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What Can We Do About [t? 275
people who have been teaching in the usual way. But they pick it up
and often find that they like it better.
Here is Lynn Carter, one of the first mentors we trained to teach
in this new way at CMU’s West Coast campus. He is a professor of
software engineering at Carnegie Mellon University.
It has taken me a while to figure out how to undo about 25 years
of teaching experience that was standing in front of a room and
talking, but I really like it. I enjoy interacting with students. As
much as I enjoy standing in front of students and talking, it is
much mote satisfying to be dealing with smaller groups, more of
a one-on-one interaction.
Professors often complain that no students come to see them
during their office hours. That isn’t a problem with us here.
How did we teach Professor Carter to mentor Socratically? It wasn’t
trivial to do, but it didn’t take that long either. Once a teacher gets
the idea that his job is not telling but helping, he gets into the swing
of it fairly easily. Training teachers to teach in the kinds of SCCs we
propose for high school is more an issue of familiarizing them with
the content, which will differ considerably from what they have been
teaching. Handholding comes naturally to most people because they
have been doing that kind of teaching all their lives with siblings and
children. Lecturing is not a natural human activity and teachers are
easily dissuaded from doing it as long as they are not being presented
with a classroom of listeners.
In the end, the real question is this: Why do we still have schools?
This is a little like asking why we still have religious institutions.
In fact, it is a lot like asking that question because you will get the
same reactions. People get used to the institutions that have always
been a part of their lives. The fact is that these institutions were cre-
ated in a different time when knowledge was harder to come by and
the economy was quite different.
Religion is not my issue. Should we still have schools?
Instead of answering this question by listing all the good things
that schools provide—no one would argue that a literate population
is a bad thing, for example—I will turn the question around: What is
bad about having schools?
Here is a list of what is bad. Following the list, I will explain what
is bad about these things (assuming it isn’t obvious).
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