NEW PODCAST: Why Do We Keep Getting Education All Wrong?

Hello and welcome to the Ruffian with me Ian Leslie. Ever since I wrote my book on curiosity, I've been deeply interested in the science of learning and education. One of the narratives that I critiqued in the book was the idea that teaching children facts and knowledge somehow gets in the way of their curiosity and creativity. In fact, cognitive science points in the opposite direction, but a thousand TED talks have been launched on the idea that instructional teaching is bad, learning by root is bad, that having children sitting in rows facing the teacher is bad, and that we should basically let kids follow their curiosity wherever it takes them. And the remarkable thing about this narrative, which comes in various forms and has lots of different aspects, is that none of it is supported by evidence. Either the evidence of what works in school systems around the world or the evidence from cognitive science. Yet it persists. Why does it persist? I think because it taps into some very old and potent myths about learning that go back hundreds of years. I recently came across a book, a new book called Instructional Illusions, by a group of academics and teachers, that tackles some of these myths head on. And I'm delighted to have one of the authors, Karl Hendrick, on the pod. Karl began his career as an English teacher in an inner city London school, before moving into education research. He's now a professor at Academic University of Applied Sciences in Amsterdam, where he leads research projects that bridge cognitive science, educational psychology, and classroom practice. We had a great conversation about some widespread illusions about learning. I hope you enjoy it. So let's start with this. There's a very popular narrative about education and how it needs to change, which people have been telling for years now in TED Talks and elsewhere. This is my kind of summary of it. And I'm sure you, Karl, and listeners will be familiar with it. It's something like this. The way we do education is all wrong. We have a system designed for the industrial age in which the teacher stands at the front of a classroom and instructs young people who are all lined up in rows and expected to be quiet receptacles. The job of the student in this system is not to show curiosity, creativity, or initiative is to keep their head down, comply with instructions, and memorize material, which they can then just regurgitate in exams. And by doing this, we are failing young people. We're failing to prepare them with a full range of skills and attributes needed for this incredibly dynamic, rapidly changing 21st century world. And we need a system that develops the full spectrum of potential that teaches social skills and character as well as knowledge. And we need to make our lessons more engaging and enjoyable so that the students are intrinsically motivated to discover their own individual paths without being told what to think or do by teachers. Karl, what is wrong with that picture in your view? So I think that picture is sort of a late confection that really originates in the 60s and 70s, when there was a lot of critique of a certain model of schooling. I mean, let's accept for the minute that the picture you painted is true. Well if it is, then it's the most successful, you know, humanitarian invention in history. It's a model that has lifted more children out of ignorance and poverty than almost anything else we can think of. The model that you paint is it's sort of a catch all phrase for things that many kind of progressive educators don't like. And it's also I think one that there's a thing in education of being against any sort of systematic or any kind of efficient mode of doing things. And so where you see things like systematic synthetic phonics or explicit instruction, things that have actually been measured to be demonstrably effective in shaping students learning. And by learning, I'm going to use Paul Kirchner's definition of a change in long term memory. So if we want kids to remember stuff in the long term and then hopefully be creative critical thinkers, which will, you know, another terms that we'll get to later, then we want them to remember things. And so what are the levers we can pull to help kids to know vocabulary, mathematical operations, historical occurrences, and then to be able to draw them together in a way that helps them to think critically. Well, formal schooling is an incredibly powerful method of doing so. And you know, imagine the lunacy of applying this another fit. You know, imagine talking about, you know, well, hospitals have, you know, patients in beds. You have this hierarchical authoritarian doctor telling them, you know, what to be done. Paul Kirchner's, you know, this, you know, this dictator ship of the conductor, violinist and cellist in Rose, you know, should we, should we be encouraging the orchestra to discover their own kind of, you know, root. So it's, it's highly problematic, I think. And then again, it emerges from this idea, which, which we're going to focus on that learning is best achieved through discovering things for yourself. And that idea is, well, it's what Richard Merrick calls the sort of dominant view of how learning happens in schools. And if you go to, you know, the vast majority of schools, despite this idea that schools are kind of an oppressive patriarchal structure, what you, what you tend to see is a lot of kind of kids in groups talking a lot of talk. In fact, when I started teaching a lot of 20 years ago, there was this idea that the teacher should be talking a lot less than the student. I can remember being observed and the observer saying, well, very good lesson. You talked for longer than eight minutes. And really, you should try to limit your, your talk. So there's a very, very strong view within, within education that learning should be led by the interests of the learner. And I suppose what's wrong with that ultimate view is that it assumes that the child has been exposed to interest worth following. So the idea that children should, you know, if my children follow their own interests, they would be looking at Gabby's dollhouse or, you know, so on and so forth. Education really should be introducing young people to, to brave new worlds. New worlds they didn't even know they understood and that they would overcome their dislike of things and then develop new interests that are lying with kind of who they are. But if we, if you're to narrow down that idea of, well, let's get rid of the factory model, let's open up the classroom. And by the way, we've tried that experiment. We've run that experiment of open plan classrooms and the evidence is, overall, well-mingly terrible. In fact, many schools in Australia who have spent billions on creating these open plan, sort of free range classrooms have resulted in pretty disastrous learning outcomes for students and not just, you know, academic outcomes, but well-being outcomes as well. They've led to real stress and anxiety for students. So we have a, we have a very effective way of teaching kids quadratic equations and Shakespeare and phonics and it's remarkably successful. I mean, I'm, we're going to get into some of the specifics of this, but just overall, I'm just kind of amazed at the persistence of this narrative when there is just no empirical evidence that the alternatives that they propose work, and in fact, every time they try, they fail. And there's a lot of evidence that is so called, you know, apparently obsolete factory model is, as you say, when it's done well, it is, you know, remarkably effective. And so it's just a very powerful story that seems to sort of survive in the face of all evidence. Yeah, I mean, it's, it emerges from, you know, we can trace this back to Russo, an book called Emile, which was a book about, it's densitably had to raise children. Interestingly, by the way, Russo himself gave up all his own children for someone else to look after. Yeah, he wasn't a great example. So there's that. But the idea is essentially that, you know, the idea is that, you know, you're going to that there's a sort of an innate wonder to childhood in children, and they should be allowed to follow their own interests. And any sort of enforcing or any sort of constraints upon them is somehow something that is evil. But and then it really kind of gets going with the constructivist movement in the 20th century. So people like Piaget, people like John Dewey, people like Jerome Bruner, and then it gets really kind of with the self-esteem to move into the 60s and the whole sort of discover yourself, the kind of Southern Californian view of the world, which is that there's some, there's some kind of innate wonder within society, and you just need to find the kind of dead poet's vision of teaching. Like the reality is that that model of education or discovery is something that privileges the already privileged. So students are kids who come from very affluent backgrounds who have very strong schemes of knowledge around particular areas who have been exposed to rich vocabulary at the dinner table. They will flourish in an environment where there are very few constraints, for very few expectations in terms of their behavior or whatnot. And this is the sort of dirty secret of a lot of independent schools that they adopt a lot of these 21st century skills, progressive models, and they're then forced upon the kids who can least afford it. Yeah. So let's get into a few of the specific illusions that you discuss in your book, kind of popular myths about teaching and learning, some of which are embedded in that narrative that we've just been discussing. And I noted what I was going to do in my pastiche of that story, I said, oh, we just need to get kids to be more engaged and to enjoy their learning more. But the number one illusion, the first illusion that you discuss in your book is the engagement illusion. So what's that? There's a broad consensus in cognitive science that the subjective experience of learning is a remarkably poor indicator of learning actually happening. This is demonstrated for, well, over decades. And one of the core truths about learning is that it can't be frictionless in the sense that there needs to be, I go back to this idea of constraints, that there needs to be, in some sense, the kind of pithy aphorism, no pain, no gain. So what we find is that, for example, if you're studying for a test, two of the least effective things you can do are rereading material and highlighting it because they give this, what Robert Bjork called the illusion of competence, if this feeling that, well, I've just read it so I understand it. And anybody who reads a lot will have that wistful feeling of walking past a bookshelf and seeing a book that you loved and you know you love it, but you can remember nothing from it. Or maybe you want to do small details, but you know that you love it. And then the older you get, I don't know if you find this, but I find myself, books that were profoundly influential on me, I remember the feeling of being influenced by them rather than the details. And I'm almost afraid to go back to them in case they have sort of ideas about life that my adult self would go, "Oh, actually, that's pretty good up." So learning is innately counterintuitive. So the things that you would want to do in the short term or that feel in the short term like you're learning often do not lead to long term learning and vice versa. So again, Robert Bjork has this framework which he calls, he calls desirable difficulties. And these are things that are, they feel a little bit more difficult in the short term. And these are things like retrieval practice. So having to generate an answer to a question rather than simply passively encountering it, trying to remember stuff. Again, this is one of the great fallacies of this movement that we're talking about. Like one of the truths about learning again is not that testing is the outcome of learning or the measure of learning, it is learning. The act of kind of recovering of knowledge from our minds, memory is very much sort of a, it's a reproductive thing. It's not reconstructive. We don't draw, we don't remember things verbatim. So every time we kind of, we recall something, we lay, there's something about the human arc, cognitive architecture that we lay down the memory. We actually rewrite it every time we draw it to mind. So that constant retrieval, you're learning is very recursive, the misunderstandings they don't emerge often until after something has been, we assume it has been learned. So you have these very sort of long feedback loops. So in terms of engagement, then it's a very poor proxy indicated because we can tend to take those indicators in the moment as being, well, the students are learning or I'm learning. Yeah, because we're seeing the kids, you know, taking part, talking, laughing, playing with materials, or whatever it is. And they're having a good time, right? They're engaged, they're not switched off. So I mean, that's good and it's nice to see, I mean, it's genuinely nice to see, right? But we shouldn't confuse that with their actually learning stuff, right? I mean, the bottom line is that, to learn a specific domain of knowledge, you want that knowledge sequenced in a very particular way. This is where curriculum is probably the most important thing in a school. Not, we tend to privilege activities in school. We tend to think about what are the activities we can get the kids to do today? When really, the nature in which you encounter a body of knowledge, the constituent component and parts of it. And we know this, you know, probably the most, the best design learning happens with, you know, early phonics instruction where kids are introduced to letters in a particular order, in a particular method, in a particular way. And that's just an extremely efficient way of learning anything. You know, you don't have many discovery learning driving instructors. You don't have many, you know, engineers or, you know, people building skyscrapers who kind of think, well, I'm just going to figure it out for myself. And likewise, if you want to learn, you know, something like, in school, something like, how to solve for X or, you know, there's an agreed upon kind of method or sequence of doing that. And, you know, a lot of lessons are, again, if you're going with the student's interest, you're kind of, you've got a very diminished view of learning. And so I think it's, like I say, it's something that needs to be challenged. And, you know, most parents, I think, you know, when they hear the certain kind of approaches going on, they're sort of horrified, but there we go. - The desirable difficulties framework, I mean, I just think that principle is, and that phrase, you know, it's such a powerful one that it ought to be hard. I mean, learning ought to be effortful. It has to be effortful, and it has to be, to some extent, frustrating. And perhaps you'll be bored or annoyed at certain points. If it's all smooth and enjoyable, and you're not kind of, there's no friction, then you're probably not learning very much. You're having a good time. Well, that's great, but, but, you're not, nothing is really kind of sticking. And so when you're designing lessons and thinking about how to educate kids, you have to incorporate that. You can't just say, well, we just want the kids to follow their curiosity and their sense of wonder and enjoyment. I mean, they'll have a great time, but they won't learn anything. - Absolutely. We should also be honest and say, there are great gains and enjoyment to be had. You know, I always think of that line in them, indeed, Martin, I think near the end of the novel, so to speak, there's great pleasure to be had and not taking pleasure. And we should be saying to kids, you know, there's the enjoyment and confidence you will get from learning this thing. And it will be, the struggle will be here. But what we try to do is we try to con kids into learning. And we try to think, well, you know, we're gonna really make this really easy for you. So we'll, instead of doing, you know, the worst example I can think of in is when I started teaching, there was this idea of, well, Shakespeare's really difficult. You know, Shakespeare's, who wants to read Shakespeare for goodness sake, you know, no one can understand it and it's so difficult. So what we'll do is we will have text message Shakespeare. So we'll get the kids to rewrite and there was books published on this. We'll rewrite scenes using emojis and so it was two, letter number two. B, an actual B, or not to B. This is a debased view of knowledge and teaching, I claim. Also, what could be more tragic than a 40-year-old man's idea of kids will find? Yeah. But you're right, it's a con, right? You're telling the kids, oh, no, you've learned about Shakespeare and they haven't. And you're telling the kids, you don't need to work hard on this. You don't need to struggle. This can be fun. Well, no, it can be fun, but you won't learn anything. So let's actually confront the fact that learning is struggle. And as you say, there's enormous satisfaction, in some sense, in the struggle, but certainly on the other side of it. Absolutely. OK, so how does this relate to the-- I guess this is all part of the same kind of framework, but one of the other illusions in the book is the student-centered illusion. And this is really about the idea that we need to just give the kids autonomy. And you don't need that kind of authority figure standing at the front of the class or whatever forcing knowledge into them. Yeah, again, this view emerges from typically the construct of this view of education, which-- so let's say there's kind of three major paradigms of teaching learning that we have. One is the behaviorist one, which is very much out of fashion now. Very-- it's sort of very invoked in the '20s and '30s of people like Watson and Skinner. Lots of pigeons in boxes and rats in boxes, you know, all that kind of stuff. And it's really interested in the external. It's interested in inputs and outputs, really not interested all in what's happening inside the mind. Then you get constructivism. And that has a sort of a late effect of people like Vigotsky, Bruner, Piaget. And that then is based on an idea that's true, but it conflates, I think, a philosophy with a way of teaching. So the philosophy is that we construct meaning ourselves, which is true. But that's not a good way of teaching. So the mistake there, the fallacy is because we create our meaning, then that should be very much invoked with postmodernist views in the '60s around Bards death of the author. Meaning doesn't reside in the author or it resides in the subject. And so then you get this cognitive revolution that emerges in the '50s and '60s. And you have this conference called a Dartmouth conference, where actually the term artificial intelligence originated from this conference. And there the focus is on the sort of internal mechanisms of the mind. It goes from the sort of external behaviors to what is going on in the mind. And what happens is you get these models of learning and models of the mind. But the constructivist model wins out really. And that model of learning should be because we construct our own meaning, that really that should be how we learn things. And so the student-centered approach is one that comes into vogue. And it's a sort of a. The reason that this has persevered for so long is because the feedback loops in education are so long. If you do something wrong on a tennis court or a. This is what Robin Hoaguyth calls kind and wicked learning environment. So a kind learning environment is a chess board or a tennis court where you're immediately given feedback on what you're doing is wrong. In education, you might find out for weeks, months, even years that the methods you've been using have been ineffective. And so that's allowed, I think, a lot of these approaches to flourish. A lot of bullshit. A lot of bullshit. A lot of bullshit. Because I was. I mean, it is a field with a lot of bullshit. And that's why. And that's why. You just sort of nailed it. I hadn't really thought about that. But it's because the feedback is so long and so difficult to empirically quantify or measure because it's tangled up with so many other variables. Yeah. And the truth is, as well, Ian, for people who are outside of education, if you go into an education department and I spend a lot of time in one, you will find sociologists, philosophers, those things are not important. The sociological issues around education, okay, that's fine. An object worthy of study. But actually, these are people training teachers. And so my view is that really, there should be an instructional design approach taken to the training of teachers. And if they want to go on later on and look at, you know, kind of activism or whatever it is, then that's fine. But the first priority should be, can you design learning environments that are effective? Based on evidence and science, based on what we know about what works. Exactly. That's my view. Yeah. So just to sort of, on the student-centered illusion. So what's the fundamental misconception there? And yeah, how does it manifest itself? So the misconception is that if the learner is directing their own learning, and you hear this phrase again and again and again, student-centered learning, students directing their own learning, and it conflates an outcome with the process. So this is one of the biggest issues we have in education where we say, we want to design an outcome, but the steps that are needed towards that outcome, we should just do that. In other words, if you want to become an independent learner, then you should just try to learn independently. But independent learnings are very bad way of becoming an independent learner. In any kind of domain, to get to a desired outcome very often, the steps towards that outcome look almost opposite. It's this counterintuitive thing of, okay, I want to get to a particular outcome. So the student-centered illusion is we want ultimately, and everybody wants students to be discovering knowledge to themselves and to be student-centered. But the steps to get there are very, very poor in terms of if that's the approach. I mean, the classic example I would give would be something like learning to read. It's an innately unnatural thing. And David Geary's work here is interesting from Evolutionary Psychology. He distinguishes between biologically primary knowledge, which is things that we are innately hardwired to do. Learning to talk, learning to walk, learning to recognize faces. We are in even things like collaboration. We are innately, we come with the software already installed. Biologically secondary knowledge is things that we are not at all evolved to learn. And they are things like Shakespeare, quadratic equations, Newtonian physics, you know, the hard one, achievements of human intellect. And those things necessitate a different form of instruction. And they start with the premise that you have a novice and you have an expert. And the novice really needs very different education or learning environment than an expert. And to assume that a novice can think like an expert is like asking someone to speak a language that they don't even understand. And that's the fallacy of the student-centered illusion. The idea that novices and experts, that there's actually a very little difference between them and that if you just think like an expert or you often see the things schools, you know, we want kids to think like a scientist. Well, you're not a scientist. You're learning to be a scientist. And if you want to be a scientist, it takes years to get there. And so we shouldn't patronize children and say, you're just as, you know, you can think just like a scientist when really, you know, it takes many, many years of hard one effort to get there. And this relates to another illusion that I want to discuss, which is the motivation illusion. And this will be familiar to people, again, who have heard this narrative and related stories about how we learn and so on. And it's basically that we work with this model in schools of essentially extreme, extrinsic motivation, i.e. you need to learn this because you need to pass this exam. And you need to learn this because you need to pass this exam to go to this university to get this job. And that is a much weaker and more kind of soulless form of motivation than kindling the intrinsic motivation of the student. I want to learn this because I'm curious, right? I'm reading a whole book about curiosity. I love curiosity. But there is something wrong with this model, isn't there? Yeah. There is a body of evidence to say that we may have the cause or the wrong way around. And so the idea that we typically think that there's some sort of intervention. If you want to motivate kids, you have to put something in place that will then lead to motivation, hopefully intrinsic motivation, as you say. And then the kid will achieve whatever it is you want them to achieve. There is a lot of evidence to say that actually it's achievement that leads to motivation and not motivation that leads to achievement. In other words, if you have a small taste of success in a particular domain, you have this sort of self-reinforcing loop where you go, "Well, that was okay. I didn't think I could do that. Now I've just achieved it. I think, "Oh, actually, I'll go on and do this thing more." And so what you see in a lot of schools is assemblies where they're shown videos of Michael Jordan trying to hit missing 99 baskets and then hitting the hundredth one and go, "Look, perseverance motivation. If you stick at it, blah blah blah." And of course, the massive one is the growth mindset movement where, and again, I should say, I think Carol Directed some really good work on this in the 80s. How it plays out in school is, again, this intrinsic motivational force. And growth mindset is the idea. It's really a belief about intelligence. And what you're saying is there's two kinds of people. They believe that intelligence is fixed or intelligence, something you can grow. And if you believe it is something you can grow, then you're going to make effort. If you think it's fixed, then you're not going to make an effort. So it's an attempt to mess with children's beliefs about intelligence. But, you know, all the while in a lot of other schools, they're just teaching kids lots of stuff and the kids are quietly getting more intelligent and getting more confident. And there's no sort of posters or kind of assemblies. I always think about that story about Neil's Boar with growth mindset posted in school. You know the one where he was a journalist came to visit him after he won the Nobel Prize. And so this lucky horseshoe, but the door and said, "Neil's, you're an eminent man of rationality of reason. Why have you got this superstitious, lucky horseshoe above your door?" And he said, "Well, of course I don't believe in it, but I hear that it works whether you believe in it or not." That is very like growth mindset in schools where a lot of teachers, they just, they sort of don't really think that it works. But, you know, we're told that it works. So I guess we should hang the poster up. I mean, it sounds plausible that if you can get students intrinsically motivated, that's better. I mean, that's hard to argue with, right? But what you're saying is, but the way to do that is to show them that they can achieve things in the domain that they're learning about. And that will kind of, that involves getting them to make an effort, but showing them that the effort has some reward quite, quite early on. And then it becomes a self-reinforcing feedback loop. Yeah. If you want to help a kid ride something effectively, there's a sequence of things that are going to be incredibly helpful, sentence construction, the tone, what does a paragraph look like? One on sentences, you can explicitly teach them to an office and you can get them to a place where they can feel incredibly more confident about what they're doing. And as a result, I'm confident about themselves. And that is a kindness. That is not, you know, an effective way of doing that is to get kids to listen in silence and talk when they need to talk, but not kind of running around a room, putting posters on a wall and so forth. So in any domain, I would say, you know, we have evolved to share enormous amounts of information with each other in very complex ways. And that sort of, you know, guilt, apprentice, master, sort of, that's, you know, anything in human history that has been learned, it's really been done that way. And where you have a kind of discovery approach, it seems to be incredibly random and, as I say, incredibly kind of ineffective. So you can motivate students, I think, but also kids are innately alive. To the sense that grownups are trying to growth mindset them. You know, they, they, they, they, they sniff that kind of stuff out and they see it for what it is. How'd you mean, how, how, how'd you mean they see it for what it is? Or what are they sniffing? They're sniffing the sort of motivational, inspirational phrases. They, it's, it's the kind of thing that, you know, when we were kids in, we always had the teacher, which was, or if you get Sir talking about motorbikes, or if you get Sir talking about X, Y, you know, you'd have to listen to the lesson. You can kind of, you know, and the teacher's thinking that this is great. And the kids are very hip to it. You know, they, they know that, you know, this is great. I like, instead of actually having to do cordial good questions, I'm in a room solving jenga puzzles. And this is, you know, like, they're not stupid. They know what that means. They know that this is largely nonsense. They, they, they, know that to get good at something, what it takes and what they really want is, they want to avoid doing that. But as adults, we should be saying, this is knowledge that we have culturally agreed upon as worth knowing. And we're going to pass it on to you. Now, what you choose to do with that, you know, at a certain point, that's you, but learning to read, learning to write, learning certain cultural waypoints, these should be non-negotiable things. And here's just an extremely effective way of doing it. Yeah, I think we've sort of lost confidence in the idea that there are certain cultural, you know, cultural knowledge that we want to pass on. And it's always talked about just in terms of skills that you need to survive. Well, yes, it's that, but it's, but we should also have a kind of some consensus on what everyone should should know about. Do you feel do you, but do you, do you think that's sort of largely a preserve of the humanities? In other words, we don't, you don't, there doesn't seem to be the same conversation in science. So, for example, people don't say, old, there's a lot of dead white men on the science curriculum. There's a lot of Newton and Darwin and Einstein. They take the provenance of the ideas rather than where they can, there seems to be something in the humanities, which is like, well, we shouldn't study Shakespeare because it's not representative of a wider classical culture, whereas I think Shakespeare is so dominant and so present in our culture the last 500 years that if we take, if we sort of slice it that way, in the same way that we would say, well, Darwin's ideas are really essential for understanding how life evolved and how ideas evolved, I think Shakespeare is, well, what was it Harold Bloom said? He shaped the modern psychology, the modern consciousness. I think to not furnish kids with that is in the name of some sort of activist kind of Utrei view of culture and learning. I think that's, you know, that we shouldn't, we shouldn't sort of give into those, which are quite extreme as to these. I don't think anyone would kind of say, well, we shouldn't, you know, Shakespeare's should be off the curriculum, as in like, you know, everyday people. It comes from university departments and yeah. The other thing I want to detouch on that you just raised in passing just now is that we want, we should want kids to be able to concentrate in silence independently and I read about this recently actually, when we, if we don't take, for instance, classroom discipline seriously, or if we're very keen on seeing them engaged and sort of talking to other students and, you know, playing with things, then we neglect that absolutely central aspect of real deep learning. And as I understand it, the evidence shows that you will, that's the only real way to, you know, you can be confident that people will retain things is if they spend time thinking and concentrating on it. Yeah, and, you know, I was an English teacher, the thing that I suppose was the first major thing in my life was reading books and I really worry now about the extent to which children are have opportunities to read or extended periods to kind of focus on reading. I think that's what you see in a lot of schools now is, you know, as we talked about a privilege on discussion or classroom talk and there's not enough room for, you know, what about silent reflection, you know, it's almost seen as a negative thing if the classroom is silent. And again, that's part of the view of that, you know, learning happens through, through talking and the governments, they have a new focus now on oracy and of course, oracy is important and talk is important, but thinking is also important. It's very hard to think when you're being forced to talk all the time. Yeah. The focus on oracy I just think is misguided and if anything it just encourages the art of bullshit. I mean yeah you're teaching kids to talk fluently. Well if you can talk fluently without having, without actually knowing things, without actually having done the work of learning and remembering then what you have is a bullshitter. So it sort of seems like the wrong way around. Let's let's just focus on that very simple task which so many people seem to want to avoid and pretend it's not important which is getting knowledge and information into kids' minds. Actually as I'm talking I think we should touch on that on the kind of the difference between knowledge and information and because I think that idea of the schema, the idea that actually what you're trying to do is build a network of knowledge inside the kids' mind or inside anyone's head because I think this is a kind of principle that applies to you know a kid or a knattle to whatever in terms of learning. Can you just talk a bit about that? Yeah so in the 70s they began to be this term of schema. Actually the term was first systematized by Piaget but it became to mean organized and sequenced and hierarchical bodies of knowledge that we have and again these are models and of course as the saying goes all models are wrong but some are more useful than others and a schema is and the crucial thing here is that it isn't additive in nature. It's very much cumulative. So you sort of use knowledge to think with and gain new knowledge and you get that you know the Matthew effect of the people with more knowledge, gain more knowledge, the rich get richer and so that has very important implications for their instructional design in terms of how we sequence knowledge and how we order knowledge and information then I think is something that obviously that we're increasingly delused with today but we're talking about this distinction between an internal reconfiguring of information into a way that is linked with what we know, what we can anticipate in the future and now William's a wonderful phrase for this he calls understanding is remembering in disguise and it's this feeling of when you're drawing together different elements in your memory that are hopefully kind of systematized where you have this feeling of oh yeah the X is similar to Y this is a little bit like that in other words I can link this reference to something that's already in my mind and the more kind of those schemas are organized and complete not incomplete the more you are you know another example would be learning to drive or driving to your your your kid's school or whatnot you have this sort of internal scheme of knowledge that tells you where to go and you can do it effortlessly and so your working memories freed up to just concentrate on talking or singing song you know as soon as you're in an area where you're you're kind of looking at maps and you have to you suddenly your working memories really limited there and you have to just really kind of all your band with is taking in that so schemas are ultimately the the the end goal of what we're trying to achieve but we can't do an MRI scan and see what's missing in a child's schema and then you know fit it in the best we only have sort of tangential ways of of finding out what that is and so yeah so schemas are hugely important yeah I mean the way I think about it is let's take history is you know again if you're if you're part of this the the the kind of narrative that that we we started the discussion with you would say well why are we teaching kids all these facts about history all these dates right it's it's the example they often use like why are we filling them up with with all these meaningless dates well I think it's really important to know some dates because what you're trying to do is give the kids or give yourself if you're learning about history a basic schema of what happened when right you need to know that the Elizabethan aged you know happened before the Civil War you know happened before the Industrial Revolution happened before the First World War right those pretty basic signposts a basic narrative in your head of what came you know the Greeks and then the Romans right once you have that embedded it then becomes much easier for you to learn because you're suddenly when people talk about some facts about about you know some interesting insight about Greek civilization or or about Elizabeth I you're suddenly oh yeah okay right I roughly know where where this is so because it's the this new information is joining these pre-existing schemas these kind of networks of knowledge that are already in your brain so that's why this this idea that we just that facts or dates and things like that yeah that they're they're meaningless and kind of pointless unless they're joined up with all the other facts and information in your brain so you need to start with the basics yeah I mean that's absolutely right and again the idea that facts are anathema to learning is again is a kind of quite a progressive view certainly disconnected I mean you've you've put it perfectly you know disconnected facts sure you know the pointless but where they're in service of a greater understanding and ultimately as you as you point out you know that's the thing that will lead to critical thinking you know all those sort of skills-based orientation it you know you can't think critically about something you don't know yeah yeah that's a very fundamental point that people seem to just overlook again and again so just to kind of round off I want to come back in one of the one of the illusions in the instructional illusions book is the easy wins illusion and we can talk about that but it also seems to me like that's a general principle when you know the reason this narrative is so so popular is it always seems to want things to be easy that there's a real kind of fear or you know sense of light we want to avoid anything that's difficult uncomfortable effortful both for the for the student and for the teacher and therefore we'll come up with all sorts of baseless ideas and and and fairy tales that suggest that it actually learning is can be easy it's going to be fun you and and if it's really difficult you probably don't need to learn it in probably it's there's probably some sort of social justice reason you don't you you shouldn't be learning it you know so we just come up with these endless kind of rationalizations of well laziness essentially yeah very very well put and and we've apologized that effort as you say you know this is focused on trauma in schools and and where that's needed for children who have genuinely suffered trauma it's very welcome and it's a very good thing but not being good at maths is not a trauma or struggling with reading it's not it's it's not something that we should you know there's that concept creep where trauma was originally associated with you know something really horrific and now we're describing it to every day uncomfortable you know difficulties and I think that you're absolutely right that you know that that idea of an easy wins and then something that I just thought of which is I haven't read your book yet on John and Paul but I really mean to but I was thinking that you often hear you know a lot of these arguments made for musicians like well do just following their own interests and they were you know in creative this creativity doesn't follow a structure but they were they had an an and you crit me if I'm wrong here but they had an encyclopedia knowledge of a broad range of you know stuff from skiffle British music hall even then we're obviously rock and roll there were of interest in and they were playing in you know they're playing in Hamburg for sort of what was it eight hours a night for you know for the even you know started writing songs or anything so when it came to being creative those schemas they had a very rich kind of well upon which to draw upon yeah absolutely right and and it's it's one of the fascinating things about them in they spent a long time not actually writing a performing their own song I mean they wrote Lenin McCartley wrote quite a few songs they didn't really perform many of them for years so what they were doing was essentially kind of just learning the schemas of popular music back to front so by the time they switch on the songwriting you know it gusha it just goes boom because they've got all that knowledge yeah yeah and they had and and what was interesting as well as like when you listen to Abbey wrote like anything after kind of rubber soul that's where they become very experimental but they're they're growing on things like as I say British music hall Maxwell Silver Hammer or the one I always come back to is a day in the life because That's really John Lennon just having his beautiful sort of kind of cord melody. And then McCartney writes this bonkers kind of middle-eight section. That's like, where did that come from? But again, if you understand what they're drawing upon, it makes total sense. And it probably did to them as well. I agree. So in short, let's kind of summarize what's going on here. Do you think that there is a we sort of moving past some of these, in quotes, sort of fashionable or progressive ideas or narratives about education? Do you think there's a kind of return to the recognition that these things don't work? And we kind of know what works now. We just need to do more of that. I don't think so. And I think that we're in a place now post-COVID, where something has happened, where we have a lot of kids who are the not in school at all, or they're in school so little, as to almost for it to be a waste of time. And then we have this issue of AI. And I think AI can solve a number of problems, actually, as well as causing a number of problems. There's a lot of interesting things. Daisy Christie's work with no more marking, for example, I think there's scope there to do interesting things. But also, the conversation we've just had in is there's many people who are running districts, running large, you know, a country-wide initiatives in education, and they've never heard any of this. They just assume they're maybe taking, as you mentioned at the top, they're looking at TED talks, or they're looking at the kind of academic output and thinking, well, that's how learning happens. So for me, you know, cognitive science is hugely important, it's hugely valuable. And I think, you know, you'd like to think that we'll be changed. But, you know, again, it's a new government comes in, and they're taken with, you know, a particular approach. I think Nick Gibb deserves great credit for many of the policies that were in this country, over a ten-year period, such as systematic synthetic phonics and whatnot. Your side of the debate is constantly having to push back against what is a very seductive story. It's just nice to be told that actually, you know, you don't need to bother with all this really difficult, factually, dense, effortful way of learning. You just need to let kids be kids. Yeah, and if you say what you're saying in, then you're somehow morally suspect. You know, you want kids of chimneys. You know, yeah, yeah. One of the funniest phrases I saw was Doug Lamov, who has done more than most people to sort of create classrooms of learning. He has a kind of structure of like, kids need to kind of pay attention, listen, track the speaker, you know, that kind of thing. He was described, again, you know, what's that idea? Some ideas are so ridiculous that only an academic could believe in them. He was called carceral pedagogy. In other words, you know, in cars, like the idea that kids in schools like that are somehow, you know, in a prison. And that's the sort of narrative. And in a lot of cases, there are the kinds of people who are setting the agenda. So like I said, I think it's things are changing and there is, you know, various kind of wellsprings around the place. But, you know, I would still say the vast majority of particularly in the west of ideas about schooling are those that we spoke about. Well, we, I hope we will make a huge impact with this podcast, once it's published, but it was, no, it was absolutely fascinating. And highly enjoyable too, which means we probably won't remember of it any of it after the next 24 hours. No, it was really good. Thank you very much, Carl. Thank you.