This is an excellent critique of large-scale education systems. But what we need is a better large-scale education system - telling everyone to think for themse

This is an excellent critique of large-scale education systems. But what we need is a better large-scale education system - telling everyone to think for themselves all the time is fun for us geeks, but most people (teachers/school administrators) just don't have the time or energy. (even if you do invent a way to get, for want of a better word, lazy teachers to actually teach real knowledge, it may still be impossible to persuade political systems to actually act on this.) I must also contrast this experience of university with my own. Cambridge mocked answerable questions and wrote-learning. In addition to (semi-optional) lectures, we learned in weekly one-on-(three to five) sessions with professors and grad students who would grade your problem sheet and then talk you through it (normally while firing off hard questions to probe how well you understood the material.) I had three or four of these sessions per week, excluding time towards the end of the degree where we were working on an independent project and that took up some time slots. Cambridge (+probably Oxford) do this in spite of the prevailing education climate - they are largely autonomous and no British politician would ever try and impose an education system on them. Everyone else, however, suffers.