Knowledge-Based Education vs. Process-Based Education 87 may not be so easy to assess until the graduate actually shows up in the real world. ALL CHILDREN HAVE THE SAME EDUCATIONAL NEEDS There is more than a 50% dropout rate in many high schools because we have forgotten that not everyone is going to Harvard and that going to Harvard is not the goal of education. Some children simply need to learn about ethics and business and child raising and how the legal system works, how to take care of their health and how to un- derstand when politicians are saying things that make no sense. Why wouldn’t those subjects be critical? No politician seems to think any of those are more important than math and science. How about the student who has a passion for the environment, or doing social good, or being a good parent, or running for office? Does every student’s school life have to be the same? STUDENTS LEARN THAT MEMORIZATION IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN THINKING In an answer-obsessed world, “go figure it out for yourself” or “go try it and see what happens” are replaced by more memorization. Giving kids a chance to fail helps them learn. Actively preventing failure by telling the right answer just helps kids pass tests. In each of the cog- nitive processes that I presented in Chapter 4, failure is not only an option—but it will happen all the time. One’s first hypothesis will be wrong, One will plan badly or botch a negotiation. These processes are all about failure, not right answers. Recovering from failure, getting better next time, is what learning is all about. Learning entails failure and cannot happen without it. The kind of failure I have in mind here is expectation failure. This means that we can fail even when we suc- ceed, because we didn’t expect things to happen quite like they did. Our predictions are often wrong. We work at getting better at making them and explaining to ourselves why we were wrong. This process of expectation failure followed by explanation is