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272 Teaching Minds Obviously, this list could be much longer. The intention here is to make any student excited about learning because what he or she wants to learn about is offered. The trick for the designers of the curricula is to make sure that students’ interest is grabbed and maintained for a full year, while teaching them how to hone their capabilities at the 12 cognitive processes. What are the obstacles? What would prevent this from happening? Really there are only four issues: Finding people who know how to build the curricula Paying the people who will build the curricula Convincing schools or other entities to offer the curricula Training teachers to be mentors in these curricula Smart, articulate, people who are well organized and can write well can easily learn to do the bulk of the work involved in building a course as long as they have access to experts and are guided by experienced designers, and the project is run by someone how knows how to run projects. Finding people who can do this work is not a problem. Being able to pay them for the year or so that it takes to do the work is the real issue. This leads us to discuss who would pay for this. The answer should be the federal government, but it is clear that that will never happen. The federal government, as any interested citizen knows, is influenced mightily by big business, especially when big business has profits to protect. Companies that produce textbooks and companies that produce and grade exams will not stand by and see their revenues drop. Any alternative curriculum that did not use textbooks and did not use standardized tests would be anathema to them. Companies that have billions of dollars in revenues from textbooks know how to encourage politicians to protect their interests. What about the testing industry? A recent report says that “the testing industry is somewhat secretive.” I wonder why. But sometimes they do report revenue. To give an example, the revenue of Kaplan Inc., which is just one of many test preparation companies, was over $1 billion in 2008. Who owns Kaplan? The Washington Post. So while the testing companies make great profits, the nation’s newspapers, having a vested interest in those profits, tout testing as the country’s HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_023958