Roger Schank, an educator or not?

Here are some quotes from his blog Education's Place for Debate

[All emphasis are mine.]

On November 03, 2006 he wrote,

Universities dictate curricula to high schools to make professor’s lives easier. If everyone takes physics and calculus and most never use it, well, professors claim it was good for the students anyway when in fact it was only good for making sure professors didn’t have to teach it in college. As long as professors don’t have to teach the basics it is okay that high school students are forced to study stuff they will never use in their whole lives. We have ruined an entire generation of high school students who don’t like learning and think the subject matter is irrelevant because professors only want to teach the good stuff.

We sacrifice the joy of learning for an entire generation so professors can have an easier time teaching incoming students.

On December 15, 2006 he wrote,

we need to make education exciting and interesting. ... If we did all that we would get more Americans interested in math and science because we would get more Americans actually interested in being in school.

This quote is also true if we remove the reference to "America".

On January 02, 2007 he wrote,

* To teach someone to reason one does not have to teach about congruent triangles.
* To teach someone to write effectively, one does not have to ask them about themes in Shakespeare.
* To teach someone about daily economics one does not have to teach about tariff acts.
* To teach someone to be a good citizen one does not need to know about Lincoln or Washington but about how to analyze for truth in what current Presidents are saying.
* To teach someone to be employable, one does not have to teach nearly any subject required by colleges for admission.


Let’s think again folks. Education is about teaching people how to live and how to make a living (to paraphrase John Adams.) We have plenty of intellectuals. Feeding the colleges is not the priority of the modern day high school -- making high functioning citizens is.

I think he is a greate educator!