Can we truly educate people? This seems like an odd question for those who believe intelligence is immutable. But for many who study the mind, it is not so odd. One reason our school systems are in such difficulty is that the underlying assumption of “just fill them with facts” comes from an idea that intelligence is not mutable. In this view, people can know more, but they can't really change how they think.

The dynamic memory view is that intelligence is, of course, mutable. If intelligence depends upon the creation of MOPs and TOPs and other types of generalizations, then it follows that helping students create explanations and generalizations and find patterns helps them to know more and to be more intelligent – not to know more in the “Trivial Pursuit” sense of acquiring facts, but to know more in a deep sense. Knowing more, in a deep sense, is truly a change in intelligence – it is the ability to better comprehend the world in which we live.

Modern educational practice has been greatly influenced by trends in academic psychology. Behaviorism, for instance, inspired a large industry devoted to turning out educational products that put into practice what the theory proposed. Of course, given the inevitable time lag in the popular dissemination of such trends, by the time this industry hit its stride, behaviorism was already in retreat as a theoretical framework for psychology. Unfortunately, by then the damage had been done.