Education Bookcast

I endeavour to understand and explain the field of education through many disciplines, including neuroscience, cognitive science, psychology, anthropology, economics, and evolutionary biology. Over the course of this podcast's history, I have changed in my reading habits and focus across these disciplines, and in my attitude as to how useful they can be, and where they are best applied. Psychology stands out as a case in point. At first, I thought that psychology would hold all the secrets to knowing how to improve education, by revealing what motivates people, how they think, and how they learn, and showing behavioural "laws" or tendencies that explain the framework from which we should approach understanding ourselves and others. Since then, I have realised that the psychological subfield of cognitive science has profound implications for learning, but the rest of psychology has been a disappointment. Firstly, it suffers from sampling bias. Almost all those who have been tested in psychological experiments

This episode starts with some unfinished business from episode 100. Then I review the topics and themes that have arisen over the history of the podcast.

I started the podcast on the 1st of January 2016 with an episode introducing myself. In this episode, I reintroduce myself, my reasons for starting the podcast, and what I hope to achieve. I also talk about the broad strokes of the development of the podcast and of my own thinking over the last 5 years.

Chinese culture has the concept of the "four great inventions" (四大發明) - inventions from ancient China that are points of pride in Chinese history, and symbolic of Chinese technical and scientific sophistication. The inventions in question are the compass, gunpowder, the printing press, and paper. One could say that there is one "invention" that is conspicuously absent. During the Sui dynasty (581-618 AD), the emperor was concerned that the aristocracy held too much power, in particular by occupying all of the positions in the government bureaucracy. In a shrewd political move, the emperor decided to start holding examinations, open to all males regardless of class, to recruit for positions in the civil service. At first regarded with contempt by the aristocrats, they were eventually won over, and after some decades started sending their own boys to be educated in order to pass the government exams. The Chinese civil service examination system (科舉) was born. The system persisted in China for over a millenium,

Range is a book that I saw in a bookshop and called out to me like little else can. Subtitled "Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialised World", I felt as though it were written for me personally. It seems as though the way to "get ahead" is to specialise early and specialise hard, drilling deeply into a single topic until you become a world expert. Get your 10,000 hours of deliberate practice in before the competition gets there first. And yet I find myself always moving from topic to topic, weaving a wider web of apparently unrelated experience and knowledge. This very podcast is a testament to that. Could I be wasting my time? David Epstein says no. As the author of the bestselling book The Sports Gene, he is no stranger to criticising the prevailing view, based originally on the work of K. Anders Ericsson (and subsequently reinterpreted, or distorted, by journalist Malcolm Gladwell), about the primacy of deliberate practice within a single domain. In Range, he shows that there is another, more common path

When we speak about people who have achieved a lot in their lives, we usually apply a single noun to describe them. Winston Churchill - politician; Nicolaus Copernicus - astronomer; Isaac Newton - mathematician; Christopher Wren - architect; Omar Khayyam - poet. In The Polymath, Waqas Ahmed reminds us that this is a misrepresentation of their lives. Did you know that Winston Churchill won the Nobel Prize - for literature? That Copernicus also had discoveries in economics and mathematics, while spending most of his time managing Church estates? That Newton's main occupations were alchemy and biblical exegesis, and that he ran the Royal Mint? That Khayyam was in fact an astronomer and mathematician who wrote poetry on the side? Wren's career was variegated enough not to be able to fit inside a single sentence. Ahmed introduces us to a compendious collection of famous and not-so-famous historical figures with great accomplishments, and shows us just how varied their lives, careers, and output were. They were all

People often talk about how to work better, but it is rare to hear discussion of how to rest better. Take the famous so-called "10,000 hour rule". This is adapted (with some distortion) from the work of K. Anders Ericsson, the late great psychologist of expertise. The nature and volume of practice among top performers in various fields, as described in his work, is widely cited. But the same research contains details of how high performers rest differently. And yet nobody seems to have taken notice. In Rest, Alex Soojung-Kim Pang argues that work and rest are not adversaries, but partners. Looking closely at the lives of many great writers, mathematicians, scientists, politicians, and businesspeople, he reveals that although their lives revolved around their work, their days did not. They would have ample leisure every day; they would rarely do more than four hours' work per day; and they often seem to take more naps than other people. Scientific research on this topic seems thin on the ground. Pang shares wh

Having looked into research on first language vocabulary development over two recent episodes, now it's time to get into literacy more generally. What happens in people's minds when they read? And how do they learn to read? This book breaks down the cognitive elements of the process of reading. Starting from written signs, it describes how these are turned into sounds (via two different mechanisms), and then how those sounds relate to word meanings; these meanings then combine with context and our knowledge of the world to create a picture of what is happening in a given text. On the way, we learn about word segmentation, phonological awareness, orthographic mapping, motivation and attitude, and a range of other important concepts in learning to read. Daniel Willingham is a cognitive scientist who I've already covered on this podcast for his book Why Don't Students Like School? He spends a lot of time on outreach to explain to teachers (and anybody else) what learning is and how it works. His books are approa

James Tooley is a specialist in private education. One day, on a work trip to India, he was frustrated that his position seemed to only allow him to help the rich, and not those who were most in need. So he decided to take a walk around the local slum. What did he find? Private schools. A *lot* of private schools! All affordable, run for and by those living in the slums. As he investigated further, he found that such low-cost private schools abound in the slums and villages of India. Later he went on to Nigeria, Ghana, and Kenya, and found exactly the same thing. He even found some in China. How can it be that there are private schools for the poor? Why aren't they attending the free government schools? Are these places actually any good? What is the government's response? Governments and NGOs responded with either dismissal or contempt, saying that the schools were insignificant in number and enrollment, or that they were exploiting poor families and providing low-quality education. What James Tooley found w

This is the second episode in a series on vocabulary and literacy. The first was episode 91 (Vocabulary Development). Closing the Vocabulary Gap is a slightly longer book on vocabulary than Vocabulary Development was, and peeks into the domain of literacy more generally. In this episode, we will focus on the following questions: What is the relationship between vocabulary knowledge and reading comprehension? (Does learning vocabulary increase your reading comprehension? Or is there no direct connection - maybe smarter people just do better at both?) How many words do people know? And why is this question important? How do people learn words from context? How should you teach vocabulary? The next part of the series will be focused on learning to read, which builds on knowledge from this book. Enjoy the episode.

Mindfulness is a concept originating in Buddhism, but has in recent years spread like wildfire in the UK and elsewhere. Aside from its adoption by enthusiastic members of the general public, it has come into UK schools and even the National Health Service. Yoga and other forms of meditation have also placed themselves firmly in the mainstream. As I myself became interested in these practices, I spent some time looking into the academic research on them. Luckily I found this book - Drs Farias and Wikholm had done my work for me. Subtitled "Can Meditation Change You?", The Buddha Pill is an investigation into the science behind yoga, mindfulness meditation, and transcendental meditation. Both psychologists of religion and spirituality, the authors have their own extensive and positive experience with meditation. The first time I read the book, as I was halfway through, I found myself doing a double take. How could people who were so invested in the idea of meditation also spend so much time discussing its limit

In 2018 and 2019 I worked for an education technology start-up in London called Mrs Wordsmith. The company produces materials for developing literacy and augmenting vocabulary among first-language learners of English. While I was there, I had the chance to dig into a lot of research about vocabulary and literacy. I gradually came over to the view that, in a sense, all learning is the development of literacy. (Or, adding some caveats, all non-mathematical academic learning is the development of literacy.) When we learn a new field, we become "literate" within that field, because previously we would not have understood its literature due to a lack of domain-relevant vocabulary and content knowledge. Just try reading academic papers outside of your domain of expertise. Vocabulary Development is the first in a series of podcast episodes about literacy. Steven Stahl is one of the big names in this field, and in this short pamphlet he puts across the most important information about vocabulary for teachers. The boo

Discovery learning is an approach that I was trying out at around the time I was in the 20's of episode numbers of this podcast. I tried out the idea of Maths Circles, running a few of my own and attending a course about them in Notre Dame University in the United States. I also tried running a Self-Organised Learning Environment or SOLE, modelled on the work of Sugata Mitra, famous for his "hole-in-the-wall" experiments in India. Since then, I have discovered the reasons why these sorts of approaches don't work, and I've been discussing this recently on the podcast. I also discussed the Sugata Mitra's apparent dishonesty in the episode on Hope in the Wall. In this episode, we look at the history of the idea of discovery learning. First suggested in the 1960's by Jerome Bruner, it has since gone through several rounds of re-branding and repeated research. The article in question is called Should There Be a Three Strikes Rule Against Discovery Learning? The Case for Guided Methods of Instruction by Richard May

Jared Diamond is a geographer and author of many bestselling books about civilisation, including Guns, Germs, and Steel and Collapse. In The World Until Yesterday, he combines his scholarship and his personal experiences in the New Guinea highlands to discuss how non-state societies of hunter gatherers and subsistence farmers and herders differ from modern industrialised state societies. In so doing, he sheds a light on the differences between our modern world and the way that humans have lived for the majority of our existence on this planet. Although the whole book is fascinating, there is only one chapter that is really relevant to the themes of this podcast: the one entitled Bringing Up Children. In it, we can get a much broader perspective on the ways that different societies approach childhood and education than we ever could by comparing industrialised state societies with one another (say, comparing the People's Republic of China to the United Kingdom). The chapter deals with the following themes: chi

Earlier in the life of this podcast I was experimenting with discovery learning. I was even something of a fan. I tried out "Maths Circles", a form of discovery- and inquiry-based teaching, with students aged 16-18 and 10-11, and even went on a course in the USA to try to learn more about it. My exploits are recorded in previous episodes. I could hardly call them a great success. Subsequently, I tried to find research on Maths Circles. The Internet didn't bring anything up. Eventually I put that obsession away and focused on other books and research in education and cognitive science. After much rummaging about the literature reading whatever I thought was interesting, I found this article, or perhaps it found me, and it was difficult for me to face it at first. I was already so strongly bound to my way of thinking that it was too much cognitive dissonance to read this. I had serious confirmation bias. It took me a while before I was brave enough to actually read it and shatter my illusions. It turns out that

I'm just about to do another episode where I talk about a scientific article on this very topic, criticising the approach. I thought it only fair to see it from the side of the proponents as well. Unfortunately, this book is something of a disappointment. There are many minor annoyances early on such as inconsistent use of terminology and a lack of back-up to some claims. But there are much greater issues than that. For one thing, the authors seem to have difficulty defining the concept, and certainly find it hard to do so succinctly. This is not a good sign. The thing that really strikes me, though, is how the central idea of the book is not very useful at all. It proposes a way in which we can view any lesson or educational experience from various perspectives, by considering aspects of the experience (such as which senses are being used, and how the learner responds emotionally). The trouble is, this only leads to a combinatorical explosion - there are so many possibilities, but which possibilities are goo

The inspiration for this episode is a rather technical tome entitled Information Theory, Inference, and Learning Algorithms by David MacKay. It's basically an infromation theory / machine learning textbook. I initially got it because it's known to be a rewarding work for the most nerdy people in the machine learning (a.k.a. "artificial intelligence") world, who want to get down to fundamentals and understand how concepts from the apparently seperate fields of information theory and inference interrelate. I haven't finished the book, and as of this writing I'm not actually actively reading it. I still wanted to talk about something from it on the podcast though. In the early chapters of the book, MacKay mentions how learning is, in a way, a kind of information compression. This fascinating idea has been circling in my head for months, and so I wanted to comment on it a bit on this podcast. Enjoy the episode.

Daniel Willingham is a cognitive scientist who specialises in the study of how people read. In this book, he brings forward nine principles of cognitive science that both have a substantial evidence base and are relevant to teachers. Although he wanted there to be ten, nine is all that he could find that would match those criteria. He names the chapters after questions that they answer rather than the principles that they expound, as this would pique the readers' interest more and make them more likely to remember the principles (he is a cognitive scientist after all). The questions (and answers, paraphrased) are as follows: Why don't students like school? (because people are not designed to think, but to not think in most situations) How can I teach students the skills they need when standardised tests require only facts? (factual knowledge must precede skill) Why do students remember everything on TV and forget everything I say? (the importance of repetition, emotion, and stories) Why is it so hard for stu

Nassim Nicholas Taleb is a former options trader who noticed that the financial markets were unstable ahead of the crash in 2008, and made a lot of money from shorting the market (betting that it would crash). Since then, he has written a quadrilogy of books on risk and decision-making under uncertainty which he calls the incerto. The books in the series are Fooled by Randomness, The Black Swan, Antifragile, and the one I cover in this episode, Skin in the Game. At least two of his books - The Black Swan and Antifragile - have now made it as concepts and vocabulary of popular parlance.  Taleb is a very well-read and insightful author. He follows a philosophy of education in the extremes - a combination of long library visits and street fights, to paraphrase his own description. More accurately, he spent much of his teenage years reading stacks of books at home while bombs went off outside, as he was a civilian during the Lebanese Civil War. His writing has generated a following, and his erudition inspired me

SuperMemo is a flashcard and spaced repetition software that has been around since 1991. Its founder, Dr Piotr Wozniak, maintains a blog with many interesting discussions of learning and memory. One that stood out to me was the 20 rules for formulating knowledge, available via this link: http://super-memory.com/articles/20rules.htm. I read the article with an eye to finding fundamental or deep principles of learning, rather than improving the quality of my flashcards. The following rules were the ones that seemed to fit the bill: Do not learn if you do not understand. (Rule 1) Learn before you memorise. (Rule 2) Build upon the basics. (Rule 3) The minimum information principle. (Rule 4) Avoid sets and enumerations. (Rules 9 and 10) Combat inteference. (Rule 11) I discuss these rules in context of my own experiences and of the theory that I have covered on the podcast. Enjoy the episode.