For the educational establishment... test scores are treated as indications of the extent to which the required ground covering has been done. ...as educationally significant. However, while they may be prognostic of a child's ability to get through school... they do not provide us with an appraisal of the child's progress in the long process of becoming a generally educated human being -- the advance made toward a more skillful, thoughtful, and cultivated mind.

What students know is no longer the most important measure of an education. The true test is the ability of students and graduates to engage with what they do not know, and to work out a solution. They must also be able to reach conclusions that constitute the basis for informed judgements. The ability to make judgements that are grounded in solid information, and employ careful analysis, should be one of the most important goals for any educational endeavor. As students develop this capability, they can begin to grapple with the most important and difficult step: to learn to place such judgements in an ethical framework. For all these reasons, there is no better investment that individuals, parents and the nation can make than an investment in education of the highest possible quality. Such investments are reflected, and endure, in the formation of the kind of social conscience that our world so desperately needs.

industrialized model of education, with its emphasis on the rote memorization of facts, is no longer necessary. Facts are what Google does best. But creativity, collaboration, critical thinking, and problem solving — that's a different story. These skills have been repeatedly stressed by everyone from corporate executives to education experts as the fundamentals required by today's jobs.

Above all, the most basic message is that teachers and students must avoid interpreting current performance as learning. Good performance on a test during the learning process can indicate mastery, but learners and teachers need to be aware that such performance will often index, instead, fast but fleeting progress.

I keep coming back to education because it is an important test case for understanding the broader issues we have been talking about, such as deciding who gets to set the objective function and how it is set.

Education is perceived as a crucial instrument for increasing productivity and income, skills, competency of human resources, and sustainable growth.

When something is described as "academically challenging," that's good. That means you learn a lot.

We are told that standardized testing must be imposed to make sure students meet a set of standardized criteria so they will later be able to fit into a world that is itself increasingly standardized. Never are we asked, of course, whether it's good to standardrize children (sorry, I mean students), knowledge, or the larger world.

In an age of infinite leverage, judgement is the most important skill.

In the age of infinite leverage, judgment is the most important skill.

It goes without saying that the science of astronomy is the highest grade subject of learning. To my thinking, it is scientifically related to all other subjects of learning, and is the foundation of basic education for all human race. What is more, it is the primal basis that uplifts one and all men intellectually.

The pressure to give A grades is intense. It comes from the students and increasingly from their parents as well.

In an age of infinite leverage, judgment is the most important skill.

Our educational system both drives and reflects our obsession with competition. Grades themselves allow precise measurement of each student’s competitiveness; pupils with the highest marks receive status and credentials. We teach every young person the same subjects in mostly the same ways, irrespective of individual talents and preferences. Students who don’t learn best by sitting still at a desk are made to feel somehow inferior, while children who excel on conventional measures like tests and assignments end up defining their identities in terms of this weirdly contrived academic parallel reality.