Education Bookcast

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 be...

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 s...

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 a...

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...

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 reco...

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 mi...

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...

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....

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...

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 (...

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 b...

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 Nobe...

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 resea...

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...

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...

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 com...

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 sp...

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 o...

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-...

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 d...

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 t...

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 greate...

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...