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- Herausgeber: Crown House Publishing
- Kategorie: Bildung
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018
In 'Making Kids Cleverer: A manifesto for closing the advantage gap', David Didau reignites the nature vs. nurture debate around intelligence and offers research-informed guidance on how teachers can help their students acquire a robust store of knowledge and skills that is both powerful and useful. Foreword by Paul A. Kirschner. Given the choice, who wouldn't want to be cleverer? What teacher wouldn't want this for their students, and what parent wouldn't wish it for their children? When David started researching this book, he thought the answers to the above were obvious. But it turns out that the very idea of measuring and increasing children's intelligence makes many people extremely uncomfortable: If some people were more intelligent, where would that leave those of us who weren't? The question of whether or not we can get cleverer is a crucial one. If you believe that intelligence is hereditary and environmental effects are trivial, you may be sceptical. But environment does matter, and it matters most for children from the most socially disadvantaged backgrounds those who not only have the most to gain, but who are also the ones most likely to gain from our efforts to make all kids cleverer. And one thing we can be fairly sure will raise children's intelligence is sending them to school. In this wide-ranging enquiry into psychology, sociology, philosophy and cognitive science, David argues that with greater access to culturally accumulated information taught explicitly within a knowledge-rich curriculum children are more likely to become cleverer, to think more critically and, subsequently, to live happier, healthier and more secure lives.;Furthermore, by sharing valuable insights into what children truly need to learn during their formative school years, he sets out the numerous practical ways in which policy makers and school leaders can make better choices about organising schools, and how teachers can communicate the knowledge that will make the most difference to young people as effectively and efficiently as possible. David underpins his discussion with an exploration of the evolutionary basis for learning and also untangles the forms of practice teachers should be engaging their students in to ensure that they are acquiring expertise, not just consolidating mistakes and misconceptions.There are so many competing suggestions as to how we should improve education that knowing how to act can seem an impossible challenge. Once you have absorbed the arguments in this book, however, David hopes you will find the simple question that he asks himself whenever he encounters new ideas and initiatives Will this make children cleverer? as useful as he does.;Suitable for teachers, school leaders, policy makers and anyone involved in educations
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Praise for Making kids cleverer
David Didau’s latest edu-blockbuster is a compelling and endlessly fascinating read. Weaving together a wealth of evidence and ideas, from the practical to the philosophical, Making Kids Cleverer confronts the taboo topic of intelligence head-on. Didau shows us that by teaching children powerful, biologically secondary knowledge we not only increase their intelligence but also prepare them for the prospect of happiness, wealth and anything that adult life can throw at them.
I have not read another education book that brims with as much insight and stimulating thought as this one: every page serves up a new surprise or gentle provocation. Thoroughly recommended.
Andy Tharby, teacher, co-author of Making Every Lesson Count and author of How to Explain Absolutely Anything to Absolutely Anyone
Written with great precision and clarity, and with a good dash of humility and humour too, Making Kids Cleverer is a truly magnificent manifesto. Everything David Didau says chimes deeply with what I know to be true and what I am trying to accomplish in our schools, and I am of course cleverer now than I was before reading it. It is an absolute joy to read, and an incredibly timely tour de force that can, and should, have a national impact.
A must-read for everyone in education, from trainee teachers to inspectors and policy makers.
Lady Caroline Nash, Director, Future Academies
Schools and parents alike invest so much energy in teaching children and yet often understand relatively little about what exactly it is they are trying to achieve. In Making Kids Cleverer David Didau reviews everything we know from cognitive science on how to enhance children’s learning, and delivers a powerful argument that we can – and must – help all children succeed at school.
Rebecca Allen, Professor of Education, University College London Institute of Education
In Making Kids Cleverer David Didau provides us with a brilliant and accessible account of why knowledge is opportunity, and of how we can increase children’s knowledge through a thoughtful and scientific approach to schooling.
More than ever, children need a core set of ideas, facts, procedures and other forms of knowledge in order to help them navigate the everchanging work environment they will encounter and to fully participate in the many opportunities afforded by the modern world. In this book, Didau offers an incisive argument for the importance of knowledge and a solid framework for how to improve the knowledge base of all children.
Making Kids Cleverer will be an invaluable resource for parents, teachers and policy makers.
David C. Geary, Curators’ Distinguished Professor, Department of Psychological Sciences, University of Missouri
David Didau has done it again! Making Kids Cleverer is an engaging, highly readable analysis of the latest research on how we learn and what we can do to improve the achievement of our pupils.
Like his previous books, David’s latest offering contains many strong claims. Your initial reaction, like mine, may be that he has made these claims for effect, but he sticks so closely to the research evidence that you have to take his arguments seriously.
Anyone involved in the care and education of children and young people would gain a huge amount from reading this book. Highly recommended.
Dylan Wiliam, Emeritus Professor of Educational Assessment, University College London
To my bold, brilliant and beautiful daughters, Olivia and Madeleine.
Foreword by Paul A. Kirschner
How do we make kids cleverer? How do we close the advantage gap? These are not easy questions to answer as the science of education and learning is far from exact. Our problem is made even more complicated by the fact that how a person learns is influenced by so many things – both internal and external – which are hard to grasp and even harder to control. This being said, there is one factor that can optimise learning, make kids cleverer and, potentially, play an enormous role in closing the advantage gap. That factor is the teacher.
As an educator and researcher in the field of educational psychology I’ve spent my whole academic career – which now spans four decades – studying how people learn and how the process can be facilitated through carefully designed interventions. What I’ve learnt in all those years, from all the studies I’ve conducted and from all of my attempts to help learners learn better (and maybe even to become cleverer), is that everything hinges on teachers.
For me, a teacher is an educational designer: a professional who designs, develops, implements and (hopefully) evaluates learning situations that are effective, efficient and enjoyable for the learner. That a learning situation is effective means that in the time allotted within a curriculum, either more is learned than was planned for or what is learned is done to a deeper level than expected or required. For a learning situation to be efficient the curriculum is mastered either in less time or is learned with less effort. Finally, enjoyable doesn’t necessarily mean that lessons are fun (real learning is often difficult), but rather that the learner experiences success and, with that success, has a feeling of accomplishment and what is known as self-efficacy (i.e. I can do it!).
Ideally, a teacher should not be just a run-of-the-mill educational designer; they should strive to be the very best they can be: a top-quality teacher. In order to explain what I mean I will resort to an analogy with what it takes to become a top chef, both because I love to eat and because I myself – before I entered academia – worked as a chef in a restaurant. Top chefs perform their magic in restaurants that have attained the Nobel Prize of the gastronomic world, namely three Michelin stars. Such chefs are capable of planning and preparing tasty, healthy and beautiful dishes for anyone, be they children, finicky eaters, diners with allergies, or gourmets. And they can do this because they have deep conceptual knowledge and finely honed skills with respect to the tools (knives, ovens, pots, pans, stoves, mixers, blenders …), techniques (steam baking, hot-air baking, wood-fire baking, sautéing, deep frying, blanching, freezing, cryogenic cooking …), and ingredients (vegetables, meats, grains, spices, herbs …) of the trade. A top chef knows when, how and why to use each of the tools, techniques and ingredients and also has the skills to properly implement them to get the best results in any culinary situation.
Similarly, top teachers are capable of designing and preparing effective, efficient and enjoyable learning experiences for all students, be they average or advantaged, possessing special needs or blessed with particular talents. And they can do this because they have deep conceptual knowledge and finely honed skills with respect to their tools (whiteboard, textbook, e-reader, tablet, computer, laboratory …), instructional techniques that optimise different types of learning (lectures, discussions, debate, collaboration, formative and summative assessment, feedback techniques …), and ingredients of the teaching trade (different types of questions, prompts, tasks, examples, illustrations and animations, homework, simulations …). A top teacher knows when, how and why to use each of their tools, techniques and ingredients and also has the skills to properly implement them in different situations and with different students.
This being the case, I must confess that reading this book has made me really jealous! David Didau has essentially written what I would have loved to write myself. This is a book that can and will provide teachers – and anyone else interested in the project of education – with most if not all of the background knowledge they need to understand how kids learn and how to make them cleverer. As such, it can and will play an important role in closing the advantage gap. In my opinion, the book you have in your hands will help teachers to graduate from knocking out reheated meals in a second-rate diner to competent chefs turning out delicious, nutritious meals. Reading this book could help teachers become the equivalent of top quality chefs in Michelin starred restaurants.
Bon appétit!
Paul A. Kirschner
Professor of Educational Psychology and Distinguished University Professor at the Open University of the Netherlands
Fellow of the American Educational Research Association, the International Society of the Learning Sciences and the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences
Acknowledgements
I owe a number of people a great debt for this book being what it is. Many of them I’ve never met, but on whose research and thinking the arguments in it depend. I am grateful to be able to jump up and down excitedly behind their shoulders, if not to actually stand on them.
There are also a number of people who are due personal thanks. First of these is Andrew Sabisky for interesting me in the study of intelligence and for recommending Stuart Ritchie’s excellent little book, Intelligence: All That Matters, which forms the backbone of much of the information in Chapters 3 and 5.
I must also thank Nick Rose, my esteemed co-author of What Every Teacher Needs to Know About Psychology, for refusing to pull his punches. As well as being grateful for his many insightful comments and criticisms, I have also leant heavily on a number of Nick’s contributions to our book, and these crop up in Chapters 2, 6 and 10.
Thanks also to Adam Boxer for allowing me to reproduce the diagrams and some of the content from his article, ‘Novices, Experts and Everything In-between: Epistemology and Pedagogy’, which can be found on his blog, A Chemical Orthodoxy.
I’m also terrifically grateful to Dylan Wiliam for making so many helpful suggestions and observations; the book is much improved as a consequence.
And, of course, to my indefatigable editor, Peter Young, who read through some pretty ropey early drafts, pulled me up on countless errors and wrestled the whole thing into whatever shape it has.
Finally, and always, Rosie.
Contents
Figures and tables
Figure 2.1. Folk knowledge domains
Figure 3.1. Degrees of correlation
Figure 3.2. Piracy and global warming over the years
Figure 3.3. The correlation between autism and organic food sales
Figure 3.4. The normal distribution of intelligence
Figure 4.1. Normal IQ distribution curves for males and females
Figure 5.1. Example of a matrix reasoning question
Figure 5.2. Chess position based on the Caro–Kann advance
Figure 5.3. The Flynn effect: rising IQ scores, 1947–2002
Figure 6.1. A simple model of memory
Figure 6.2. Baddeley and Hitch’s working memory model
Figure 6.3. Representation of a schema – the individual nodes link to form one interconnected chunk
Figure 6.4. Ebbinghaus’ forgetting curve
Figure 6.5. The new theory of disuse
Figure 7.1. Example of a maths question which can be solved using Pythagoras’ theorem
Figure 7.2. The offside trap
Figure 7.3. The Coffey still
Figure 8.1. The domain, the specification and the test
Figure 8.2. The domain; a schema within a domain; a schema begins to be acquired
Figure 10.1. The task-switching penalty
Figure 10.2. The feedback continuum
Figure 10.3. The spacing effect
Table 4.1. Estimated influences of genes and environment on reading ability at age 5
Table 4.2. Estimated influences of genes and environment on reading ability after one year of reading instruction
Table 4.3. Estimates of broad heritability, shared environmental effects and indications of non-additive genetic effects for representative psychological traits
Table 5.1. Accuracy of setting with a test of validity of 0.7
Table 9.1. The difference between novice and expert
Table 10.1. Optimal intervals for retaining information
Preface
I’ve spent a good bit of the past five years thinking about and researching the contents of this book, and have learned a lot along the way. Not having a background in any field of science, at times I’ve struggled to appreciate some of the complexities, particularly those around behaviour genetics, heredity and gene expression. Consequently, when I started writing, I still had a confused belief that our personalities are more or less determined by our genetic inheritance. Even though I had repeatedly read about what heritability actually implies, I still found myself reverting to a folk biology explanation: we are who we are because we share the genes of our parents.
Although this hereditarian position has been passed confidently along in a more or less unbroken progression from the earliest origins of intelligence research to various current experts, it’s a narrative that has given – and continues to give – comfort to eugenicists and racists and encourages the spread of the soft bigotry of low expectations. This is not the story I tell in this book.
Initially, I planned to include a chapter on the history of intelligence research – detailing the contributions of Galton, Spearman, Burt, Terman, Jensen and the like. Although Alfred Binet provides a rare example of an intelligence researcher who was neither a hereditarian nor a eugenicist (his motivations in measuring children’s mental abilities are very much in the spirit of making kids cleverer), many of the others – despite being responsible for such useful inventions and discoveries as factor analysis, the positive manifold, and reliable and valid IQ tests – are found wanting on moral or intellectual grounds. I found myself in the position of having to condemn much of their research and conclusions while extracting precious little that added to my argument. Eventually, I decided it was a lengthy distraction from what I really wanted to write about and so ditched it.
What really matters is the environment in which our genes express themselves. This book is about what we can do. The measurement of individual differences is only really of interest to individuals; but the notion that intelligence is both malleable and correlated with a vast range of positive outcomes should be of interest to us all. This is the story of how we might go about improving society by improving the lives of every individual within it.
I’m painfully aware that my knowledge of the subjects I discuss is far from complete. Please assume that where there are mistakes or flaws of reasoning, these errors are my own and not those of the various sources I cite.
What is so thrilling about our time is that the privilege of information is now an instant and globally accessible privilege. It is our duty and our responsibility to see that gift bestowed on all the world’s people, so that all may live lives of knowledge and understanding.
Kofi Annan
Wrong does not cease to be wrong because the majority share in it.
Leo Tolstoy, A Confession
Introduction
Who’s afraid of Charlie Gordon?
What did you expect? Did you think I’d remain a docile pup, wagging my tail and licking the foot that kicks me? I no longer have to take the kind of crap that people have been handing me all my life.
Daniel Keyes, Flowers for Algernon
Given the choice, who wouldn’t want to be cleverer? Who wouldn’t wish for greater insight and understanding? Who wouldn’t strive to see further and know more? What teacher wouldn’t wish these things for their students, and what parent wouldn’t wish them for their children?
When I started researching this book, I thought the answers to these questions were obvious. But it turns out that the very idea of intelligence makes many people extremely uncomfortable. When I started asking these questions of friends and family, instead of the resounding positivity I’d expected, I got equivocation. “Maybe” was the most popular answer. When asked if they would want their children to be cleverer, parents would say things like, “I just want them to be happy.” When I asked my youngest daughter, she was concerned that if she was cleverer then perhaps she wouldn’t be the same person anymore – maybe the way she thought would become fundamentally different and, if this was the trade-off, she’d rather stay as she was. Others, particularly those who work in education, are often concerned that if some people were more intelligent, where would that leave those of us who weren’t?
In Daniel Keyes’ novel, Flowers for Algernon, Charlie Gordon, a man with an IQ of just 68, undergoes a surgical procedure to artificially raise his intelligence. The story concentrates on Charlie’s changing perspective and how he is treated by those around him. At the outset, Charlie is frustrated by his inability to make sense of the world, but finds that the consequences of getting cleverer are not all positive. He is rejected by his workmates and plagued with resentment at the way he had been treated when everyone believed him to be retarded. Perhaps intelligence is not such a blessing.
Leaving aside the fact that no one has yet come up with a technique to raise intelligence as described in the novel, Charlie’s story taps into some popular misgivings about the consequences of making kids cleverer. Maybe ignorance is bliss? Maybe children would be more content if they knew less and therefore could think less about the world?
This squeamishness about intelligence seems to be the norm. We’re assailed by popular images of the geek, the nerd, the dysfunctional scientist and the mad professor. Brainiacs have fewer friends, lack empathy and don’t know how to have fun. You may have heard that IQ doesn’t really mean anything in the real world and that being more intelligent leads to more problems than it solves. These pervasive, but false, ideas infect society to the point that, very often, especially during the school years, it’s just not cool to be clever and being brainy is social suicide.
Fascinatingly – and much to the contrary of these enduring myths and misconceptions – intelligence appears to govern many other traits, and having more of it is connected to increases in almost every other desirable human characteristic. If you are cleverer, not only will you do better in school, but you’ll also be more creative, demonstrate better leadership skills, earn more, be happier and live longer. In fact, the only downside to intelligence is a slightly greater tendency to wear glasses!*
You’re not gifted or talented
As a child I never thought of myself as being particularly clever. Let me rephrase that: I never considered myself to be particularly academic. I did, however, pride myself on my quick wit and tended to gravitate towards the position of class clown. Too much of my time in school was spent cracking inopportune jokes and generally making a nuisance of myself. To my parents, I was something of a disappointment. My father loved Jesus and mathematics. He was disgusted with both my irreligious soul and my inability to manage more than the most slippery of grasp on anything to do with numbers. I also struggled to learn to read and, as you’ll hear more about later, I was briefly home-schooled by my mother. To really rub salt into my intellectual wounds, I’m the eldest of three boys and my middle brother, 18 months younger than me, was always the clever one. He took the entrance exam for a local selective school; no one ever suggested that I might.
My first inkling that I might not be a complete duffer came as the result of a primary school quiz. I was selected as a last minute replacement for the school team when another boy – I can no longer remember his name – was taken ill. Why me? I wondered. No one told me, but whoever made the decision’s instincts were pretty good as our team ended up winning and, if I didn’t cover myself in glory, I certainly didn’t disgrace myself. Looking back, this was probably the first time I made the link between being clever and knowing a lot.
Whatever my own opinion of my intellect, my teachers never seemed impressed. When I began secondary school, I was considered distinctly average. I worked reasonably hard in history and English and clawed my way into higher sets, but this was balanced against my performance in maths and science, where I seemed to sink ever lower. By the time I reached my last year of school, I’d given up trying at most subjects and only passed three of my GCSEs – further confirmation of my lack of scholarly prowess. I left school, got a job in a record shop and turned my back on education.
I drifted from job to job until, a few years later, working on a building site, I decided that there must be more to life and signed up to do an A level in classical studies at night school. As a child I’d had a much-treasured copy of Heroes of Greece and Troy but, apart from the Asterix comics, I really didn’t know all that much about ancient civilisations. Suddenly I was reading Homer, Thucydides, Herodotus, Aeschylus, Virgil, Tacitus, Suetonius and Ovid (all in translation, of course), and I loved it. My mind felt enlarged like never before. Suddenly I had so much more to think about. As the end of the course loomed I asked my foreman if I could have a day off to sit my exams. Apparently, no one had ever asked him that before and he was impressed. When I came back on site the following day, I’d been promoted from general labourer to engineer’s mate. Instead of having to haul bricks around all day I got to hold a theodolite and everyone took to calling me ‘professor’. Such are the rewards of education.
Rather than bore you with further indulgent anecdotes, suffice it to say that from there I took another A level, this time in English literature, was persuaded to go to university, graduated and, after some further perambulations, became a teacher. I taught English in a series of state secondary schools for 15 years. Like most young teachers, I wanted to change the world. I wanted to set young minds on fire and instil in them a love of learning. And, like most young teachers, I rapidly realised it wasn’t going to be easy. I was stunned that so many of the children I taught seemed to take such defensive pride in their ignorance and were so dismissive of the world beyond their narrow experience.
A few years into my career, the job of gifted and talented coordinator came up at my school and I decided to apply. (Back in those days, English schools were required to identify their gifted cohorts and put together a programme to enrich them beyond what was on offer to other students.) I happened to mention to my mother that I was interested in the role. She responded with some surprise and said, “That’s funny because you’re not gifted or talented.” How we laughed.
You’ll be pleased to hear that I got the job. I now see the idea of identifying a minority of children as gifted and talented as a terrible one. I’ve got no problem with giving children enriching experiences, but I object strongly to the notion that enrichment should only be accessible to those already considered more able. But back then I threw myself into the role. I organised all sorts of activities, visits, speakers and intellectually stretching experiences for my students, many of whom came from fairly deprived backgrounds, knew little of the world and felt their ignorance sharply.
One of my schemes was to put together a public speaking team. We entered a competition held in a local independent school. When we arrived, it turned out that our team was one of only two from state schools. My little group felt hugely intimidated by the other students. They kept asking me things like, “Why do they sound like that?” and “Why is their hair like that?” When these other children spoke they were confident, controlled and articulate, but what really set them apart was what they knew. They all seemed ferociously intelligent. When it was my students’ turn to speak they were nervous wrecks. Needless to say, we came last.
I’ve no idea whether these other children really were more intelligent than my students, but it didn’t matter. The power of knowing things struck home. Being clever and being knowledgeable may not be the same thing, but, as was clear to me and my students, knowledge trumped all else. The way I thought about what I did shifted profoundly. At about the same time my eldest daughter was born and I began asking of the education I was providing, “Is this good enough for my own child?” Increasingly, the answer seemed to be no.
What do we really want?
Education isn’t cheap. On top of the Herculean efforts of teachers, we spend millions every year on keeping the system going and so it’s important that education provides some sort of value for money. But, important as this might be, it also has to satisfy us on a more human level. To that end, it’s worth thinking about what we most want for the next generation.
When I asked my wife what she wanted for our children she said she’d settle for about £100 each. After we’d stopped chuckling she explained that, although she’s ambitious for them, mostly she wants them to be content. This is in line with what most people say: we’d like our children to be successful, but only as long as that doesn’t make them unhappy. We also want our children to be healthy, safe and secure. All parents tend to put financial security near the top of their lists; there’s a recognition that contentment is more likely if you’ve got a decent job. Nothing extravagant, but enough to pay the bills without being soul destroying. And, of course, we want them kept out of harm’s way and to live a long, illness-and accident-free life. The question is, how best to arrive at these ends?
Contentment, happiness, call it what you will, can seem a meagre ambition, but without it, little else is likely to be worth savouring. But what is it? How do you acquire happiness? The most useful definition I’ve encountered suggests that happiness is best thought of as being derived from both pleasure and purpose.1 Pleasure involves doing what makes us feel good, and purposefulness requires that we head towards some sort of goal. None of us want a life of pure hedonism for our children, and few would see happiness as being achieved by a life spent relentlessly pursuing an ambition. So, pleasure and purpose must be taken in moderation and in harmony. They temper and complement each other.
For life to be purposeful, we have to be able to choose a goal that seems meaningful. Being able to choose is, at least in part, a function of how well educated we are; the better we do in school, the more choices there are before us. Of course, there are always stories of successful people whose success has come despite flunking their exams, but this is survivorship bias; such folk are the exception rather than the rule.
For most of us, our chances of being happy are greatly increased by having been successful at school, but we also recognise that education is more than examinations and qualifications. We tend to agree that children, no matter their backgrounds or starting points, need the best chance of becoming rounded young people who are ready to face an uncertain future. Like everyone else does, I want young people to be creative, skilled at collaborating with others to solve problems, able to clearly and critically communicate their thoughts, take on new challenges and persist in the face of setbacks. I want them to be prepared for whatever the unknowable future places in their paths. And, of course, I want my children – and yours – to be tolerant, compassionate, open-minded, curious, cooperative and to help leave the world in a better condition than the shambles it currently seems to be in.
In 2012, I left the classroom and turned to the dark side to become a full-time writer and consultant. When I’m not working in schools and training teachers, I tend to read academic papers and books. In doing so, I have become aware of a huge body of research indicating that intelligence appears to be connected with all sorts of other good stuff. I began to wonder whether it might be possible to get what I wanted by making kids cleverer. What if, by raising children’s intelligence, not only would they do better at school, but their lives beyond school might also be improved?
This, then, is my contention: whatever it is we might want for our children, making them cleverer appears to be the best way to go about making it happen. Over the course of this book, I will explain that, unlike many other qualities we might value, intelligence has the advantages of being malleable, measurable and meaningful.
Intelligence is a social good. The greater the number of individuals with higher intelligence, the safer, happier and more productive the society in which we live. It’s also an individual good, and, contrary to popular belief, intelligence correlates strongly with creativity, leadership, happiness, longevity and most other factors we tend to view as worth striving for. It therefore seems reasonable to suggest that if we want to make children more creative and better critical thinkers, we need first to make them cleverer.
By ‘making cleverer’ what I really mean, of course, is raising intelligence – increasing children’s intellectual capacity. Intelligence means different things to different people. It has been described as a faculty for logic, understanding, self-awareness, creativity, problem solving and the ability to learn new information more quickly. According to some, it’s the ability to acquire and apply knowledge, while others see it as plain old ‘good sense’. Whatever it is, it seems safe to agree that it’s not simply a single thing. One widely accepted definition is offered by Linda Gottfredson. She defines intelligence as:
… a very general mental capability that, among other things, involves the ability to reason, plan, solve problems, think abstractly, comprehend complex ideas, learn quickly and learn from experience. It is not merely book learning, a narrow academic skill, or test-taking smarts. Rather, it reflects a broader and deeper capability for comprehending our surroundings – ‘catching on,’ ‘making sense’ of things, or ‘figuring out’ what to do.2
We’ll add some flesh to these bare bones as we go, but for now, this is the definition I’m happiest with and what you should assume I mean whenever you see the word.
The gap
The arguments in this book are aimed at both parents and those involved in education. As parents, we are most interested in what is likely to make our children more successful. It’s not that we don’t care about other people’s children, but ours, rightly, come first. I hope you will find much in these pages to guide you in your endeavours and to be more knowledgeable about what goes on in schools.
I’m also writing for teachers, policy makers and all those who, directly or indirectly, influence what happens in schools and classrooms. Your priority is the well-being and success of all children in the system. You will be concerned that some children fare far less well than others and you will be interested in whether there is anything we can do to arrest and narrow the advantage gap. According to a report by the Education Policy Institute, while the situation may be improving, the gap between rich and poor children is still very wide:
The gap between disadvantaged 16 year old pupils and their peers has only narrowed by three months of learning between 2007 and 2016. In 2016, the gap nationally, at the end of secondary school, was still 19.3 months. In fact, disadvantaged pupils fall behind their more affluent peers by around 2 months each year over the course of secondary school.3
The Sutton Trust report Global Gaps found that while children in England do better at school than those in most other countries, “bright but poor” children – those in the top 10% for achievement but in the bottom 25% for socio-economic status – are almost three years behind the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) average. For girls, the situation is even worse.4 These facts are stark but they are not the complete picture. All children, in every country in the world, are better off today than at any other point in human history. Yes, of course, some children are unfairly disadvantaged, but this is not fate. Children from less advantaged backgrounds are only failing when viewed through a particularly distorted lens. Not only can we change the future, but the present is not what we think it is.
In his book, Factfulness, the Swedish statistician Hans Rosling warns us against the gap instinct: the tendency to divide the world into two distinct and conflicting groups – poor and rich – with, in his words, “a chasm of injustice in between”. This instinct distorts our ability to see the world as it actually is. Rosling asks, “How do you like your bathwater? Ice cold or steaming hot?” Of course, we choose our bathwater to be any temperature between these extremes. He points out that when asked whether the majority of people live in low, medium or high income countries, most people tend to guess the first option. This is wrong. In fact, 75% of the world’s population live in middle income countries – right where the gap is supposed to be. In Rosling’s view, “there is no gap”.5
We have the same tendency to divide children up into two discrete categories: rich and poor; more and less advantaged; those from secure backgrounds and those from chaotic backgrounds. This is just as absurd. The overwhelming majority of children are somewhere in the middle. Trying to create education policy based on the experiences of the few per cent at the top and bottom of the distribution is unlikely to work because it ignores most children. Instead, we need to think in terms of what is likely to work for all children.
That said, we ought not to be complacent about the least advantaged. The message of this book is that all children can become cleverer and, in so doing, increase the chance that they will lead a happy, healthy and prosperous life. Currently this is not the case. Children from more deprived backgrounds are disproportionately more likely to struggle at school. This often leads to a cycle of failure with children learning that school is for other people and growing into adults who pass this suspicion of education on to their own children. It wasn’t always like this. Arthur Scargill, tub-thumping leader of the National Union of Mineworkers, who led the opposition to Margaret Thatcher’s struggle to break the power of the trade unions, wrote, “My father still reads the dictionary every day. He says your life depends on your power to master words.”6 This view of education – that it confers power and choice – is one that must be reclaimed. Mastering words, along with all other forms of knowledge, is the mechanism for becoming cleverer.
A gap – a difference between those at the top and bottom of a distribution curve – is inevitable. We can’t all be equally intelligent. But that gap does not have to be based on something as arbitrary and unfair as your parents’ income. The information and arguments in this book will, I hope, provide you with both practical strategies to apply to the classroom and an intellectual and moral underpinning for creating the schools our children need, altering your thinking about those who succeed and those who fail. This is my manifesto for making education benefit all children, regardless of their beginnings.
A chain of reasoning
Before we plunge further into the book, here is a brief summary of the arguments I will go on to make in support of the idea that education should be about making children cleverer.
The first chapter considers the various competing claims about what the purpose of education ought to be. The three proposed purposes we shall review in detail are: preparing children for employment, moulding children’s characters, and transmitting culture. The conclusion I offer is that, while each of these purposes has individual merit, all are best achieved by making children cleverer. This, then, should be the purpose to which we bend our collective will.
All well and good, but if we’re serious about making children cleverer then we need to consider the means to make it so. Chapter 2 is a discussion of the ways our brains have been shaped to learn and think. The fact that we find some things easy to learn doesn’t mean we find all things equally so. Evolutionary psychology provides us with some sensible ideas about why this might be and suggests an explanation as to why human beings came to invent schools. There is good reason to think that skills like creativity and problem solving are actually evolutionary adaptions so important to the survival of the species that we’ve evolved to find them easy to learn.
Next we need to think more seriously about what intelligence is and isn’t. This is the subject to which we turn in Chapter 3. Although myths and misconceptions about intelligence and IQ abound, there’s compelling evidence that higher intelligence is positively associated with pretty much everything we tend to regard as important and worth valuing. By unpicking the more persistent and pernicious of these beliefs, we should get a better, less biased understanding of what we mean by intelligence. Along the way, we will also examine the data suggesting that intelligence might be the root cause of all other good things, whether we can trust this data and what the implications are.
From here we move onto a discussion about where intelligence comes from. Chapter 4 takes on the nature vs. nurture debate and explores the implications of a hereditarian view of intelligence, as well as the notion that we are entirely the product of our experiences. Intelligence (and pretty much everything else) is influenced by our genes. Some children are just born with a greater potential for cleverness than others. However, there’s good reason to believe that we are already getting cleverer in some respects as we become more knowledgeable, and, by concentrating on those environmental factors that can be changed, we might be able to make all children cleverer, and in the process benefit not just society as a whole but every individual within it.
Just as everyone isn’t equally tall, equally healthy, equally talented at playing the piano or equally good at maths, we can’t make everyone equally intelligent. However, it may be possible to address the difference between the most and least advantaged in society. Trying to develop children’s ability by teaching generic skills directly is fundamentally unfair. Children with higher fluid intelligence and those from more advantaged backgrounds will be further privileged. If we make a concerted attempt to increase children’s intelligence by expanding what they know about the world, we may also be able to shift the whole curve upwards. I will argue that while both matter, currently there’s nothing anyone can do about their genes, so our power to shape children’s environments is all we have. And perhaps all we need.
Chapter 5 returns us to intelligence research, but this time the focus is on what actually increases our store of intelligence. The concept of intelligence can be broken into two subcomponents: fluid intelligence and crystallised intelligence. Fluid intelligence is our raw reasoning power, and is, as far as we can tell, fixed. Nothing we’ve tried as yet is able to increase it. Crystallised intelligence is the ability to apply what we know to new problems and can certainly be increased by adding to our store of knowledge. This is the central thesis of the book: more knowledge equals more intelligence. But it may not be the only way to get what we want, and there are plenty of other competing theories. Before we move on we need to assess these alternatives and so we will evaluate the merits of growth mindset, brain training and cognitive acceleration, to name but a few.
If I’m right that knowing more leads to us becoming cleverer, then we need to think more about how children are going to remember all this additional knowledge. To that end, Chapter 6 examines what our memories are composed of, what limits our thinking and how much space we’ve got to fill with precious cargo. We possess a working memory – the ability to hold things in mind when trying to solve a problem or perform a task – and a long-term memory – the ability to store huge quantities of stuff that can be dredged up as needed. It turns out that our working memory capacity is strictly limited and cannot be easily increased, but its limits can be ‘hacked’ by storing information more robustly in long-term memory. When we store knowledge in long-term memory, it organises itself into schemas which, when we use them to think about complex problems, take up less of our limited reasoning capacity. While those with less fluid intelligence may find it more difficult to create long-term memories, the capacity of their long-term memory, like that of anyone else, is essentially infinite. All children can remember stuff, regardless of how able we perceive them to be, but some better than others. While the difference might be explained by higher fluid intelligence, we should also look at ways we might train our memories to be more efficient and work out what to do about our natural tendency towards forgetfulness.
But understanding memory is not much use without considering the stuff of which our memories are composed. The somewhat contentious view I present in Chapter 7 is that knowledge is all there is. We take in some of the early philosophical explorations of knowledge before settling on the notion that everything is knowledge. No one can think about something they don’t know. Equally, the more you know about a subject, the richer and more sophisticated your thinking on that subject becomes. It’s my view that ‘21st century skills’ depend on knowing things rather than on simply being able to look stuff up on the internet. What we know is composed both of what we are able to bring to mind and consciously think about and those things we’re not always aware of but which we think with. Some of what we normally refer to as skills can, with practice, be made effortless and invisible so that they take up practically no space in working memory, giving us a far greater capacity with which to think. If children automatise powerful procedural knowledge in long-term memory and encounter culturally rich knowledge, they will become cleverer and therefore more creative, better problem solvers and able to think more critically.
Certain types of knowledge are particularly worth automatising because they recur so often, both in education and in subsequent life. This leads us, in Chapter 8, to think about what knowledge (whose knowledge) children ought to learn. Not all knowledge is equal. Some kinds of knowledge are much more likely to enhance children’s intellectual capacity than others. We will consider several mechanisms for selecting knowledge and organising it within a curriculum, packaged and ready for children to embark on an exciting voyage of discovery. We will think about whether the curriculum ought to be divided up into subjects and how we can organise and sequence the things we want children to learn.
Chapter 9 takes on the concept of practice. We all know that expertise only develops as a result of hard work and effort, but how much? You may have come across the neat sounding, but ultimately unhelpful, idea that we should practise for 10,000 hours if we want to achieve mastery. Sadly, as with knowledge, not all practice is equally effective. We will look at the type of practice most likely to result in expertise and then consider what makes experts expert. Fascinatingly, when experts operate within their area of expertise, they develop entirely different cognitive architecture to the uninitiated.
Novices and experts are very different beasts and, for the purposes of education, must be treated as such. The vast majority of school students are currently novices. Explicit instruction will very likely be the most effective way for them to be taught. Context has very little to say on this matter; not nothing but very little. If, for example, you want to pay for your child to attend a private school then that’s fine. You’re exercising a choice. The fact that you can afford the fees means that your children will almost certainly be fine, no matter how they’re educated.
It may be true that “everything works somewhere but nothing works everywhere”,7 but, if so, it’s trivially true. I would accept that pretty much any approach to teaching can be made to work – sort of – but it’s not whether an intervention works but how well it works in comparison to other interventions. Better to say, some things work in most contexts and other things rarely work anywhere. Some approaches to the curriculum and instruction have stood the test of time and are better suited to achieving the ends most people value.
In Chapter 10, we turn our attention to what is most likely to lead to children learning the knowledge they need to become cleverer. When it comes to the best way to teach there are no certainties, but there are some pretty clear probabilities. For instance, explicit instruction appears to be much more effective than discovery learning for novice learners. Ends never justify means. There’s little point in judging someone by their intentions – the road to hell is paved with high hopes and grand plans. Instead, we should all be judged by our actions. If your actions fail to achieve your aims, what then? This is a social justice argument.
The book concludes by returning us to the gap in attainment between the most and least advantaged. For those children endowed with high fluid intelligence and a privileged background, it probably doesn’t matter much what schools choose to do. But for those without these advantages, a school provides choice. With greater access to knowledge, taught explicitly, disadvantaged children are more likely to live happy, healthy, prosperous lives. We all agree that children should be happy, virtuous and successful; where I diverge from the received wisdom is on how we can best achieve these aims. Although making kids cleverer doesn’t rely on causing any other outcome to be worthwhile, the fact that intelligence appears to correlate with so much of what we want is a possibility we should not ignore.
All this applies most to those children who are often overlooked, assumed to be plodders and consigned to bottom sets. I’m not claiming that what I suggest in this book will work magically to make all children cleverer, but that we can, and should, seek to increase the intellectual capacity of all children. To this end, resources should be targeted at those who struggle to master the basic academic tools of reading, writing and arithmetic, to help them overcome these difficulties by whatever means are effective. Leaving school without an acceptable level of competence in each of these areas is entirely unacceptable; those who do so have been failed by their school and by the system.
Once the arguments I will present have been absorbed, making children cleverer becomes a very useful framing device. It provides a mechanism for interrogating many educational issues:
Q. What is the purpose of education?
A. Making children cleverer.
Q. How do we make children cleverer?
A. By getting them to know more.
Q. How do we get children to know more?
A. By teaching them a knowledge-rich curriculum and focusing on strengthening their access to knowledge stored in long-term memory.
Q. What is a knowledge-rich curriculum?
A. One built around the most powerful and culturally useful information.
Q. How do we focus on strengthening children’s access to knowledge stored in long-term memory?
A. By teaching in a way that prioritises opportunities to recall what has been learned and minimises distractions and irrelevances.
Q. Why should we be interested in making children cleverer?
A. Because this seems to be the best bet for improving children’s welfare and because getting children to know more is something that’s relatively straightforward for schools to do.
And so on.
Whenever I’m confronted with some new initiative or policy proposal, my first question is, will this help make children cleverer? I hope that once you’ve read the book and chewed over the arguments, you’ll find this simple formulation as useful as I do.
Notes
1 Paul Dolan, Happiness by Design: Finding Pleasure in Everyday Life (London: Penguin, 2014).
2 Linda S. Gottfredson, Mainstream Science on Intelligence: An Editorial with 52 Signatories, History, and Bibliography, Intelligence 24 (1997): 13–23 at 13.
3 Jon Andrews, David Robinson and Jo Hutchinson, Closing the Gap? Trends in Educational Attainment and Disadvantage (London: Education Policy Institute, 2017), p. 6. Available at: https://epi.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Closing-the-Gap_EPI-.pdf.
4 John Jerrim, Global Gaps: Comparing Socio-economic Gaps in the Performance of Highly Able UK Pupils Internationally (London: Sutton Trust, 2017), p. 4. Available at: https://www.suttontrust.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/Global-Gaps_FINAL_V2_WEB.pdf. These figures are specifically for achievement in science. The differences in reading and mathematics are nearer the OECD average.
5 Hans Rosling with Ola Rosling and Anna Rosling Rönnlund, Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World – And Why Things Are Better Than You Think (London: Sceptre, 2018), pp. 19–46.
6 Arthur Scargill, The Sunday Times (10 January 1982).
7 Dylan Wiliam, Leadership for Teacher Learning: Creating a Culture Where All Teachers Improve So That All Students Succeed (West Palm Beach, FL: Learning Sciences International, 2016), p. 6.
* Before the bespectacled among you get too smug about your eyewear, the correlation between IQ and wearing glasses is about 0.4 (see page 62 for details on degrees of correlation), which means that although on average those with glasses are a bit cleverer than the rest of us, there are still plenty of less smart glasses wearers out there. See Rosner and Belkin (1987).
Chapter 1
The purpose of education
Our top priority was, is and always will be education, education, education.
Tony Blair
The greatest university of all is the collection of books.
Thomas Carlyle
Despite the esteem in which it’s held, education is as hotly contested and ideologically riven as any other field of human endeavour, probably more so than most. Much of the disagreement stems from the troublesome fact that there’s little consensus on what education is actually for.
Most people readily accept that the purpose of medicine is to make people healthier. There’s no such consensus about the purpose of education. One of the things that makes education different from other areas of enquiry is that everyone has spent a lot of time in schools and we all feel we know what makes them successful. We might also have spent time in hospitals or law courts, but we tend not to assume we could do what doctors or lawyers do. But teachers? They just, well, teach, don’t they?
Schools vs. libraries
If you’re anything like me, at times you probably wondered why you were at school. In most developed societies, school is taken utterly for granted and, like death, taxes and other things that are unavoidable, we often view it with a mixture of resentment and disdain. I look back at my time in school and remember it as being three parts mind-numbing tedium to two parts social battleground. I wasn’t a good student. I didn’t know how to study and, as I said, wasn’t at all sure why I was there. By the age of 13, I had started voting with my feet.
Although I’m not a Catholic, I went to a Catholic school. It was about 15 miles away from my home and I had to catch two buses in order to get there. This could have been prohibitively expensive, but for some reason the local education authority took pity on children in my position and gave us free bus passes. This was somewhat ironic, as my free bus pass became my ticket out of school. For months at a time, I would leave home in the morning in my school uniform and catch the bus into central Birmingham. Where do you go if you’re a 13-year-old with no money in the middle of England’s second biggest city? The library, obviously.
Birmingham Central Library was my refuge, my sanctuary and, in some ways, my alma mater. Not only was it warm, but it was big enough that a teenager in school uniform went unnoticed. In memory it was vast. There were escalators to several floors, and one of my favourite ways to pass the time was to ride up to the top floor and use the microfiches to hunt through old newspapers for diverting nuggets and tidbits. In retrospect, this must be akin to the kind of aimless surfing through YouTube and BuzzFeed that my teenage daughters engage in today. I say akin, but there was one acute difference: as far as I could tell, I was the only child who seemed to spend his time in this way.
When I wasn’t flicking through decades-old headlines, I’d scour the shelves for interesting sounding books and take a handful into the reading room to peruse. I read all sorts. As well as indulging my penchant for science fiction and flicking through encyclopaedias, I wrestled with aging classics like The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, On the Origin of Species and The Prince, as well as more popular titles like I’m OK – You’re OK, The Selfish Gene and Surely You’re Joking, Mr Feynman? And for some now unknowable reason I became a devotee of Russian literature: I read Crime and Punishment, The Gulag Archipelago, The Master and Margarita and Anna Karenina. I didn’t understand them all that well – and I certainly didn’t like them all – but I stubbornly ploughed through them, day after day. And no one in the library ever questioned my right to do so.
But it couldn’t last. Eventually I was found out. My school – after many blissful months – finally worked out I wasn’t turning up and got around to calling home to ask my parents whether I was attending another school. I won’t detail the exquisite agonies of my punishments here, but the one accusation that still rings in my ears is that I was throwing away my education. At the time I went along with it, but now this seems rather bizarre. After all, what is education? My memory of school is that I spent a lot of time being bored, staring out of windows and playing squares.* For years, I thought of myself as something of an autodidact and that I learned practically nothing at school. I now know that this is incorrect, but more on that later.
What, we should ask ourselves, is the point of going to school? Why do we make children wear uniforms, sit at desks and do homework? What’s it all for if children can learn as much – or more – from libraries (and, of course, the internet)? The point, as I’ve slowly come to realise, is that most children are not like I was. If I’m honest, even I wasn’t much like the way I remember myself. At the library I only read what interested me. At school I had to learn about blast furnaces, quadratic equations, osmosis and The Mayor of Casterbridge, whether I wanted to or not. Much as I might try to deny it, something of each of these things is lodged somewhere in my brain. I am my own example of survivorship bias!
In a society where we no longer believe it ethical to put children to work in factories, school gets young people out of bed and gives them something productive to do instead of just snapchatting each other all day. As an adult, with children of my own, I have sympathy with this. I instinctively dislike the idea of children purposelessly meandering through their days, as seems to be the case at weekends, and going to school is, on the face of it, better than sending them up chimneys.
There are no end of cynical takes on what education is, as opposed to what it ought to be. Matt Ridley complains, “Rarely, if ever, has the purpose of state education been to add to scholarship and generate knowledge.” He quotes the American journalist H. L. Mencken as saying, “The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all. It is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same level, to breed a standard citizenry, to put down dissent and originality.”1 A depressing thought.
But, less selfishly and cynically, when we think about why we send children to school, the answers tend to fit into three broad areas: socialisation, enculturation and personal development.
Socialisation – in this view, education is primarily a tool of the state, employed to make its citizens more productive. In this way of thinking, children should be prepared both for work and to become loyal and enthusiastic participants in the activities of the state.Enculturation – the notion that the towering achievements of our culture should be passed along, like the Olympic torch, from one generation to the next to allow young people to fully participate in the intellectual and cultural life of their society.Personal development – many take the view that education ought to address ‘the whole child’ and aim to make children flourish in as broad a sense as possible. This includes the belief that education should be both therapeutic and concerned with developing character.Underlying each of these is the notion that education is our best chance for eradicating inequality. This includes the belief not only that all children, no matter their start in life, should be afforded the advantages enjoyed by the most privileged, but also that all children have the capacity to rise to the top if their disadvantages are specifically addressed and playing fields are systematically levelled.
But it’s worth enquiring whether school – or schooling – does an adequate job in these regards. To that end, we will address some of the details of these three broad visions for the purpose of education.
The content of our characters
The idea that schools should be educating children’s characters has been gathering momentum in recent years, but if we’re going to educate children in a way that moulds their characters, we need to be very clear about what kind of character we want them to have.
We all agree that a good character is, well, good. But what should this include? Is grit, tenacity, resilience (or whatever you want to call it) part of a good character? Or is character more about being polite, well-mannered and able to smoothly navigate through the world? Or might it be to do with morality, ethics and conscience? Is it about doing the ‘right thing’? And if it is, who decides what’s right? Should we be guided by the so-called ‘British values’ of fair play, tolerance and self-deprecation? On some level all of these things are desirable, but are they teachable?
