The most flawed educational proposals proceed from the position that education is an engineering problem, and thus we can build educational systems can be built to create systems that produce measurable achievement reliably. For many reasons, those systems that approach all teaching and learning as a recipe that produces learning that can be measured with test performance are flawed. Ingenious humans solve engineering problems very quickly. The fact those systems have not been solved in the decades since A Nation at Risk provides evidence that education is not an engineering problem; the on-going debate over education provides evidence that our society cannot even decide what it means to be educated, never mind build a system to ensure that all individuals become educated.