> The real difference: When you found a crappy workaround, you learned. You were frustrated, felt stupid but you learned. You made the same experience every child has to make once: Dont', just fscking don't, touch the hot plate.

Surely every educational innovation is greeted with this sort of lament? (I'm a teacher, and I know that, if I listen carefully to myself, the "good old ways" whose loss I am bemoaning are the new-fangled ways of a few years ago.) For example, when programming was done by hand translation to assembler, you learned what every line of code was doing, but now with compilers people don't really understand the invocations …. I'm reminded of the XKCD cartoon tracing back through hundreds of years the lament about how people don't write like they used to do.

Uhm. No. I am not lamenting an "educational innovation", I am saying that being presented a solution is not education at all. Education for me means understanding, understanding requires thinking, thinking requires time and taking wrong turns (because we only understand that the turn was wrong after exploring it).

> I am not lamenting an "educational innovation", I am saying that being presented a solution is not education at all.

For what it's worth, that was exactly what I meant. I don't think that anyone says, or even thinks, "grr, these kids and their ways of learning that aren't exactly like mine!"; but rather that one sees these kids and their ways of learning that aren't exactly one's own, and says "grr, these kids aren't really learning!"

This isn't to say that it isn't true, as I'm sure that sometimes it is, but that I think that most of the time it's a reaction that's likely to fade with time. However we learned looked, almost assuredly, like "not really learning" to some of those who came before us. Again, to appeal to my own experience, I have become a lot more relaxed about the use of calculators in math classrooms; I initially felt that they were taking away from students' calculational facility (and have not changed my mind about that …), but now feel more that they are clearing away the computational drudgery to allow more room for conceptual exploration. It is believeable to me that being able to Google the answers to things that are already known is a great way to get as quickly as possible to the things that aren't already known—although, of course, it is a worthwhile argument whether, or how much, preparation it offers to deal with those unknown things upon reaching them.