Knowledge-Based Education vs. Process-Based Education 8&3 those people will do anything to live in the United States. So they cram math down their own throats, knowing that it is a ticket to America. Very few of these applicants come from Germany, Sweden, France, or Italy. Is this because they teach math badly there or is it because those people aren’t desperate to move to the United States? U.S. students are not desperate to move to the United States, so when you suggest to them that they numb themselves with formulas and equations, they refuse to do so. The right answer would be to make math and science actually interesting, but with those awful tests as the ultimate arbiter of success, this is very difficult to do. Math and science are not important subjects. There, I said it. Start the lynching. One can live a happy life without ever having taken a physics course or knowing what a logarithm is. But being able to reason on the basis of evidence actually is im- portant. You cannot live well without this skill (or any of the other cognitive processes I have been writing about). Diagnosis is science as it actually is practiced by scientists. Science is not a bunch of stuff to be memorized. It is the fact-based tests that cause this prob- lem. We don’t need more math and science. We need more people who can think. TESTING FOCUSES TEACHERS ON WINNING NOT TEACHING Many teachers are extremely frustrated by the system they have found themselves a part of. They cannot afford to spend time teaching a student or getting a concept across if the issues being taught are not on the tests. They are judged on the basis of test scores. So any ratio- nal teacher gives up teaching and becomes a kind of test preparation coach. Testing has become a kind of contest between schools, much like football. I like football. But the football mentality that envelops our concept of schooling is a disaster. Take a look at this excerpt of an article taken from my local paper. What our educato