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and that the stuff that he loves (art and music and video games) will be a great future for him and the stuff he hates (math and science) is something he will never compete in, never have a chance at.

But school doesn’t care, because school does not have the objective of helping my son produce the maximum amount of value in the future that he will probably encounter. School cares about ensuring that he knows how to take tests, follow directions and can do math that he will never have to care about for the rest of his life.

Education’s job should be, says Kay, to bridge this gap. To help, that is, people form these necessary new idea-receiving categories–teaching them the capacity for ideas–early on in their lives, so that as they grow they are ready to embrace the things we need them to know. Let me say that in a better way: so that as they grow they are ready to know in the ways we need them to know.

cultivate the ability to conceive of, work with, create, understand, manipulate, tinker with, disrupt, and, generally, appreciate the beauty of systems

Seeing systems is an epistemology, a way of knowing, a mindset

a game, or a simulation, thought of as a thing we might create (rather than a thing we only act within), is a visceral example of systems thinking

It’s the Flatland story–that we need to train our 2D minds to see in a kind of 3D–and Kay’s genius is that he recognizes we have to bake this ability into the species, through education, as close to birth as possible.

Systems thinking is to be conceived of as a platform skill or an increased capacity on top of which we will be able to construct new sorts of ideas and ways of knowing, of more complex natures still. The step beyond seeing a single system is of course the ability to see interacting systems – a kind of meta-systemic thinking – and this is what I think Kay is really interested in, because it’s what he does. At one point he showed a slide of multiple systems–the human body, the environment, the internet, and he said in a kind of aside, “they’re all one system . . .”

The point is to be able to see connections between the silos. Says Kay, the liberal arts have done a bad job at “adding in epistemology” among the “smokestacks” (i.e. disciplines)

What happens when you’re stuck in a system? You don’t understand the world and yourself and others as existing in constant development, as being in process; you think you are a fixed essence or part within a system (instead of a system influencing systems) and you inadvertently trap yourself in a kind of tautological loop where you can only think about things you’re thinking about and do the things you do and you thus limit yourself to a kind of non-nutritive regurgitation of factoids, or the robotic meaningless actions of an automaton, or what Kay calls living in a pop culture

A downside of being epistemologically limited to thinking within a system is that you overemphasize the importance of the content and facts as that system orders them

In all these activities, technology-based assessments can provide data to drive decisions on the basis of what is best for each and every student and that in aggregate will lead to continuous improvement across our entire education system.

Another basic assumption is the way we organize students into age-determined groups, structure separate academic disciplines, organize learning into classes of roughly equal size with all the students in a particular class receiving the same content at the same pace, and keep these groups in place all year.

The NETP accepts that we do not have the luxury of time – we must act now and commit to fine-tuning and midcourse corrections as we go. Success will require leadership, collaboration, and investment at all levels of our education system – states, districts, schools, and the federal government – as well as partnerships with higher education institutions, private enterprises, and not-for-profit entities.

Schools today are not training students to be good citizens: they are training students to be obedient.

the football team got a bigger budget than the Library

I even read about a girl who ran a library of banned books out of her locker.

@SchoolSecurityBlog, the issue is that in schools your constitutional rights are completely ignored. Random bag searches are not conducted with probable cause or a search warrant. If students spend the first part of their life in an environment where their rights are ignored, then they will not insist on them later in life. Someone might make the argument that since students are minors that they don't have rights. It is a weak argument. For one thing, I reached the age of majority while still in public school, and they still ignored my rights.

most of these so called "reasonable risk reduction measures" are not reasonable nor do they reduce risk. Cameras are entirely ineffective in preventing crime or violence. My school had a camera watching the vending machines, but a student still robbed them and was not even caught (he took the simple measure of obscuring his face). I acknowledge that there have been many court ruling that make what schools do legal. However, even with the "in loco parentis" policy in place, even my parents would not have a legal right to search my stuff without my permission when I turned 18 (which is how old I was my senior year). Yet the school could search my bag if they wanted to. Or my friends car (I am pretty sure he was also 18 when that happened, he was only a few months younger than I). That means that once a kid turns 18, the school system technically had more control over the kid than his parents do. Another problem that I have with in loco parentis is that the school really is not a students parent. A parent presumably has the child's best interests at heart, if they didn't it could be grounds for the state to take the child away from the parent. Unfortunately, school faculty members do not always have the student's best interests at heart. They should and often do, but many times some faculty members just like messing with people. It is an unfortunate fact, and one that I am sure many people would like to ignore, but the fact of the matter is that bullies are not confined to the student body. Also parents go to extraordinary measures for their children. They pay to keep them clothed and fed and cared for. They devote endless hours taking care of them. Therefore it makes sense that they should be granted extraordinary legal measures to take care of their children. To grant these same legal measures to an arbitrary school faculty member is really in insult to the hard and loving work of parents everywhere.

The schools of decades past seemed to get by without universal surveillance. Why is it all of the sudden essential today? Could many of these security measures be over reactions stemming from mass publicized incidents of school violence?

please don't generalize from specific autistic traits to all the students on the spectrum. Our autistic daughter isn't a visual learner, she's a voracious reader. Still, the number of times people have assumed that she learns in a visual or tactile way, in the style of Temple Grandin? Too many to count.

a good first step would be to listen to autistic undergraduates themselves and to put the needs they express first instead of responding primarily to the perspective of the neurotypical parents of autistic children. The perspective of autistic undergraduates, which seems to me to be the most important on the subject, is entirely missing from this post