“…the secret of education lies in respecting the pupil…”

Quietly but steadily, the ground is being prepared for an eventual shift in American colleges away from a teacher-oriented system featuring lectures delivered to passive audiences to a more learner-centered process in which students become more actively involved in their own education and professors adapt their teaching in accordance with more complex understandings of human learning.

A child learns, at any moment, not by using the procedure that seems best to us, but the one that seems best to him; by fitting into his structure of ideas and relationships, his mental model of reality, not the piece we think comes next, but the one he thinks comes next. This is hard for teachers to learn, and hardest of all for the skillful and articulate, the kind often called ‘gifted.’ The more aware we are of the structural nature of our own ideas, the more we are tempted to try to transplant this structure whole into the minds of children. But it cannot be done. They must do this structuring and building for themselves.