Article Reaction

I was intrigued by the title, "Teaching Children to Learn Without Us", but honestly I found the article to be a little over my head. It's pretty obvious that it's directed at teachers and maybe parents. The author states that teachers need to get over the fear of having students plan and decide what and how to study. I have some fear about it myself. I'm always researching stuff I'm interested in on my own. I've found tons of interesting information on many topics, but I'm not sure I'd be comfortable trying to teach myself high level math based on basketball like the boy in the article. I rely on my teachers to give me structure and guidance to help me learn. I don't see how teachers could realistically help everyone do totally custom learning when there are so many kids in each class.
Actually a friend of mine goes to a private school centered around this exact kind of idealogy, and unfortunately what really seems to happen is that the students get off task, play video games, and don't accomplish much of anything. I know it doesn't mean that it couldn't work somewhere else but there's potential for a system like this to fail.
Also, I feel like sometimes it would be great to learn about something through one of my passions or interests, but I worry that if that's what we did all the time I'd miss out on learning about new things that I 've never heard about or tried before.
Don't get me wrong. I love technology and I think it's an awesome tool for learning, but I really like hearing new and interesting things directly from my teachers like when Mr. Freeman brings something like how the world was changed by 9/11 to life in one of his lectures. He also lets us participate and share our own ideas through discussions.
I do think it would be cool to learn the material we need to cover and then be able to choose whatever type of project we want (video, poster, song, blog, etc.) to show what we learned.
Actually a friend of mine goes to a private school centered around this exact kind of idealogy, and unfortunately what really seems to happen is that the students get off task, play video games, and don't accomplish anything. I know it doesn't mean that it couldn't work somewhere else but there's potential for a system like this to fail.