I have been in actual class, in the last 3 years, where this text was used as the opening reading. It was a course on pedagogy. The teacher was using it as a li

I have been in actual class, in the last 3 years, where this text was used as the opening reading. It was a course on pedagogy. The teacher was using it as a lightning rod, a discussion piece. The teacher used it, I think, to quickly sort the class in to the types of people she had in her classroom. To be blunt, I love this essay. And, there seem to be few of you engaging in the ideas. Yes, its easy to look at it and say utopia, never going to happen. And, yet, it's easy to say well if this was the case, no one would learn anything, but come on, dig in. I think the point is, and it's one that paul graham him self has made in his book, Hackers and Painters, is that students are trying to learn real things, but in most cases they are just sitting there being talked at. Not in all cases, but most cases. I don't think he is trying to say that things like chemistry, and physics aren't important, but he is making the point that giving people a choice is more important. Before I make my passionate case for the way I like to learn, its important to state that I realize that there are as many ways to learn as there are colors. We can probably sort people in to a small number of effective buckets, but diversity is the name of the game. I don't practice anything passionately that was taught to me in school. Programming, cooking, writing. They tried to teach me writing, but they tried in an English teacher way, and I don't write, or think like an English teacher. The things I choice to care about, and I chose to get better at, I do best. And, I can hear you already, you liberal education people, yelling, "but if you don't force people to learn lots of things, they won't ever do it by themselves.", bull shit, of course there are going to be people who refuse to learn anything, but come on, life is a bell curve, most people would probably choose to learn, a moderate amount of things ,in moderation, and that is fine. The damage we are doing, as argued by the essay, is that by forcing everyone to learn the same things, determined by people other then the people learning, is that we are probably turning many, otherwise eager to learn people, off of learning for ever, because they are forced to learn things they don't care about, and a lot of things they really don't care about. So, come on, lets engage on the subject matter. Hackers, and Painters http://books.google.com/books?id=B4dk0tYPrckC&printsec=frontcover&dq=hackers+and+painters&source=bl&ots=PQ2eZ7Gh9Y&sig=-I-rwxUPDB2NawTfRTqmX8K3Y_s&hl=en&ei=JZPnS5KlD4TMsQOq2fX-CA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=3&ved=0CCQQ6AEwAg#v=onepage&q&f=false http://books.google.com/books?id=B4dk0tYPrckC&printsec=f...