Brilliant TED talk from Barry Schwartz. It’s only 20 minutes and so worth watching. Great implications for education. What stood out for me?

• A wise person knows when to make an exception to every rule
• A wise person knows when to improvise
• You don’t need to be brilliant to be wise. Without wisdom, brilliance isn’t enough.
• Rules and procedures may be dumb … but they spare you from thinking
• As we turn increasingly to rules and incentives, moral skill and will is chipped away and deprives us the opportunity to improvise and be creative
• Lockstep curricula is an example of the overabundance of rules
• Excessive reliance on incentives demoralizes professional activity
• We must celebrate moral exemplars
• “As teachers we should strive to be the ordinary heroes, the moral exemplars, to the people we mentor”