The typical school or college classroom, unhappily, is not a very good place to learn. “Frontal teaching,” with one instructor sitting or standing in front of twenty to thirty-five students who are sitting at fixed desks, is primarily an administrative expediency, a way of parceling out and keeping track of the flood of students in mass education. It’s sad that over the past hundred years almost every aspect of our national life—industry, transportation, communication, computation, entertainment—has changed almost beyond recognition, while our schools remain essentially the same.
