From an educator's point of view, the goals that the current system leads students to adopt are curiously content-free. The system does not lead students to want to investigate some scientific question. Nor does it encourage them to get involved in activities that will, for example, lead them to want to write a persuasive essay. It does not put them in situations in which they care about what happened in early American history so that they might, for instance, be able to provide an informed opinion on some current policy issue they are facing in a class project.
Through natural learning, students will become experts in those areas in which they have strong interest. Giving the goals students usually hold in today's system, this means they will become experts at trying to get approval, getting good grades, and studying for tests. Sure, some students will gain more expertise than others, but natural learning assures us that all students will become adept at pursuing such goals (except those who intentionally buck the system -- they will become adept at system-bucking). Are these the areas in which we want our children to become proficient?
Goals can be characterized in terms of their relevance to the content we would like students to learn. The goals that we (mostly inadvertently) encourage students to adopt are not particularly relevant to the material we would like them to learn nor the way in which we would like them to learn it.
The Goals of the Current Educational System
Where am I in the content of the book?
