Students in the back row of a class in Japan are reading the newspaper while the instructor up front drones on about his subject. Across the Pacific at one of the world's most renowned universities, a physics professor spends his entire time talking to the chalkboard while writing formulae. Three thousand miles away in England, another professor reads to his students from the textbook for most of the hour. In South Africa, a college professor cannot get the overhead projector to work and spends fifteen minutes of a sixty-minute class wrestling with his audiovisual aids. At a high-level executive program in Germany, the room is filled with round tables and medieval columns so that participants cannot speak to each other. At a New Jersey corporate training facility, the participants file in, weary to have to sit through another mind-numbing experience – as the renovation crew on the floor above begins its drilling and hammering. And at a meeting of the Southeastern United States-Japan Society, the former chairman of Nissan Motors declares that the reason more Japanese firms don't build plants in the United States is that they can't find candidates who are well-educated enough.

These situations demonstrate organizations' worldwide tendency to squander prime learning opportunities. Universities, consulting firms, and corporate training departments all too often subject their students, clients, and participants to poor teaching technique and poor learning experiences that undermine their very purposes. This phenomenon is a global tragedy, a tragedy of opportunity that turns aspiring students off to a variety of disciplines, and more than that, to learning in general. The costs to students, whose investment in education and potential for future accomplishment are compromised, are significant.