open source education
In his controversial 1992 book Dumbing Us Down, -- now in its tenth edition -- award-winning teacher John Taylor Gatto puts forward a decidedly different view of what needs to be done to improve our schools. He argues that kids need less school rather than more, that our current system of education stifles the natural curiosity and joy of learning, and that between school, television and the internet, kids today are left with less than 12 hours a week "to create a unique consciousness":

"It appears to me as a schoolteacher that schools are already a major cause of weak families and weak com­munities. They separate parents and children from vital interaction with each other and from true curiosity about each other's lives. Schools stifle family originality by appropriating the critical time needed for any sound idea of family to develop -- then they blame the family for its failure to be a family. ...

"The truth is that reading, writing, and arithmetic only take about one hundred hours to transmit as long as the audience is eager and willing to learn. The trick is to wait until someone asks and then move fast while the mood is on. Millions of people teach themselves these things -- it really isn't very hard. Pick up a fifth-grade math or rhet­oric textbook from 1850 and you'll see that the texts were pitched then on what would today be considered college level. ...

"Self-knowledge is the only basis of true knowl­edge. Everywhere in [a successful education] system, at every age, you will find arrangements that work to place the child alone in an unguided setting with a problem to solve. ... Independent study, community service, adventures and experience, large doses of privacy and solitude, a thousand different apprenticeships -- the one-day variety or longer -- these are all powerful, cheap, and effective ways to start a real reform of schooling."