I ran into two articles this morning about education from the Washington Post that on the surface seem very different, yet truly dovetail into each other. The first is the fact that education in the United States is not providing the skills to the population that will be needed for the 21st century, even though it is in vogue to say things are “21st Century Skills”. One only needs to look to the fact that Common Core requires teaching imaginary numbers but never mentions binary to see we have a problem. The other article was about how we screw up learning in school so often, and how instructional fads that are said to be absolutely true at the time, are often not. Along the same lines, it is worth considering what has happened when kids have just gotten to use a computer, and how much they learned on their own.