A little bit of history goes a long way – and certainly puts some of the 21st Century Learning rhetoric in perspective.
“The Pedagogic Institute had been established to further the Austrian educational reform program. This attempted to steer education away from a ‘drill school’ approach, in which schoolchildren were treated as empty vessels to be filled by the accumulation of dictated knowledge and respect for authority, toward seeking children’s active engagement through self-discovery and problem solving. Both Popper and Wittgenstein were trained in the methods of encouraging this. Integral to the vision was a general view of the mind as innately capable of producing frameworks within which information could be organised.”
from Wittgenstein’s Poker