I’ve talked often that we need new ways of thinking about education. I was reading this morning’s Esquire piece profiling former Florida Governor Jeb Bush.

I’ve been a fan of Jeb Bush for a long time, and have spoken about many of these ideas before, but I’ve never heard the fundamentals of education reform articulated quite this succinctly.

Are we educating our kids properly? Are enough of our children gaining the power of knowledge in the current system? The answer is unequivocally no. So we should have more school choice, we should have more pay for performance, we should be raising standards, not lowering standards, we should embrace technology in a radical way, we should have “seat time” eliminated.

Q: Seat time?

You show up for 180 days, you graduate. It should be based on what you learned… People learn differently. It’s a simple fact that our education system ignores.

We’re living in a world now where in order to create high-wage jobs, you have to have knowledge-based workers. There is no way to do that unless they have the basic building blocks of being able to think abstractly, understand math and science, be able to read, maybe once in a while express a thought in a three-syllable word, preferably do so in more than one language, and have a sense of history, because it has this crazy way of repeating itself. I don’t think our education system in America is acceptable right now.

Right on. Read the piece here.