Edumaction: Learn me a book

So earlier today on reddit someone started a thread asking "What do you feel is wrong with our schools?" I went on sort of a mini rant and decided to post it here as well.

Schools teach children facts but not how to learn. Look at math class for example. Ask a 1st grader what 5 x 6 is, and they can probably tell you. Ask them why that is and I bet they'll tell you "Because the times tables say so." We have children memorize the things thought to be important, but don't equip them to go out and learn things on their own.

Also, the school system is living in the past. I can't count the number of times I was assigned a research paper in high school (and even in college a few times) and told "You must use 5 sources for this and 4 of them must be non-internet sources." So, we have the most powerful tool for communication and information exchange in the history of our species quite literally at our fingertips, and we are denied its use so we "learn how to research." I can safely say that in my adult life I have never once gone to a library to research. Anything I need to learn I find online. (Also my "non-internet" sources invariably came from an internet database that archives them anyway.)

The justification is always "Well there's so much bad information" on the internet, which is true, but that's the point! Instead of telling kids to steer clear of Wikipedia and go to the library instead, we should be teaching them how to tell legitimate internet resources from some random angry guy's Tripod page.

Also, tests, bleargh. 9 times in 10, tests/exams test nothing except for a student's ability to regurgitate information on demand. Multiple choice tests only tell you how well a student takes multiple choice tests. For example, I'm in software development, and thankfully most of the classes I had in college were more project oriented, so more like an actual development environment, but I still had a few that were the typical "Put your books and notes away and answer these questions." That is nothing like how it is in real life. When I program now I have a stack of reference books on my desk and a dozen reference pages bookmarked or open in tabs, as do all the professional and undergrad developers I know. Cutting students off from books doesn't test anything except their memorization abilities and limits their ability to solve problems in an environment like the one they'll find in the professional world.