Cognitive Process-Based Education 3 don’t want to learn, or is something else more complex going on? I will summarize these five issues as follows: ABILITY POSSIBILITY METHODOLOGY CONSTRAINTS GOAL ALIGNMENT School is subject-based and, further, those subjects are predefined and agreed upon by those in charge. Without giving a history of how this state of affairs came to be,' or why it is an issue, it is first necessary to note that it is the case. I say this because when we were students in school, we accepted the fact that school was the way it was, and we assumed that it was the way it was supposed to be. We may not think each subject we learn is valuable or interesting, and perhaps we long to learn different subjects, but never do we hear people suggest that there shouldn't be subjects in school at all. This is a very difficult idea to swallow. There have always been subjects. What else would there be? What would it mean to not have subjects? Answering this question is the aim of this book. We need to under- stand what goes on in schools and what might be preferable. The issue really is not schooling at all. The real issue is how learning actually takes place in the human mind. Ask a student how he is doing in school and he will tell you the subjects he likes. I like English but Iam bad at math, he might say. This is such a normal sentiment among students that we never think about how weird a sentiment it really is. We don’t ask: How are you doing at life? We could ask that of a teenager and she might say: I am good at dating but bad at driving. But, actually, you would never hear teenagers say something like that. This is weird because, in general, dating and driving are much more important subjects in a teenager’s world than English and math. But they don’t talk about whether they are good at it or bad at it in the same way. They continue to practice and get better at those things because they care about them. Saying, I am bad at math, means, in essen