Learning Redefined

Much of our educational effort is Sisyphean. The work of both teachers and students is wasted in passive, bulimic learning in response to correct-answer schooling and standardized tests. The missing ingredient is initiative--not only within student learning but within teaching--for teacher initiative has been systematically suppressed by a top-down bureaucratic command and control system. Initiative needs to be brought into our schooling.

Learning Redefined investigates how neuroscience impacts education, especially in ways that excite and inform the right side of the brain. It points out how the metaphors currently guiding educational practice are not aligned with our democratic principles.

Otherwise, education will fail in its primary function--to serve as society's liver, to remove the poisons of ignorance, incapability, prejudice, disconnection, and irresponsibility from the social body. Redefining learning will generate necessary changes: the end of correct-answer schooling with its fixation on the easily measured--and renewed focus on thinking and understanding. We need education that reconnects us to the democratic spirit by inspiring engaged, imaginative, and responsible citizens who learn through personal initiative.