Education Bookcast

"Follow your passion" is bad advice. It seems an almost blasphemous thing to say. And yet in this book, Cal Newport argues that it is, indeed, generally a bad idea to try to base a career on a pre-existing passion. Firstly, as blunt and uninspiring as it may sound, most people don't *have* a passion to begin with. Hence the need to "find yourself" or figure out what you want to do with your life. People who do have a passion are usually passionate about something that can't provide them with a career, such as supporting a local sports team. Secondly, passions are usually the *result* of a successful career due to the build-up of skills that allow for more interesting jobs, rather than something that people start with. Having higher quality skills that are in high demand means that you can "trade them in" for a job which is in high demand. To think that you can go in to a field and get an exciting job right away is rather naive, and the entry-level positions don't tend to be the sorts of things that inspire people. This book was written by the author as he was contemplating where he would go with his career after finishing his PhD, as he confronted the fascinating question: what makes for a career that people love? Through a combination of personal stories and broader research, the author argues his perhaps unorthodox position to us in very convincing style. Enjoy the episode.

With The Talent Code, we have another perspective on the development of expertise. Daniel Coyle looks at "talent hotbeds" in music, sport, and academics in order to piece together a theory of how people get good at things. In the process, he discovers different types of teachers, necessary for different stages in the process of achieving mastery.

In Genius Explained, we saw how people considered "geniuses" build up their skills over many years prior to their production of great works. Although this training usually happens in childhood and adolescence, we saw at least one case - that of George Stephenson - where the key knowledge and expertise were built up in early adulthood. This prompts me to cover a book about adult development to supplement our series on expertise. Meg Jay writes not just about adolescents, but directly for them. She is a therapist specialising in the twenty-something years, and her experience in therapy combined with her knowledge of the background scientific literature contributes to the value of this book. Her main thesis is that many people today appear to believe that the twenties should be a period of unrestrained fun and thrill-seeking, and that "grown-up" concerns such as building a career, finding a partner, choosing a place to live, or raising a family can be left to the thirties, since "everything happens later now". Her response to this is that the twenties are not a time that can be wasted, since they are of such great developmental importance. Various biological and particularly neurophysiological changes during the twenties make it a time of great learning and of building habits for a lifetime. Her interviews and case studies with clients show that the twenties can be a rather harrowing time, with young people unsure of what they are supposed to be doing with their lives, and often not doing anything at all with them. Often paralysed by a combination of apparently limitless choice, endless time, and the day-to-day banality of doing anything in particular, many twenty-somethings end up doing the rough equivalent of nothing at all, unemployed or underemployed in an eternal "Starbucks phase". This book should interest both those who are interested in psychology and adult development in general, and those who are in their twenties or know people who are and would like some practical advice from an expert. Enjoy the episode.

Last episode, we got to see the lives of three exceptional individuals in depth: Charles Darwin, George Stephenson, and Michael Faraday. In today's episode, we take a look at how people have tried to bring up children to be prodigies, and to what extent they succeeded. We also look at genius writers so as to get a view of a more "artistic" kind of high achievement. Finally, Michael Howe explains explicitly why he thinks that the idea of inborn talent being necessary for genius doesn't have any real evidence behind it, and what he thinks the secret to genius really is.

In Genius Explained, Michael Howe takes us through biographies of many people with great achievements, who we might consider to be "geniuses". It is an investigation into what makes geniuses so great, chiefly through looking at their upbringing. I'll refrain from sharing his conclusions in this brief description to keep up the suspense :). In this first part, we will look at Charles Darwin, George Stephenson, and Michael Faraday in depth.

A continuation of last week's episode about Daisy Christodoulou's book.

This should be a controversial episode! I cover this book in the interests of looking at the cognitive science it refers to. However, this is also the sort of book that tries to undermine, or even overthrow, what might be interpreted as a failing ideology among many educators. It is therefore not possible for me to talk about it without at least paying some heed to a long-standing debate in education circles: progressivism versus traditionalism. Progressivism is hard to pin down exactly, because it's used as a catch-all term for many ideas in education. Some people who would call themselves educational progressives would have completely different ideas from other self-described progressives. Ideas huddled under the progressive umbrella include character education; "whole-child" learning/development; using more "authentic" assessments (i.e. not paper-and-pencil tests); experiential learning; and discovery learning, to name but a few. You have to say though, they did a good PR job naming their ideas "progressive" - who doesn't like progress, after all? Daisy Christodoulou is one of the relatively un-trendy educators who rails against progressivist ideas rather than campaigning for them. A former teacher in the English state school system, after several years she left her job to study cognitive science. As a teacher, she followed all the advice and guidance of her superiors and training bodies and institutes, but found that, despite this, her students weren't learning much. During her subsequent degree, she feels that she found out why - because the progressive ideas that she was being taught as a teacher in training are completely out of line with the actual science of how people think and learn. Although it's a slim little volume, I've had to split it into two parts to cover it in enough depth. I try my hardest not to be biased and to be fair to all sides of this debate, and any failings on this point are my own. It's hard remaining neutral on such a hot topic, I have to say! I hope that the ideas in this book help to enrich your own understanding of this controversy in education, whatever your views. Enjoy the episode.

We are now moving on to a series of episodes answering the question: How do people get good at things? In Bounce, Commonwealth champion and Olympian table-tennis player Matthew Syed shares his research into this topic.

The funny thing about Malcolm Gladwell is that everyone seems to enjoy reading him, but few remember many details of what he actually wrote. I had a conversation with a parent of one of my students not long ago about the overestimation of the importance of IQ, referencing some studies done by Lewis Terman. She listened with rapt attention and deep in thought. The information seemed new, original, and surprising to her. I mentioned that Malcolm Gladwell wrote about this in his book Outliers, to which she responded, "I read that book!" Apparently these things don't stick! Blink: The Power of Thinking without Thinking is one of Gladwell's many bestsellers. He seems to have an enduring interest in both psychology and in education, which means that he'll make several appearances on the podcast, even though he's "just a journalist". He seems to draw people in with his combination of Viking-quality storytelling and modern statistical and scientific thinking. It seems to me that his later books are more knowledge- and idea-rich, and his earlier ones are a bit more take-one-idea-as-far-as-you-can. The idea in Blink is that some apparent thinking is done without conscious processing (although Gladwell puts it in much sexier terms). For example, art critics know whether something is a genuine Greek sculpture or not because they can *feel* it, and they often can't explain why. Their intuitions can be - tend to be, in fact - more accurate than careful and detailed analysis and background investigations. What's going on here? If you've been paying attention to the podcast so far, you should see where this fits in with the themes we've been exploring. Several books so far have been concerned with something similar. Thinking, Fast and Slow is about cognitive biases, which are subconscious "wrong" thinking. The Power of Habit looked at how people can learn even when they can't form any long-term memories. "Picture yourself as a stereotypical male" dealt with stereotype threat, i.e. how people subconsciously fulfil stereotypes about groups they belong to. Apart from the idea of subconscious thinking, Gladwell also discusses some cases where this thinking is accurate, and others where it is wrong, or even disastrous. Surprise surprise, experts tend to have valid intuitions, whereas novices shouldn't trust their gut feeling. This idea of the differences between experts and novices is one reason why we're covering this book now, as our next theme for the coming weeks will be the question "how do people get good at things?". Enjoy the episode.

A natural continuation from last week. Habit formation, and breaking habits, takes willpower. So how does willpower work? Like a muscle. Willpower gets tired. You have a limited "store" of it, and it gets drained over the course of a day. So, if you had a stressful day at work, then you are much more likely to cave in and have that chocolate cake / cigarette. (Sound familiar?) Willpower gets stronger with use. People who adopt strict exercise regimes, for example, start eating healthier, studying more (if they're students), and drinking and smoking less. This is also true when people take up some other willpower-heavy scheme, such as trying to improve their study habits. This is the weirdest one - willpower is more or less directly related to blood glucose levels. If you've just eaten, you'll have more willpower; if you're hungry, you'll have less. The book gives numerous examples of people who have demonstrated vast amounts of willpower, and shares strategies from those people. Like a typical Gladwell, it blends scientific research with individual cases into a sort of easily digestible yet nutritious risotto. And then it spends a chapter giving ill-advised parenting advice based on a lack of proper research on the subject. Well, you win some, you lose some. Enjoy the episode.