[Origin date unknown - circa late 1990s is our best guess for now]School is a bad place for children to learn because it’s a bad place for teachers to learn. In the traditional model, the teacher isn’t learning. The teacher knows it and is teaching a curriculum that the teacher already knows, and the kids are learning. In the model we’re trying to present here, everybody is learning, and the way we get there is by building things that create a problem situation.
You’re building a robot out of Lego, you’re writing a program on a computer, you’re writing… You’re doing something that nobody has ever done before. Every creation is a unique one. And so the problems that come up are not problems to which somebody knows the answer. And this is the model of what it should be like, of what the learning environments of the future will be like, where constantly people are in situations that are unique, where everybody is learning because nobody knows the answer.
And this is radically in contradiction to the whole idea of curriculum, that you learn something because this is the day in which you’re supposed to learn it, because somebody made a lesson plan. No. The kind of learning we’re modeling is one in which you’re working on projects, you’re doing interesting things you really care about, and in the course of doing them, you need knowledge, and you get the knowledge when you need it.
This is not a small change. It’s not something that you can do by little increments.