Only about 25 percent of teens who take the ACT exam are actually proficient in all the areas they need to be in order to go to college. While educators around the country are trying to cobble together programs that might get their charges better prepared for the next educational step, one New York teacher and adviser believes the problem is more basic. In her book The Republic of Noise, Diana Senechal believes American children and teens are over-stimulated and have lost the ability and opportunity to reflect—a critical skill, she believes, to educational success. “I’m not a psychologist,” she tells Salon.com, “but in the classroom and in many discussions on education, what I see is an emphasis on keeping the students busy from start to finish; not letting any moment creep in when they don’t have something specific to do, something concrete where they are actually producing something. So if you keep them busy, busy, busy and doing something at every moment, then supposedly they’re engaged…What happens in this focus on visible engagement, we lose something that may go deeper, where students may have a chance to wrestle with something that’s a little bit above his or her head and where the answer is not immediately apparent.” (Salon.com)