“Students have their own goals, communities their own needs”: an interview with Roger Schank

Roger Schank is known as one of traditional education’s harshest critics. A professor himself for over three decades, he quit in 2000 to run his own company and since then has been busy tearing up the educational rulebook. He is a vociferous opponent of the lectures and multiple-choice tests prevalent in undergraduate education, believing that the system they embody is fundamentally broken, and with his background in Artificial Intelligence, he may well have the technological means to fix it. We caught up with the educational iconoclast to get his views on how to redesign our failing learning systems.

 

What explains the persistence of lectures within the education system, given their inherent weakness as a format?

 

It is baffling that people voluntarily submit themselves to lectures. Maybe they don’t. A study found that only 60% of Harvard students actually show up for lectures. Why do we keep on lecturing?

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