Education Bookcast

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 to...

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. Psyc...

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 app...

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...

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 resp...

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...

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...

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 hyp...

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 uni...

"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 "bu...

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' ide...

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...

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...

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...

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 wi...

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...

"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 th...

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, s...

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...

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 thr...

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...

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 lik...

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 cultu...