What I learned from teachers, mostly, was to distrust authority figures. Maybe iPads can't provide this lesson. The article says: "Finding and growing great te

What I learned from teachers, mostly, was to distrust authority figures. Maybe iPads can't provide this lesson. The article says: "Finding and growing great teachers is devilishly hard. Retaining them is very expensive." How do we even know who is a great teacher? One of my best teachers told me, after years of me skipping his classes to play around with computer stuff, that he loved my style of learning. My style was to mostly ignore school, stay out of trouble, and read and tinker on my own. I might be biased and wrong, but from my perspective, it seems like there's way too much talk about teaching, and way too little about learning. The kids in that nightmarish Indianapolis "learning center" are being oppressed. If there's anything they're interested in on their own, they're probably too burned out when they come home from the "learning center" to pursue it. And they learn that learning is something you do with someone else's permission, guidance, and monitoring. I learned that learning happens when I'm free to play around, follow my curiosity, and work hard with the natural zeal of a restless child. Alan Kay had the idea of building an educational tablet computer in 1972, and was quite realistic about it. [1] Since he has a humanistic and child-centric view of learning, he envisioned the tablet as a tool for children to learn on their own. When interviewed in 2013 about whether new computing devices are helping in the classroom, he said: "The perspective on this is first to ask whether the current educational practices are even using books in a powerful and educative way. Or even to ask whether the classroom process without any special media at all is educative. "I would say, to a distressing extent, the answer is 'no.'" [1]: http://techland.time.com/2013/04/02/an-interview-with-computing-pioneer-alan-kay/ http://techland.time.com/2013/04/02/an-interview-with-comput...