Seven Myths About Education

After almost 9 years of home schooling I thought it was high time I read up on some theory of education (better late than never!). I came across this book,



and found it fascinating from start to finish. The author was a teacher in some challenging schools for a number of years. I am aware that the author puts across her particular view but she argues well and seems to back it up with a good body of evidence. Even if some would disagree with what she says, I found it really helpful to make me think and question what and how I teach my children in home school, and what we need to be aware of as R (13) may start doing more National Curriculum-based education next year online. It's also been helpful as we consider the education system in this city and seek to be a blessing to the children who are a part of our lives here:

The 7 myths (one for each chapter) are:
1 facts prevent understanding 
2 teacher-led instruction is passive 
3 the twenty-first century fundamentally changes everything 
4 you can always just look it up
5 we should teach transferable skills 
6 projects and activities are the best way to learn
7 teaching knowledge is indoctrination.

There is so much I could copy and paste from it but I'll try to be self-controlled and only put on the parts I found most interesting or helpful to me.

This, taken from the introduction does a good job of summing up the book's premise:

Throughout this book, I have tried to stress that I share the aims of many of the people whose methods I disagree with. I agree that education should aim to produce confident, creative and problem-solving critical thinkers. I agree that we should prepare pupils for the twenty-first century. I agree that we should design our education system to suit everyone, not just the high achievers. I agree that education should be concerned with democracy and equality. I agree that pupils should be active learners and that lessons should be engaging. It is because I believe all of these things that I am so concerned about the current education system. The methods we are currently using to achieve these aims simply do not work. 

The main reason they do not work is because of a misguided, outdated and pseudo-scientific stigma against the teaching of knowledge. The evidence for the importance of knowledge is clear. We have a strong theoretical model that explains why knowledge is at the heart of cognition. We have strong empirical evidence about the success of curricula that teach knowledge. And we have strong empirical evidence about the success of pedagogy that promotes the effective transmission of knowledge. If we fail to teach knowledge, pupils fail to learn. 

But, as we have also seen, very little of this evidence is known or taught within the English education system. The implications of this are astonishing. It is not simply a matter of saying that we have got a few bits of obscure theory wrong.

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From the Foreword by Dylan Wiliam:

There is now a considerable body of evidence that discovery learning approaches—where students “discover things for themselves”—is simply less effective than those where the students are guided by a teacher to the intended learning outcomes (Mayer 2004). This does not mean that students should be passive recipients of knowledge—the idea that learning is an active rather than a passive process has been well established for over half-a-century—but activity is not the same as engagement. In too many classrooms, teachers worry about having the students active rather than having the students thinking, and even where students are thinking, there is often too little concern for what students are thinking about. 

We also know that just getting teachers to talk less, and have students talk more is unlikely to improve learning in classrooms. For example, in the TIMSS video studies of middle-school mathematics classrooms, it was discovered that in US classrooms (which for these purposes are very similar to UK classrooms), there were approximately 8 teacher words for every student word. In Japanese middle schools, the figure was 13, and for Hong Kong, it was 16. This disconnect between what cognitive science has revealed about learning and what happens in our classrooms has for me been a growing source of unease for many years.