> [A]ll my best learning would be done outside school. Choose one: - Experience of discovery and survival of curiosity to adulthood; - Set of job-relevant sk

> [A]ll my best learning would be done outside school. Choose one: - Experience of discovery and survival of curiosity to adulthood; - Set of job-relevant skills well defined by names of subjects; - Standardized testing and easily comparable grades. (In my admittedly limited teaching experience.) I would guess that the last point will always get chosen, because it’s bureaucracy-friendly, and a bureaucracy makes the choice. But one of my most bizarre experiences is (some) HN readers being quite vocal about their support for it as well, where I haven’t seen it be anything but harmful. The bullshit admission process at US colleges might be to blame—I’m really not sure. References: Lockhart’s “Lament”[1], of course, for describing the feelings that (good) teachers have on this subject; Quinn’s “Revolution in mathematics”[2], as a more clinical analysis of how the bureaucracy won and got to basically redefine what “mathematics” even means for the majority of the population (in a way that’s as hopelessly obsolete as it is intensely harmful to the subject proper). The point shouldn’t be specific to mathematics, but it’s what I have the references for. [1] https://www.maa.org/external_archive/devlin/devlin_03_08.html https://www.maa.org/external_archive/devlin/devlin_03_08.htm... [2] http://www.ams.org/notices/201201/rtx120100031p.pdf http://www.ams.org/notices/201201/rtx120100031p.pdf