Education Bookcast

So far, one of my most downloaded episodes has been number 42, on Sir Ken Robinson's talk Do Schools Kill Creativity? Numerous members of the audience have told me that they appreciated my critical eye on the matter. But at that time I had not read any of Ken Robinson's several bestsellers. "Don't you think you should? How can you be critical of him when you haven't even read him?" It was goading from someone else, asking me to rise to my own intellectual standards, that made me finally give in. I decided to read a book of his. Suffice to say, it was not a very good use of my time. Out of our Minds comes with the subtitle Learning to be Creative, and yet it gives very little concrete advice on that point. A jumbled book with no clear order, it mixes worn-out platitudes with click-baity list articles ("Nine qualities of a creative leader" - all that was missing was "Number six will shock you!!"). He weaves in talk of a "schism" between arts and sciences without properly defining what he means by this, as well

Let's set things straight - intelligence isn't really *all* that matters. The editor seems to have forced a provocative title that even the author doesn't agree with. But intelligence does really matter, and the evidence on this point is overwhelming. Early on in my study of education, I was enamoured with Carol Dweck's Mindset research, and in all of my growth mindset zeal I couldn't bear to even consider that people might differ in some apparently "fixed" way. However, with time I have had the courage to face this issue; or, more realistically, it has beseiged me enough that I have had to give in. Intelligence is real, it varies from person to person, and it has a large heritable component. Research on intelligence has continued for well over 100 years, and it has several findings which are very well supported by evidence. The most important finding is the positive manifold, which states that all mental capacities - from vocabulary size to social intelligence to mental rotation to reaction time - are positi

This is the second part of the episode about Robert Haskell's book Transfer of Learning. In this part, we go in detail into the importance of rich declarative knowledge for transfer. Topics include: The difference between surface structure and deep structure of problems, and how experts can see through the former to get at the latter, allowing transfer to happen How pure scientific discoveries with no application resulted in groundbreaking technological breakthroughs decades later Prolific inventors' advice on what it takes to be a great inventor (hint: "irrelevant" knowledge) How even specialists in procedural knowledge ("skills") openly admit that rich, well-structured declarative knowledge is the cornerstone of transfer Enjoy the episode.

One central question which I find very difficult to answer is "What is education for?". There seem to be many parallel purposes, most of which are subjective, ill-defined, and hard to measure. It is difficult to navigate between the Scylla of unrealistic expectations far from the core activities of school (e.g. developing well-adjusted entrepreneurial job-ready good citizens) and the Charybdis of uninspiring flat-footed apparent irrelevancies (e.g. hoping that they at least remember Pythagoras' Theorem). However, there is one aim that seems to me to pass both of these criteria: the ability to use what one has learned in novel situations. It seems absolutely necessary to make for a justifiable education - after all, if you are unable to apply your knowledge anywhere outside of the classroom, what's the use of learning it in the first place? On the other hand, it also seems eminently achievable and related to real classroom content. Application of what one has learned to new scenarios is known in the psychology

"Critical thinking" is an idea commonly discussed in education. Most people who talk about it say we need more of it. Almost nobody seems willing or able to define it. I have trouble believing in it. With anything that I believe, I keep an open mind and even force myself against my cognitive biases to hear out those whose opinions I disagree with. This has been very useful to me in the past, as there have been a number of education-related ideas that I have had to eschew on further investigation. In line with this attitude, I was happy to give this book a chance, particularly since the author claimed to be a fan of the show, and therefore would presumably have some sense of my predisposition to this issue. The book opened with promise. The author writes that he is aware of the many criticisms levied at critical thinking - that "it cannot be defined, ... or that it takes away from the content of the course, or that it is different in every discipline, or that it depends on knowledge..." (all of which would be

Phillip Tetlock is an expert on expertise, but of a different kind to the late K. Anders Ericsson. While Ericsson's work focused on experts within "kind" domains (as defined by Range author David Epstein) such as music and chess, where feedback is near-immediate and clear and the rules are known to all and stated at the outset, Tetlock is interested in those who specialise in "wicked" domains, such as economics and politics. These are fields in which we can't run experiments or train for specific, recurring situations; where the rules are unknown; and where the situation at hand is not bounded, but can be influenced by a myriad of unpredictable forces. The author's most important finding is that cognitive style plays a major role in deciding who is good or bad at predicting world events. He reaches for Isaiah Berlin's concept of the Hedgehog and the Fox: "the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing." Hedgehogs tend to view the world through their particular favourite lens, basking in the p

Jaron Lanier is a Silicon Valley veteran and a pioneer of virtual reality technology. In Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now, as you might expect, he outlines his dissatisfaction with the status quo of the Internet. He admits that his generation of Silicon Valley engineers and entrepreneurs made a grave error in the early days of the Internet by paradoxically believing in the power of everything being "free", while at the same time hero-worshipping successful billionaire capitalists such as Steve Jobs. Lanier is a very witty writer, and the book is peppered with eminently quotable phrases. I structure the recording around these. Here are some of my favourites: "Social media is biased, not to the Right or Left, but downward."; "Your character is like your health, more valuable than anything you can buy. Don't throw it away."; "Hypnosis might be therapeutic so long as you trust your hypnotist, but would you trust a hypnotist who is working for unknown third parties?". Having just rec

This is the last part of the multi-part episode on David Lancy's The Anthropology of Childhood. I share the main points of what I've learned, what I think of the book, and the way that Professor Lancy summarises the main points of the text. Among the things we've learned are the differential ways that WEIRD (western, educated, industrialised, rich, and democratic) societies and most societies throughout history approach topics such as: Reproduction; Family structure; Parenthood; The social status of children; The value of children, economic and sentimental; The stages of childhood (baby, toddler, child with "sense", adolescent); Children's relationships with adults; Play; Learning and teaching; School; Discipline; Children's work and responsibilities; and How young people change society. I hope you learned a lot - I certainly have! Enjoy the episode.

This is the second from last part of the multi-part episode on The Anthropology of Childhood by David Lancy. This part concerns school. It answers questions such as: What are parents' attitudes to school when exposed to it for the first time? How do children from traditional pre-state societies fare when schools are introduced to their communities? What has the experience of schooling been like in most times and places in the world? How do parents from different societies prepare (or not) children for school? Enjoy the episode.

This recording is the seventh part of a multi-part episode on Professor David Lancy's book The Anthropology of Childhood. In this episode, we look at adolescence, including questions such as: Does adolescence really exist? How does it vary across societies? What role do adolescents play in social change? Why are teenaged boys so obnoxious? Enjoy the episode.

This recording is the sixth part of a multi-part episode on Professor David Lancy's book The Anthropology of Childhood. In this episode, we look at children learning through work, including questions such as: When do children start doing chores? What is their attitude to them? How does learning through chores tend to differ by gender? How do young people learn crafts? What are apprenticeships like? Why do they exist separately from the main body of craft learning? How similar are any of these learning situations to school? What ancient institutions might school have evolved from? Enjoy the episode.

This recording is the fifth part of a multi-part episode on Professor David Lancy's book The Anthropology of Childhood. In this episode, we look at the nature and role of play in children's lives, including questions such as: In societies without many material possessions, what do children play with? Are there any toys? What kind of games do children play? How does this vary from culture to culture? What commonalities are there in play behaviour between humans and other animals, and across human societies? Why do human societies, and animal species, vary in their play behaviour in the way they do? In what way is play an evolutionary adaptation? What is the "purpose" of play, biologically speaking? How do adult attitudes to play vary across cultures? How does play influence children's development? What implications are there for education more broadly? Enjoy the episode.

This recording is the fourth part of a multi-part episode on Professor David Lancy's book The Anthropology of Childhood. In this episode, we look at the transition in children's lives into the "age of sense" and the way in which they learn their culture, including questions such as: What ways of learning do we see consistently across cultures? What differences in attitude to learning do we see between industrialised cultures and pre-state societies? How does this vary over the lifespan? What role does the family play in children's education in different societies? Enjoy the episode.

This recording is the third part of a multi-part episode on Professor David Lancy's book The Anthropology of Childhood. In this episode, we look at community involvement in childrearing, including questions such as: Why do some anthropologists consider attachment theory, the most well-established component of developmental psychology, to be "cultural ideology"? Why, in most societies, are older sisters so keen to raise their younger siblings? What is "toddler rejection" and why is it so common cross-culturally? Do modern ideas of investing in children through parent-child play really make a difference? Enjoy the episode.

This recording is the second part of a multi-part episode on Professor David Lancy's book The Anthropology of Childhood. In this episode, we look at reproduction and the family, including questions such as: What attitudes and practices are there to family size and family planning in pre-state societies? What are the roles of mothers and fathers in these societies? How do cultural practices such as patri- vs. matrilocal residence or monogamy vs. polygamy vs. polyandry affect family structure and the raising of children? How do all of the above vary in societies with different subsistence patterns (subsitence farmers vs. herders vs. hunter-gatherers)? Can the variation by subsistence pattern be explained through evolutionary and/or economic factors? Enjoy the episode.

The Anthropology of Childhood is a monumental work of scholarship. Professor David Lancy has combed the ethnographic record with an eye to understanding the range of experiences of children around the world in different types of societies - hunter-gatherers, subsistence farmers and herders, pastoral nomads, and modern industrialised societies, particularly in the West and in East Asia. The author also considers juveniles of other primates, such as chimpanzees and bonobos. I consider it to be so rich in content, and so important, that I am doing my longest episode ever, splitting this up into nine (!) individual recordings. Otherwise I would be talking continuously for over six hours straight. The reason I think this is so worth studying is that it provides us with insight into what we take for granted. Culturally, we are all fish that can't see the water that surrounds us. By looking at a broad survey of human and other primate societies we can see what we might have thought to be cultural and yet is in fact

Rote memorisation is commonly reviled. I think some careful consideration of its role is in order. In short, my position is that rote memorisation is an inefficient approach, but sometimes difficult to avoid (such as when learning foreign language vocabulary), and should not be shied away from when there is no other option, though we should certainly do what we can to use alternatives. In the recording I also talk about ways to reduce or eliminate rote memorisation where possible, cultural differences between China and the West, and my own experience of learning vocabulary, among other things. Enjoy the episode. *** RELATED EPISODES Cognitive science (general): 19. Seven Myths about Education by Daisy Christodoulou; 52. How We Learn by Benedict Carey; 79. What Learning Is; 80. The Chimp Paradox by Steve Peters; 81a. The Myth of Learning Styles; 81b. on the Expertise Reversal Effect; 82. Memorable Teaching by Pepps McCrea; 85. Why Don't Students Like School? by Dan Willingham; 86. Learning as information compr

This book is about slot machines. It is creepy. By way of this book, we can arrive at a new psychological idea which Natasha Dow Schüll calls "the machine zone", but I prefer to call "dark flow". The word flow is already used in psychology to refer to Mihály Csíkszentmihályi's concept of optimal experience, in which time distorts, the sense of self disappears, and the subconscious and conscious mind work in harmony. Dark flow is similar to flow, but... for want of a better term, it's evil. Whereas flow allows us to both enjoy our lives to the fullest and grow as a person, dark flow entails the same kind of perfect absorption but with the goal of self-destruction. Both the aim and the result are an obliteration of one's life. It's like a disease that swallows all of a person's time, money, and thought; the subject craves the sense of release from reality that the flow process provides, and ultimately acquiesces to, or even seeks, the destruction of their life that follows. Death metaphors are very common in pa

This recording serves as an appendix to the episode on James Paul Gee's book What Video Games Have To Teach Us About Learning and Literacy. In his book, he provides 36 principles of learning that he proposes in his book on the basis of the psychological effectiveness of computer games. In my opinion, 36 principles is far too many; ideally, I would have five or fewer. I thought that a principle was supposed to be a distillation, and so a proliferation of them seems counterproductive and rather ironic. But I still wanted to go through his principles to be fair to him and his book. What's striking is how he is occasionally absolutely correct in his assertions, yet at other times completely off the mark. He is another example of somebody who is apparently academically respected within the field of education, and yet says things which are completely unreal and make little if any sense to those who know the basics. Enjoy the episode.

What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy is a book that I read early in my education research quest. At the time, I thought that it had interesting points to make, but I was unclear on quite how to react to it. After several more years of reading and research, it's clear to me that this book is deeply flawed. First of all, the author redefines "literacy" in a very strange way. He takes any form of semiotic system to count as a "type" of literacy. So, for example, if you know how to use a smartphone, then you are "literate" in the layout, symbols, and conventions of smartphone user interface. This is obviously not the kind of literacy that most people are interested on or concerned about, and it is less valuable than "conventional" literacy, partly because of barrier to entry (learning to read is relatively hard, learning to use a phone is relatively easy) and partly because of utility. Secondly, he coins a lot of new terminology for no apparent reason. During the recording I've had to tra