schools

What’s the point of school?

1 Comment / educational policy, schools / Richard

In The Blank Slate, Steven Pinker argues that “education is a technology that tries to make up for what the human mind is innately bad at.” Schools have only ever existed in cultures where culturally specific knowledge has outpaced universal folk knowledge. What is universal – speech, recognising distinctions between the properties of inanimate objects […]

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The cause-effect illusion-confusion

schools / Richard

If we knew the precise things that make the most difference in terms of school improvement in order to secure the specific outputs we want, then everyone would be laughing. We would simply do more of those things and the outputs would improve. Voila! Bob’s your uncle! However, of course we don’t actually have a precise

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