One can take two approaches to renovating School -- or indeed anything else. The problem-solving approach identifies the many problems that afflict individual schools and tries to solve them. A systemic approach requires one to step back from the immediate problems and develop an understanding of how the whole thing works. Educators faced with day-to-day operation of schools are forced by circumstances to rely on problem solving for local fixes. They do not have time for "big ideas." This essay offers a big idea in a reflexive way: the most neglected big idea is the very idea of bigness of ideas. In brief, when ideas go to school they lose their power, thus creating a challenge for those who would improve learning to find ways to re-empower them. This need not be so. What I am suggesting here is a program of idea work for educators. Of course it is harder to think about ideas than to bring a programming language into a classroom. You have to mess with actual ideas. But this is the kind of hard that will make teaching more interesting, just as idea work will do this for learning. An article by Semour Papert published in a special issue of the IBM Systems Journal about the MIT Media Laboratory. [ A very interesting, perhaps very important, article about the nature of our educational systems. A lot of this resonates with me, having experienced some dissonance with the particulars of education. I was a decent student, particularly pre-college, but always found creative assignments, those which de-emphasised the memorization and reapplication of facts, much less difficult. At the time, I, probably like most people, thought of it as an expression of innate aptitude. I'm simply not good at math or history. I see implications in this article for a concept that i've been considering roughly for some time... that school is often backwards... presenting fact and isolated example, which will lead to a later synthesis... when the student has absorbed enough examples, facts and skills, the conceptual understanding will come, an epiphany. I've had reservations about this method, and without having the intellectual devotion to come up with a solution, have felt that one must exist... that it's probably possible to start with an idea, and let the applications fall out of it. I probably haven't fully absorbed this, but it's worth applying some time to, i think... -k] What's the big idea? Toward a pedagogy of idea power | 
