Education Bookcast

I picked up The Cambridge Handbook of the Learning Sciences hoping for a longer term project of enrichment from a volume published by one of the most prestigious universities in the world. However, it only took reading the introduction by editor R. Keith Sawyer to see that this book is suffused with ideological stances commonly supported and even dogmatically preached in educational circles, whose major tenets have been shown wanting time and again by empirical evidence from cognitive science - not to mention the practical experience of teachers. The whole thing is made all the more facepalm-worthy for the extent to which the author emphasises that his ideas apparently are based on "cognitive science" ideas of "deep learning". In practice he has paid attention to some important facets of the cognitive science of learning (mainly the value of the novice vs. expert axis of comparison), but draws from this ludicrous conclusions which are not, in fact, supported by the science at all. Ultimately, I decided that t

How the Brain Learns is one of the first books I bought about education, all the way back in summer of 2014. It sat on my shelf for seven years before I finally got round to reading it. Now, with the benefit of knowledge gained from so many years of investigation, it is much less impressive to me than it would have been when I started. After introducing some basics of brain anatomy, the author starts to describe learning, covering a lot of ground that we've already seen in this podcast in a generally acceptably accurate way. As usual for books about learning with "brain" in the title, it feels as though this word is maintained largely for the purposes of hype, as references to brains in this book, as in others, do little to help us understand the nature of learning. The book does have several important flaws, most striking of which is the author's apparent lack of understanding of the concept of working memory, perhaps the most important learning concept to grasp. The author seems to think that cramming for a

In my episode on Stuart Ritchie's Intelligence: All that Matters I spoke about IQ and intelligence, after a long silence on this issue. In Hive Mind, we get a look at how IQ affects the fate of entire nations, rather than just the individuals living in them. Jones' argument rests on data showing that IQ correlates positively with patience, win-win thinking, productivity in teams, supporting "good" policies (i.e. those endorsed by experts), and saving more money. There is also data to indicate that richer countries tend to have higher average IQ, and some indications that causality goes from IQ to national wealth. The Flynn effect - a constant increase by the equivalent of 3 IQ points per year around the world throughout the 20th century - shows that IQ can be increased, but a more important question is whether that increase can be encouraged somehow. Jones also covers this ground, although it seems that we don't really know good answers to this. Nevertheless, that doesn't stop authors like David Didau in Maki

This is the second part of the episode on the book Multiple Faces of Attachment - Cultural Variations on a Fundamental Human Need. In this section, we will look at three societies - the Beng (Ivory Coast), Nso (Cameroon), and Makassar (Sulawesi) - to see how children are brought up there, and the extent to which Attachment Theory as it is currently formulated makes sense within these example societies. We will see the themes of the child not "belonging" to parents, alloparenting or additive parenting, the need for the mother to get back to work after birth, the lack of an ideology of mother love, and child autonomy and choice concerning its caregivers as factors that undermine the basic thinking of Attachment Theory, and expose it as ultimately ethnocentric. Finally, we will see an example of where application of Attachment Theory's suggestions seems to actually lead to harm, as a final demonstration of the shortcomings of this psychological theory. Enjoy the episode.

The title of this episode might ruffle some feathers. Attachment Theory is developmental psychology's shining star, the theory with the greatest predictive success, and one which has become popular among child psychiatrists. You can now hear it spoken about wherever child psychology is the main topic, and it has become something of a buzzword. Could this scientific theory really be "cultural ideology"? What would that even mean? Attachment Theory as Cultural Ideology is the name of an essay within the volume Multiple Faces of Attachment - Cultural Variations on a Universal Human Need which I talk about in the recording. It is a collection of essays written by anthropologists plus one evolutionary psychologist on the problems with existing Attachment Theory - mainly its lack of applicability outside of a Euro-American context. The Cultural Ideology essay in particular was the one that got me to buy the book, and it shows how Attachment Theory is in fact deeply intertwined with 20th century Western moralisms ar

Which country was the first ever to have universal, free, compulsory education? Zero points if you said "Prussia". The correct answer is the Aztec empire, almost four centuries before the oft-cited German state. I happened to find out this bizarre fact from an aside in a YouTube video, and decided to look into it. If this isn't an independent societal data point on the development of education, then I don't know what is! In this episode, I discuss the article Developing Face and Heart in the Time of the Fifth Sun: An Examination of Aztec Education by Timothy Reagan. You will hear about Aztec society and values, and how the education system fit within the society in order to achieve its educational aims. You will also hear a lot of bloody stories of human sacrifice. Enjoy the episode.

I realised I missed something, and I kicked myself. For a while I've been toying with the idea that learning occurs in two stages, which can be mapped between cognitive science and neuroscience: Exposure to new material -> neuronal connections Practice and repetition -> myelination ...with elaboration (e.g. relating one piece of information to another) being a practice that involves both stages. This model appeals to me for several reasons. Firstly, it is simple, which is a relief in the complex world of teaching and learning. Secondly, it is grounded in the idea that learning is all about addition to long-term memory, which is now a deeply ingrained idea with me. Thirdly, it is in line with the way that most teachers would teach, which makes sense - you would think that teachers tend to do something more or less right after so many years of experience. However, there is one anomaly that I couldn't place in this model: pre-testing. It turns out that when you are given a test on something before you start le

This book touched my heart, and it changed my mind about neuroscience. I wasn't going to read this book. While I was at my friend's house, I picked this book up and read the preface, written by Will Self. He wrote that Oliver Sacks is extraordinary in the way in which he fuses such humanity with his scientific probing of the brains of his patients. At that point, I got interested, and my friend told me I could borrow it. I gobbled the book up in two days. Having read the book, I can see what Will Self was saying. I used to feel that neurologists were dehumanising of people, seeing them as a pile of neurons, and seeing themselves arrogantly as masters of the most important discipline. Oliver Sacks couldn't be more different. He has a real care for the humanity, for the soul of his patients, even as he describes the areas of brain damage. He marries up scientific description and human concern in a way that is life-affirming and touching. I used to think that neuroscience is too low-level to be relevant to educa

This episode feels almost nostalgic, as it is a return to the theme of the roles and interactions of the conscious and subconscious mind, something which I focused on early in the podcast and came out strongly in my main series on expertise (around episode 20). It also shares some relation to books on the topic of cognitive biases on the one hand, and the complexity of the world on the other. Psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer has two main points to make: firstly, that ignorance and cognitive biases often outperform knowledge and "clear thinking"; and secondly, he proposes a way in which gut feelings work. On the first point, Gigerenzer points us to some experiments which are convincing of their point but difficult to know how to make use of. It turns out that, in tasks like guessing which of two cities has the larger population, if you've heard of one but not the other, the one you've heard of is probably more populous. This requires that you are "somewhat ignorant" - you know one city but not the other - as if yo

This episode concludes the series on Jin Li's fantastic book Cultural Foundations of Learning, East and West. After reviewing the key differences between the cultures of learning, we quickly look once again at the evidence for these claims. Then we will see what Chinese teachers think of American educational practices. Finally, I will add some commentary of where in my own learning I have some apparently Eastern views and practices. Enjoy the episode.

This is the final part of the series on Jin Li's book Cultural Foundations of Learning, East and West before the summary and conclusion. Speech is seen in the West as a distinct personal quality, a right, a leadership trait, and an art. Rhetoric was part of university curricula since the Middle Ages, and we celebrate famous orators like Cicero, Martin Luther King, and Winston Churchill. But in the East, speech is not seen so favourably. Chinese people assume that those who speak less are likely the more intelligent (in America it is those who speak more who are thus perceived), and Chinese culture has a general distrust of speaking, seeing it as inferior to action and potentially a way to mislead. Notably, unlike Cicero, King, and Churchill, there are no famous speakers in East Asia. This different attitude to speaking has consequences for education. Notably, we know from experiment that Chinese people's thought process is inhibited when they vocalise, whereas this is not true for Americans. But it also leads

This is a continuation of the series on Jin Li's book Cultural Foundations of Learning, East and West. In this recording, we will see how mothers interact with their children in such a way as to promote their cultural worldview, which goes a long way to explaining how the culture is perpetuated. Interestingly, it is clear from the sample interactions that the children often do not know how to respond to the parent, and so have not yet learned the cultural mindset, so we get a real sense of attitudinal transmission going on through the interactions. Enjoy the episode.

This is a continuation of the series on Jin Li's book Cultural Foundations of Learning, East and West. In this episode, we will see the emotional side of learning, with a Western focus on interest, curiosity, and enquiry juxtaposed against an Eastern focus on dedication, conviction, and commitment. This also leads to a different conceptualisation of time within the sphere of learning, which leads to concepts like success and failure make less sense in a Chinese cultural context. Since the process of learning never ends (or, at least, is considered to be very long), one cannot that one has reached "success" or "failure" at any stage, as things could always get better (through application and virtue) or worse (through becoming slack and irresponsible). Westerners, in contrast, have a much shorter-term and piecemeal view, seeing motivation as dependent on the nature of the material (empirically shown to not be important to Easterners), and viewing learning problems as requiring technical solutions (rather than h

This is a continuation of the discussion of Jin Li's book Cultural Foundations of Learning, East and West. In this recording, I discuss the differences between Western learning process concepts (active learning, exploration and enquiry, critical thinking, and self-expression) and Chinese ones (sincerity, diligence, endurance of hardship, perseverance, and concentration). Enjoy the episode.

This is the third in a series of recordings on Jin Li's book Cultural Foundations of Learning, East and West. In this episode we will see a range of empirical data reflecting the differences between the cultures in question, mostly from psychology, including issues of motivation, attitudes to competition, and the language which is used to describe learning. I will also discuss British and Chinese students' views of the nature of understanding, pointing out what existing cognitive science has to say about this issue. Enjoy the episode.

This is the second in a series of recordings on Jin Li's book Cultural Foundations of Learning, East and West. In this part, we will see how the fundamental aims of education differ among the cultures in question, and how this is grounded in philosophical traditions that go back thousands of years. At the end, we will see a startling and unexpected piece of evidence which supports the author's hypothesis. Enjoy the episode.

You may have noticed that I am generally quite disappointed in professors of education. It seems that the work of cognitive scientists, (some) psychologists, anthropologists, (some) economists, historians, and even machine learning researchers and philosophers is reliable, trustworthy, and can offer a good contribution, whereas that has not been my experience with people explicitly employed by university education departments. However, Jin Li breaks that trend. And boy, how she breaks it. Cultural Foundations of Learning, East and West follows Jin Li's research into the nature and causes of differences in learning beliefs, attitudes, and behaviours between Westerners (mainly European-Americans) and people from "the East" (mainly Chinese, Taiwanese, and Chinese-Americans). She goes into issues of parenting, teaching techniques, student attitudes, language usage, and underlying philosophy. Overall, she paints a coherent picture which is invaluable to helping see the water in which we are swimming. What is reall

"It’s as if someone were out there making up pointless jobs just for the sake of keeping us all working. And here, precisely, lies the mystery." The above text is from David Graeber's super-viral article On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs. His basic, audacious thesis is that there is a large and increasing number of "bullshit" hours worked in the economy, through a combination of some outright "bullshit jobs", and previously normal jobs that have become increasingly "bullshitised". Graeber's intention with the word "bullshit" is completely unnecessary work that is useful to nobody, and a "bullshit job" typically contains much pretending to work while actually browsing social media, as well as carrying out a number of tasks that really don't need doing, but not being able to face up to the Kafkaesque reality head-on as there appears to be a taboo about letting people know that you aren't doing anything, or that your job is pointless. Ironically, such soul-destroying employment is often considered to be quite p

I was recently contacted by a fan of the show asking for advice in the choice of their research topic. Oddly, the best advice I could give them pertained to philosophy of science. In this episode, I expand on what I told them, to explain the most important ideas in the philosophy of science that I think are worth knowing about. My ultimate target is Imre Lakatos. If you can understand Lakatos' idea of research programs then you have all you need. However, in order to properly understand Lakatos, you need to know about Thomas Kuhn's concept of paradigms, "normal" science, and scientific revolutions; and to understand Kuhn, it helps to have some grounding in what Karl Popper had to say about falsificationism before him. I add in Francis Bacon as the founder of science and William of Occam just to mention his timeless razor. The "feel" of this episode is to say that science is done by people, and people are imperfect. Philosophers of science have long discussed the ways in which science should be (or is) done, a

When we ask the question of whether something is "nature or nurture", we are implicitly suggesting a dichotomy, or excluded middle - it is either nature, or nurture, or a mix of both, but not a mix of both plus something else. In The Hidden Half, Michael Blastland takes us on a journey of skepticism which somehow magically reveals the presence not only of a "third factor", but shows, startlingly, that such a factor has been known to account for as much as half (!) of the variation in some traits. References to dark matter immediately spring to mind. After reflecting on a paradigm-shifting species of parthenogenic crayfish, the author discusses, among other things, how you only have a 50% chance of developing the same mental disorder as your identical twin you were raised with is already suffering from (shared genes and environment, remember - shouldn't this be close to 100%?); the mysterious inability to transfer infant mortality reduction measures to new regions; and the still inexplicable sudden drop in tee