Davidson begins with a fascinating premise. What if we seriously considered the ways in which we think, especially the ways in which we selectively pay attention to and ignore the world around us, and then formed our educational and workplace environments around our brains, rather than trying to hammer our polygonal personalities into round holes?

It's an idea so simple you'll be shocked you didn't have it. Anybody who's in school or the workplace will tell that something is rotten in the state of Denmark, and as Davidson reveals, our standardized test obsessed education system is the historical legacy of a system designed to take farm kids and immigrants and get them ready for assembly line industrial jobs. The modern office complex, with cubicles and corner offices and HR departments, is the white collar equivalent. The problem is that standardized education is pointless and alienating, it lacks rigor, relevance, and relationships, and assembly line careers are as dead as the Edsel. Rather, the future is collaborative and creative. Videogames and internet culture are far better models for productive endeavors than the old top-heavy bureaucracies.

Davidson's exploration of education, and her own experiences as a professor at Duke teaching radically new classes is very well done. Unlike certain people (Jane McGonigal *cough* *cough*) she isn't drinking her own kool-aid. The periphrial material, on the science of attention and on new business models, is less inspiring, more in the genre of 'superficial TED-talks a la Malcolm Gladwell and Howard Rheingold' (why isn't that a real genre yet?) But the central message of the book, that standardized tests measure only what they measure, and not anything externally worthwhile, is something that should be hammered into the heads of every politician, educator, and parent on the planet. Your kids know what's up, why don't know?