The book is divided into four sections and can be described as follows:  Click below on each hyperlink to go to an overview of each section...

I.                    What’s Going On Here – The problem with education today.

II.                 The Classic View of Learning and Forgetting – What education should be.

III.               The Official Theory of Learning and Forgetting – What we have now and where it came from.

IV.              Repairing the Damage – What can be done to improve education.

Frank Smith presents these main arguments through the course of the text:

1.      The classic view of learning is universal and deeply rooted.

“We all share and respect the classic view, which is embedded deep beneath our consciousness, though we are    rarely aware that we do so.

2.       Learning is a natural process that occurs effortlessly.

“ We are learning all the time – about the world and about ourselves.  We learn without knowing that we are learning and we learn without effort every moment of the day.  We learn what is interesting to us ( because we are members of the club) and we learn from what makes sense to us ( because there is nothing to learn from what confuses us except that it is confusing).” p. 31  

 3.        Learning is social process - part of our growth and best achieved when one establishes an  identity.

“ We don’t find out “who we are” by gazing into a mirror and asking profound existential questions.  We know who we are – and other people know who we are – from the clubs, formal and informal with which we associate ourselves; form the company we keep.”    p.11 

4.        There are serious problems with the so – called “official theory of learning and forgetting”.

“There is an alternative to the classic view that is preeminent, coercive, manipulative, discriminatory – and wrong.

"It is a theory that learning is work, and that anything can be learned provided sufficient effort is expended and sufficient control enforced.  The theory has gained supreme power in educational systems from kindergarten to university.  It has become so pervasive that many people can’t imagine an alternative to it".

5.         Testing is an unnecessary exercise.

“ Testing, which has become a mania in education, disregards the classic view that you can see whether people are learning by observing what they are doing.  Instead it is based on the odd idea that learning can only be uncovered by probing with test instruments, scientifically designed and rigorously wielded.’  p. 61