How Not to Teach 187 in order for a student to defend a point of view and learn to be con- vincing. A teacher might fail to praise a student, even when she has succeeded, because the student should know that she has succeeded in any case. I am not suggesting that teachers never tell the truth, only that it isn’t necessary to do it all the time. Since coming to one’s own conclusions is mostly how we learn, the real job of a teacher is to force students to come to sensible con- clusions by confronting what they already believe with stuff that is antithetical to those beliefs. A confused person has only two choices. Admit he is confused and doesn’t care, or resolve the confusion. Re- solving the confusion entails thinking. Teachers can encourage think- ing by making sure students have something confusing to think about. Rule #8: Never assume that a student is listening to what you are saying or that what you are saying really matters. What I have been arguing so far amounts to defining what I call Socratic apprenticeship. Learning by doing is facilitated by a good teacher, but that teacher has to be around when needed and has to know what to say and what not to say that will help the student think harder. The teacher doesn’t provide answers—he just helps students find out where to look for answers and how to know whether they found the answers. Our current education system does not encourage teaching and learning to work this way, and I assume neither did the system that Plato was criticizing when he started to talk about learning by doing and Socratic teaching in the first place. But something important has changed. We can now create ap- prenticeships online. It is possible to learn by doing in a simulated world set up on the computer that provides for human help as needed. We have been building what we call story-centered curricula for about 10 years now. Students learn within the context of an intense year- long experience where they do only projects and produce