John Bald: Conservatives are deluded to think we have defeated the “progressive” educationalists
Trust is earned, not demanded.
John Bald is a former Ofsted inspector. He is Vice-President of the Conservative Education Society.
The best news for education in recent years has been the election of Professor Stanislas Dehaene, head of neuroscience in France, to the Royal Society. Dehaene’s work over the past 20 years on the processes of learning, based on direct evidence of brain activity rather than the indirect evidence gained by inferring it from external observation, has provided a clear picture of the way the brain develops from infancy that calls into question every educational practice that is not consistent with it.
His election adds to the substantial number of Royal Society Fellows with a main or significant interest in brain research, and comes at a time when the Society is working to extend knowledge of the field beyond its own members. This is real science, not quackery about “learning styles” or “brain food” (water) that led to so many false dawns in the 00s. The French government has given Dehaene a unit to investigate the application of his work in the school system, and something similar is needed here. Dehaene was kind enough to describe this review of his major work, How We Learn, as “beautiful”, so I suggest it can be taken as an accurate introduction.
Dehaene’s overarching theory, that learning involves an adjustment in thinking to take account of new material, poses challenges to both sides of our current schism over the purposes of education. For Labour and its progressive allies, his demonstration that mental development is a process of adjusting thinking shows that their infatuation with mixed ability teaching is a blind alley. Earlier research, beginning with Santiago Ramón y Cajal´s drawings of brain cells which won him the Nobel Prize in 2006, identified the formation of links between brain cells and the deposit of myelin as an insulator through practice, as the basic process of development.
As the process of intellectual growth is exponential, the highest-achieving children learn at a much faster rate. For example, Marie Clay’s investigation of six-year-old readers in the 1960s found that the most able quarter made very few errors, and were often able to correct their own mistakes. The weakest quarter’s error rate was 20 times as great. They read proportionately less and were rarely able to correct an error. The needs of the two groups were so different that it was not possible for one teacher to meet both at the same time. The same issue arises in maths, though unfortunately, far too few teachers have the skills they need to teach the weakest pupils. Our opponents still control most teacher training and systematically ignore the issue.
David Cameron’s storming defence of his record on education and the responses to it show the challenge to our …
Trust is earned, not demanded.
John Bald is a former Ofsted inspector. He is Vice-President of the Conservative Education Society.
The best news for education in recent years has been the election of Professor Stanislas Dehaene, head of neuroscience in France, to the Royal Society. Dehaene’s work over the past 20 years on the processes of learning, based on direct evidence of brain activity rather than the indirect evidence gained by inferring it from external observation, has provided a clear picture of the way the brain develops from infancy that calls into question every educational practice that is not consistent with it.
His election adds to the substantial number of Royal Society Fellows with a main or significant interest in brain research, and comes at a time when the Society is working to extend knowledge of the field beyond its own members. This is real science, not quackery about “learning styles” or “brain food” (water) that led to so many false dawns in the 00s. The French government has given Dehaene a unit to investigate the application of his work in the school system, and something similar is needed here. Dehaene was kind enough to describe this review of his major work, How We Learn, as “beautiful”, so I suggest it can be taken as an accurate introduction.
Dehaene’s overarching theory, that learning involves an adjustment in thinking to take account of new material, poses challenges to both sides of our current schism over the purposes of education. For Labour and its progressive allies, his demonstration that mental development is a process of adjusting thinking shows that their infatuation with mixed ability teaching is a blind alley. Earlier research, beginning with Santiago Ramón y Cajal´s drawings of brain cells which won him the Nobel Prize in 2006, identified the formation of links between brain cells and the deposit of myelin as an insulator through practice, as the basic process of development.
As the process of intellectual growth is exponential, the highest-achieving children learn at a much faster rate. For example, Marie Clay’s investigation of six-year-old readers in the 1960s found that the most able quarter made very few errors, and were often able to correct their own mistakes. The weakest quarter’s error rate was 20 times as great. They read proportionately less and were rarely able to correct an error. The needs of the two groups were so different that it was not possible for one teacher to meet both at the same time. The same issue arises in maths, though unfortunately, far too few teachers have the skills they need to teach the weakest pupils. Our opponents still control most teacher training and systematically ignore the issue.
David Cameron’s storming defence of his record on education and the responses to it show the challenge to our …
John Bald: Conservatives are deluded to think we have defeated the “progressive” educationalists
Trust is earned, not demanded.
John Bald is a former Ofsted inspector. He is Vice-President of the Conservative Education Society.
The best news for education in recent years has been the election of Professor Stanislas Dehaene, head of neuroscience in France, to the Royal Society. Dehaene’s work over the past 20 years on the processes of learning, based on direct evidence of brain activity rather than the indirect evidence gained by inferring it from external observation, has provided a clear picture of the way the brain develops from infancy that calls into question every educational practice that is not consistent with it.
His election adds to the substantial number of Royal Society Fellows with a main or significant interest in brain research, and comes at a time when the Society is working to extend knowledge of the field beyond its own members. This is real science, not quackery about “learning styles” or “brain food” (water) that led to so many false dawns in the 00s. The French government has given Dehaene a unit to investigate the application of his work in the school system, and something similar is needed here. Dehaene was kind enough to describe this review of his major work, How We Learn, as “beautiful”, so I suggest it can be taken as an accurate introduction.
Dehaene’s overarching theory, that learning involves an adjustment in thinking to take account of new material, poses challenges to both sides of our current schism over the purposes of education. For Labour and its progressive allies, his demonstration that mental development is a process of adjusting thinking shows that their infatuation with mixed ability teaching is a blind alley. Earlier research, beginning with Santiago Ramón y Cajal´s drawings of brain cells which won him the Nobel Prize in 2006, identified the formation of links between brain cells and the deposit of myelin as an insulator through practice, as the basic process of development.
As the process of intellectual growth is exponential, the highest-achieving children learn at a much faster rate. For example, Marie Clay’s investigation of six-year-old readers in the 1960s found that the most able quarter made very few errors, and were often able to correct their own mistakes. The weakest quarter’s error rate was 20 times as great. They read proportionately less and were rarely able to correct an error. The needs of the two groups were so different that it was not possible for one teacher to meet both at the same time. The same issue arises in maths, though unfortunately, far too few teachers have the skills they need to teach the weakest pupils. Our opponents still control most teacher training and systematically ignore the issue.
David Cameron’s storming defence of his record on education and the responses to it show the challenge to our …
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