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He discovered a profound disconnect between what potential employers are looking for in young people today (critical thinking skills, creativity, and effective communication) and what our schools are providing (passive learning environments and uninspired lesson plans that focus on test preparation and reward memorization).

Finnish system is praised extraordinarily highly for its global success, and yet students don’t work terribly hard, have many choices, use technology creatively, enjoy the integration of the arts, and learn in a culture which emphasizes depth over breadth and less is more.

Students are shown researching and collaborating online in their studies, and many classrooms are shown with a wide array of technological units, not just computers.   Students use wikipedia and facebook when researching very current topics, and Wagner explains that there is a culture of trust that is extended to students in their technology usage.

A particularly inspiring moment comes when Wagner reports stumbling across a project at one school, the “Innovation Camp,” in which teams of students are given 26 hours to come up with a new product or service.  

The reason we find it easy to believe the internet is making us dumber is because, in some ways, it's making us less self-reliant. Our GPS devices navigate for us and we neglect to remember things because we have Google search. That doesn't make us dumber, necessarily, but rather causes us to rely more on what psychologist Daniel Wagner calls transactive memory. This type of memory is actually very useful because it allows us to, in essence, store more data in less space.

 I am all for PBL but I think that we need to not only create the opportunities for our students to do this, but for ourselves as well.  Again referencing the Wagner book, schools in Singapore are seeing the importance of learning communities that promote active learning:

Boasting a 98 percent college-matriculation rate among graduates, High Tech High warrants a closer look, and Whiteley's documentary devotes a full year to examining the project

"The only surviving skills that will save young kids are creative and innovative. As the current school system is now, for 12 of 16 years, you're not in an environment that brings that out of them."