Minsky's views on education

In the Cognitive Science class, we often talked about Design. A different thing that I wanted to touch upon is Education. We talked about education when we discussed Piaget and Vygotsky. I think there is enough stuff out there to discuss more about it. Having taken the Education Technologies (CS 6460) course by Mark Guzdial, I have some insight about the research that goes into "making children learn". It is so vital that our education leverage the best of the ideas of Cognitive Science to make children learn more, understand more and not feel scared towards a particular subject.
I read a couple of essays of Minsky that I would like to mention here. These are basically his memos for the OLPC idea and also contains his rants about the current education system.
Talking about Mathematics (which is a very good topic to discuss since we all know its important for the child to understand it and we also are cognizant of how many students dislike the subject), Minsky makes this statement - "instead of promoting inventiveness, we focus on preventing mistakes". I think this is a strong and unfortunately true statement. Many countries have their education system committing the same mistake.
He also points out that not all students are able to create "cognitive maps" of the subject/concept. He supports the introduction of computers to teach the subject concepts in a little different way. Using a nice simulation software, one can teach students concepts of acceleration, momentum etc. Like one of the research projects at GTRI here, plans to build a mobile phone app for teaching physics (utilizing the accelerometers in the phone) to students.The students can have an interactive way of learning difficult concepts. This will build better mental maps for these concepts. Minsky is a strong supporter for introducing computers early so that the learning of other subjects will be affected in a positive manner.
In another essay Minsky, suggests a particularly bold idea. Schools do not explicitly teach the students how the human mind learns and reasons. So as a solution towards this - a different approach: to provide our children with ideas they could use to invent their own theories about themselves! This is the idea of meta-cognition - thinking about thinking. And the way he suggests is by doing interesting computer-related student projects.
The way we can go about implementing the above idea is not by teaching Psychology to children,
but Cybernetics.
This essay is recent (January 2009), and Minsky recounts the past efforts - idea of teaching LOGO to children. This did not really take off, but Minsky feels that we have come a long way and these are really feasible now. He suggests robotic projects (LEGO Mindstorms NXT, I believe does this in a super cool way), Cognitive Projects (reasoning by analogy) , optimization projects, puzzle solvers and lots more.
My favorite quote from the essay is-
However, Computer Science is not only about computers themselves; more generally, it provides us with a whole new world of ways to understand complex processes—including the ones that go on in own mind.
Minsky concludes the essay by suggesting how it helps to think like a machine and hence supporting his claim of metacognition being improved by computers

I’m not good at math. ---There are some bugs in my symbolic processes.
I’m just not very smart ------ Some of my programs need improvements.
I don’t like this subject. ---------- My current goals need better priorities.
I am confused. -----------Some of my processes may conflict with others.

And how one can be more efficient !-

Time-management. ----- Organizing Searches. -------Splitting problems into parts.
Selecting good ways to represent things. -----Making appropriate cognitive maps.
Allocating short-term memory. ---------- Making appropriate Credit Assignments.

The jury is out !