Education and Mind in the Knowledge Age

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Our Oldest Unchallenged Folk Theory at Last Faces Its Day of Reckoning

Something is going on in elementary schools across North America that might strike the detached observer as insane. Millions of dollars are being poured into high-tech equipment that is used mainly to produce the kinds of “projects” that in an earlier day were produced using scissors, old magazines, and library paste. At the same time, and in the same schools, a back-to-basics movement has teachers obsessively concerned with covering traditional content and preparing students ...