28 March

In this book I co-wrote with Alan Bain, we looked at why education usually fails. Kids learn, but the schools and universities they go to contribute very little to that learning. It’s hard to raise that without insulting teachers (it’s not their fault), but it’s easy to prove and hasn’t changed in generations. I was a teacher, this is the reason I’m not any more. Plenty of teachers try to deal with this situation, but they can’t do it alone. For decades it’s been known how to teach anybody just about anything. But our schools and universities are not set up to use that knowledge, it’s as simple as that. The response from schools and universities is usually a ‘retreat to relationship’, where it becomes about teaching the ‘whole child’, like a proxy parent. The response from outside schools is to have more and more external testing. Both approaches have no effect on learning. Not one tiny bit.