About eight years ago I wrote a short essay about how education has remained largely unchanged, aside from the introduction of mass education after the arrival of the printing press, since the Pyramids. This is a particularly bitter pill for me because I was one of those “square peg in a round hole,” “achievement seems to be below ability” students decades ago. Some people, notably biased like my mother, claim was I a gifted child. But at the same time, I seemed to have learning disabilities; for example, I wasn’t able to grasp making proper change in cash payments and was unable to read analog clock faces until I was in middle school.
And now at 51, I still wonder at how I was hobbled by this. My formal education, a bachelor of arts in history, says almost nothing about what I actually know: information technology. Anyway, I’m not really making any insightful comments about educational techniques or pedagogy here. At least none that haven’t been said a zillion times before by people much more learned that I. I still don’t have the Mandarin language course in a pill that science fiction promised me, but things are getting better in other areas–