Education Nation by Milton Chen -Chapter1

Chapter 1 -The Thinking Edge, Getting Smarter about Learning

I very much enjoyed reading this chapter.  The first quote that I came across while reading that I really liked was, "as we know from efforts to change politics, religion, and even our personal relationships, changing our thinking can be the most difficult thing we human being can do, especialy when our opinions are firmly rotted in personal experience." This I believe is so true, it's hard for us humans to change our way of thinking because it's what we have always done.  We are ment to love learning, but this isn't the case necessarily today in our education system, which is really upsetting.  The author writes about hybrid thinking, this means that we need to think of new and exciting ways to educate our students.  For example, when Sesame Street came on tv, it was a new approach to learning.
"Here when we want the elephant to grow, we feed the elephant. We don't weigh the elephant."  I love this quote, it means that instead of always testing our students to see how smart they are, we need to teach them. Teach them that learning is more then just memorizing stuff.  At the very end of the chapter, Chen used the example of how we don't teach basketball out of a book, then why should we teach math and the other subjects out a book.  This I believe is true, we know of many different ways to teach sports then why don't we come up with new ways to teach different subjects.  Here is a question that Dewey left us for building an Education Nation, "Could we design a school system in which every child could investigate the facts which they see, feel and touch everyday?"  In this chapter there were many different points Chen hit, but overall the biggest point was schools need to be exciting and challenging.