This makes a lot of sense in theory. Children are in the most critical periods of their life. They are giant sponges absorbing every little thing around them. To teach children problem solving skills at an early age makes sense. Like the article mentioned it doesn't make sense to punish children for behavior they don't yet have the ability to control. To be completely honest this could be translated into strategies for parenting. My issue with this is the practicality of it. I remember going through school, and watching as classrooms got larger and larger. The teachers received no assistance and some just drowned. In a climate like this I don't see this as being useful simply because the growing number of other children who don't have to be handled like this are stuck being neglected because they are more competent than another student. What I'm curious about is will those students begin to act out if they see it is as way to gain the attention of the adults?
I come from a teaching family and my wife was a special-ed teacher for many years; one of my constant observations, reinforced by a very competent wife and a mother who was a comprehensively horrible teacher was that there seems to be very little respect given to the job and there's very little training given in how to do it well. It's also terribly subject to politics, fads and administrative whims. I could go on for hours, honestly. But teaching problem-solving skills was part of my wife's toolkit. Some of them worked alarmingly well on me. For me. I meant for me. And when doing a "push-in", say working on math skills for a group that's not getting it, sometimes she'd show the alternate strategy to the whole class. In other words, she was teaching the teacher how to teach better. She also taught test taking strategies, like "If you don't know, the answer is "c" more often than not." She'd model conflict-resolution strategies for kids with behavior issues. If they were never going to be able to master reading, she'd teach them how to cope with not being able to read. A master-class teacher is one who has strategies that work for different learning styles and abilities. In large classes, the best you get is "one size fits most." Lesson plan, teach to test, test, digest data, re-adjust; it could be done by an expert system running on a desktop PC. Which might be a great idea - if you keep the teachers; that would give them time to teach.
I remember there was an article in my school paper written by a professor at my university on how to change the college classroom for the better. The one that stuck at most was he wanted the lecture to disappear. Instead he wanted the professors to record their lecture (audio or video) and post them. He believed it allowed for students to go at their own pace. What was so crazy about this was that he didn't want to get rid of class time either. He wanted it to be used to go over material in a smaller group environment, so people who needed specific clarifications could come and get them. I thought it was a really interesting idea. I know the original piece wasn't about colleges, but its interest to see that the train of thought could be expanded all the way up the chain.