year-olds in China are doing (trigonometry!) and you see the
straight rows of silent students and rigor, and it’s easy to decide that there’s a race, and we’re
losing.
We are losing, but what we’re losing is a race to produce the low-paid factory workers of
tomorrow.
In New York, the Education Department just proposed a reading test for all third-graders—a
test that would last more than four hours over two days. Clearly, playing with blocks is not part
of this requirement.
But go back to the original premise of this manifesto—that what we need is not to create
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