I think Gadfly misread Alison Gopnik's essay, "How we learn." She certainly is not denigrating "routinized learning," which she describes as, "Something already learned is made to be second nature, so as to perform a skill effortlessly and quickly." She does distinguish between the two kinds of learning (and she may be right or wrong on that, but surely that's not grounds for non-constructive criticism) but sees value in both: "In a sense, routinized learning is less about getting smarter than getting stupider: it's about perfecting mindless procedures. This frees attention and thought for new discoveries." I think she uses the phrase "getting stupider" with some artistic license; I don't believe she is being critical of routinized learning.
Conservatives in education have a tendency to caricature liberal positions, making them seem much more extreme than they are. In mathematics, many good progressive programs that have children working with data and solving real problems are characterized as asking students to "write about their feelings about the number 7." What's wrong with teaching math facts but also having students recognize how to plot data points and interpret graphs? My juniors and seniors can't do this, but are quick to tell me that their papers have "lots of good facts."
Billy Goodman
Science teacher
Passaic Valley High School
Little Falls, N.J.