Education Bookcast

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 was quite different. It was the government schools that were failing, and the people were exercising their free choice to send their children to the private schools, which were significantly better. The Beautiful Tree documents Tooley's personal adventure through the world of private schools for the poor; his struggles with government bureaucrats, both well-meaning and corrupt; and his encounters with parents, children, and teachers doing what they can for themselves and each other. He explains his research about the economics and pedagogy of these schools, and explores the little-known history of private schooling in India, and how it has affected instruction in places as far away an the UK and South America. This is the first book about economics of education on the podcast, and as such it is difficult for me to add much commentary or be very critical. But Tooley provides ample evidence (as well as sharing many personal experiences) about the structure of the education sector in developing countries, and writes in a balanced way that makes him seem trustworthy. In future, I intend to get more into economics of education, as I now see it as one of the key elements in coming to understand the nature of education as a whole. Enjoy the episode.

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 limitations and outright negative aspects? The book almost felt like an attack on these practices, although a measured and fair one Upon second reading, while preparing this episode, I realised that the shock I had experienced was in fact due to my unrealistic (but not uncommon) expectations - that meditation does nothing but good, brings nothing but calm, and is more effective at improving your quality of life than any other activity that you might engage in. Drs Farias and Wikholm merely show their readership the extent to which these practices have been "hyped up" by the underlying assumption of the perfection of exotic Eastern ideas, and a misunderstanding of their philosophical basis and context. Overall, the message of the book is a "yes, but". Yes, meditation can be beneficial, but it can also be harmful - it can lead to mental disturbances, including, in extreme cases, psychosis, mania, and suicidal ideation. Yes, meditation can be therapeutic, but more "standard" methods tend to work just as well - things like CBT or exercise. And yes, meditation can make you happier, but that's not what it was originally designed or intended for - the original purpose was to destroy your sense of self, to reveal the illusions that permeate your psyche and your life, to better understand yourself through a radical undermining of your ego. Enjoy the episode.

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 book is very short, but I manage to turn it into a very long episode. This is mostly because I have much to comment. I will be working through books on literacy and vocabulary on the podcast, gradually adding layers of information, until we will finally be ready to tackle the most detailed books on the subject. Enjoy the episode.

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 Mayer. Specifically, it shows that pure discovery learning methods (where students are mostly left to their own devices) have abundant evidence that they are not as good as guided discovery methods (where the teacher provides feedback and hints during problem solving), though it seems that there is also some evidence that guided discovery methods are better than expository approaches (i.e. explaining everything in detail beforehand). The defining features of the human mind that seem to be the cause of this are two: the limitations of working memory capacity on the one hand; and the human desire to avoid thinking where possible on the other. Discovery learning appears to overload working memory, whereas expository approaches might result in the students not actually thinking. In a way, it is two sides of the admonition "they need to engage with the material." Discovery learning focuses on engagement at the expense of the material, and expository methods focus on the material often at the expense of engagement, but it appears that guided discovery can avoid both of these traps with greater reliability, at least in some cases. Enjoy the episode.

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: childbirth; infanticide; weaning; birth interval; breastfeeding; infant-adult physical contact; fathers and "allo-parents"; responses to crying infants; physical punishment; child autonomy; multi-age playgroups; and child play and education. There are two reasons that I wanted to talk about this topic. The first is that I want to understand the range of human societies, cultures, and attitudes as well as possible, to make sure that my own understandings and viewpoints can take a broad perspective and discover and challenge any assumptions I might have rather than myopically studying the same society all the time. I believe that this makes me less likely to be an "accidental extremist" - somebody who holds an extreme viewpoint but doesn't realise it because everybody around me assumes the same as a matter of course, since we belong to the same culture. One potential example of this is the assumption of the need for school itself, as most humans that have ever lived have not spent a single day in school, nor have they ever felt the need to. The second reason is actually to do with other people's arguments around what is "natural". For example, the unschooling movement, an offshoot of homeschooling where no instruction takes place, is largely based on the idea that copying the way that children have been brought up for hundreds of thousands of years is a better way to do things than to submit to modern assumptions about the necessity of schooling. By understanding something about the societies that inspire this line of thinking, we can both come to appreciate their perspective, and be in a reasonable position to engage with their ideas. Enjoy the episode.

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 this kind of teaching has been shown many times over to be ineffective. My failures with my experiments weren't just because I was doing it wrong, it was because the whole approach is flawed. Evidence has been mounting about this for over half a century, I just didn't know about it. This was certainly an eye-opener for me. I hope that it inoculates you against something that could waste your time - or convince you to stop doing what you're doing, if you are currently using these inefficient and ineffective methods. Enjoy the episode.

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 good? So many perspectives, but which ones are useful? A real expert focuses on providing the right way of thinking about a situation, not on all the different ways you can view a situation. Ultimately I find that there is little that is useful here. I still wanted to talk about the book a bit in order to be clear about what my expectations are, and why this book doesn't meet them. Enjoy the episode.

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 students to understand abstract ideas? (because we understand things in terms of what we already know, and what we already know is mostly concrete) Is drilling worth it? (practice is essential) What's the secret to getting students to think like real mathematicians, scientists, and historians? (don't - experts are fundamentally different from novices) How should I adjust my teaching for different types of learners? (learning styles are a myth) How can I help slow learners? (hard work can improve intelligence and beliefs about intelligence matter, but some difference is genetic) What about my mind? (teaching is a skill like any other) When I first read the book, there were a number of truths that shattered my pre-existing notions, which was scary but beneficial for me. I hope it helps you as much as it helped me. Enjoy the episode.