1. In the current testing culture success is doing well on tests, getting the right answers; just exploring isn’t valued (by teachers, by students, by parents)
2. Speed: Laurent Shwartz worried that because he wasn’t “fast” he might not be intelligent. His schooling conveyed the not so covert message that speed=intelligent/smart – so if he was slow at thinking about something he didn’t already know, he mustn’t be smart.
3. Persistence isn’t valued – where what matters isn’t how fast you get to understanding but how thoroughly you make sense of something complicated. But that’s a hard sell in schools because they’re geared for “one size fits all” – and don’t make room for people need time to figure things out for themselves.
On Learning 