The Problems of Translating the Science of Learning - A Conversation with Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath

Welcome to the Future Learning Design Podcast.

If I know something about genetics, what does that mean for pedagogy? What does that mean for teachers and students? And the answer is, by and large, nothing. Doesn't mean a damn thing. And it's not because it's wrong, it's simply too far removed and it ignores any emergent property that comes after it that really matters to a teacher and a student in a classroom.

Hi everyone, thanks for joining me. My name is Tim Logan and the podcast is brought to you in partnership with Notosh. This was such a fun conversation to have with Jared Kounihorva about the brokenness, or not, of schooling and education today. We covered a lot of ground, laughed a lot, and even found a few things that we actually agreed on. Jared is an award-winning cognitive neuroscientist, bestselling author, and renowned keynote speaker with an expertise in human learning, memory, and brain stimulation. He's published 6 books, including most recently with co-author David Bott, 10 Things Schools Get Wrong and How We Can Get Them Right. He's the director of LME Global, host of the popular YouTube channel From Theory to Practice, and previously honorary researcher at the University of Melbourne and St. Vincent's Hospital in Melbourne. You can find links to Jared's work in the show notes, and if you like this episode, check out the other more than 130 episodes on the channel, and we'd appreciate you taking a moment to rate or review the podcast.

Hey Tim, how you doing?

Hey, hey, yeah, good. We finally make it happen.

We did it.

Yeah, sorry man, that's been a crazy couple of weeks there, but we got it there.

It has.

All right man, well let's, yeah, let's dive in because I'm so excited about this. I was reading back through some of our initial interactions we had online, which is kind of, which was, you know, cards on the table, I'm a bit of a Mary Helen Imbordino-Yang fanboy, right? So yeah, yeah. And it came up because she posted a new paper that she'd just written and lots of bold claims, let's say, in there. And that prompted a little, or what turned into quite a nice and big interaction and now has led to this conversation. So now I'd like to talk about some of that, but not, you know, we'll see where we go with it. But there's, you've got so much work that's so interesting that you've done. So yeah, no, I really, I'm looking forward to the conversation. So thanks for joining first.

I love it.

And I'm all yours. Everything's on the table. I'm, I'm whatever you need.

I'll do what I can.

Man.

So I was aware of your book actually. I hadn't realized, but I was aware of your book, but, but hadn't made the connection with you. So I, I spent a bit of time looking at the book that you've written, 10 Things Schools Get Wrong and How We Get It Right. And the first words you type in there in the prologue or the intro is education is not broken. So that is a, that is a good, in the context of where I sit or in the conversations that I'm in a lot of the time. The generally received wisdom and kind of consensus is that there's something pretty fundamentally wrong. And so it'd be great maybe if we could just start there. And if you like, when you say education is not broken, what do you mean by that? What has led you to start a book with that phrase?

And it's funny that of all the things I teach, and I teach a lot of crazy stuff, that one gets the biggest pushback. People hate it when I'm like, by the way, you know, ed's not broken.

What?

But if you take an objective look at literally any measure of education that we would deem meaningful, we're in a golden age, man, of education. So I— if you want to take a look at student well-being, we've never focused on it more than we have right now. If you want to take a look at public outreach, we've never done more than we have now. More kids have access to education. More kids are succeeding through education. The number of years of school kids are getting is going up, up, up. Their performance, if you care about grades and standardized tests, going up, up, up. Everything is going in the right direction, but we have this wonderful narrative going on that everything sucks, and that does my head in. I think it's the absolute worst narrative because I think as adults it's fine, we can say whatever the heck we want to, but that narrative bleeds into the students.

Sure.

And the students then start to come in with the expectation that this place sucks, I'm supposed to be bored, this is supposed to be horrible. And the joke is, if you go and compare what we did when we were in school. So go back 30 years, compare it to now. You can still tell you're in a classroom. By and large, school looks the same because it works. The school has looked the same for thousands of years. We have etchings from basically BC of people sitting in a row listening to someone talk because it works. But everyone was so afraid in the '70s that we were boring people that it started to move. And if you go into classrooms now, teachers are so well-versed in so many different pedagogies that if you still think it's the Ben Stein from, what was that movie, Ferris Bueller?

Oh yeah.

Then you have no clue. Then you've never been in, I'm like, go to school and go tell me that that's what you're seeing. It just doesn't really exist outside of pop culture. Yeah. And so I just, I think that narrative is fine for us because we get interesting ideas from it and we talk about it. But once it starts trickling into the kids, all of a sudden we've got this hurdle where they assume school sucks and their parents assume school sucks. And if we start from the baseline that we're doing stuff wrong, Man, we've got a huge hill we got to climb just to convince them that no, we've got your kids' best interests at heart and what we're doing is working.

So that is so interesting because that is precisely the line of argument that people will use to say that it's not working. So the fact that it looks the same as it has always done and your conclusion there is it's persisting because it's working.

Because it's effective.

So what is it then Where is that narrative coming from then? Yeah, that seems to suggest that the fact that it's the same— whatever, what are those kind of data points that people are pointing to to say actually it's really not working?

So far as I can tell, there are no data points. There's no objective measure to show that, that education is going down. The few that you could say are literacy scores are starting to go down, and mathematical scores, especially in younger kids, are starting to go down. But the joke is they started going down once we started changing how we taught reading and numbers. So it was like, oh, this sucks. See, I told you this sucks. No, that sucks because you put your foot in the door, man. If you would have just left us to do what we were doing— we know how to teach literacy and numeracy. That was the one thing we've been good at for a very long time. So it's interesting to see where it comes from. Primarily, you will only see that narrative in Western cultures and Western cultures with a strong pop culture going on. There's something about having this kind of global narrative in a Western culture where we just say, hey, didn't school suck for you? Oh yeah, didn't it suck for you? Oh yeah, man, school must suck. Our kids are getting nothing from school. Oh, and it's totally subjective. It's because we think of the movies we saw and we were told school— and it's a fun trope in Hollywood. Yeah, school sucks. When you go back to your real— it's like a good example, my wife. Grew up, she went to a private school. She hates private schools. Awesome. And when I knew her, she just was like, I can't stand schools. I can't. I think all schools suck. I want my kid to be homeschooled. I want to say. And then she married me. And over about— we've been together, gosh, for 16 years now. She started— I just remember a couple of years ago, she's like, school is pretty good, isn't it? Yeah. It's like, I actually learned quite a lot there. Yeah. It's like all my kind of behavioral patterns and my ability to handle life kind of came from them pushing back against me, me pushing back against them. Yes, it's good. This is how human beings learn. I think we've shifted, and this is kind of a tangent, but it fits in. Well, we talk about kids like they're little adults, and we assume that they are the same as us, just smaller, and they can't lift as much weight as we do. And that's just not true. They are in a completely different world than we are. And our job has always been for thousands of years to raise them into adulthood, not to treat them as adults. And I think once you start thinking— and again, this is largely a Western culture thing— that no, kids are adults, we need to give them the same freedoms we give adults, then school starts to look horrible because, yeah, there's a lot of rules, there's a lot of structures, there's a lot of things we need you to learn, which as an adult, do not give me rules or structures, man. I'm going to burn down any bridge that says you got to do this. But I ain't a kid anymore. The only reason I can comfortably say I am now an adult and I know how to make my own decisions is because I went through that process of behavioral understanding, of, of learning a coherent language that we can all share, of understanding that I don't always have the only voice in the room and I got to learn to follow someone else's ideas when they pop up. All these things. That's how education has always worked. And I think if you, if you go down to the very base, How do human beings learn best? And if you just— so we're talking just pure biology now, it's got to be through mimicry. And that's how babies learn from their parents. That's how animal babies learn from their animal parents. It's just, that's biology. Mimicry requires at some level someone to be demonstrating or showing something that somebody else doesn't know. So at some level, that's going to require someone doing something that other people have to watch. And then interact with. And that is what a classroom is.

Interesting. As I've noticed on your YouTube channel, you paint a compelling case very well.

Well, I just, I like to think I'm just, I don't know, I get all the different stories. I just think there's a lot of wishful thinking in a lot of people's narratives around education. A lot of the progressive education movements especially, I always, whenever I get, have to talk to some of them and we get in debates, I'm always like, just show me what you're talking. Can you take me to one classroom that is as boring as you just told me it was? And they're like, well, oh yeah, it's, it's my son's friend's dog's owner's classroom.

So, okay, so let's, let's try a few things. I, I definitely agree with you that there is a, there are caricatures of the thing that we don't like and And as we discussed in our exchange online, there was, you know, ideology is everywhere, right? So just going back over a couple of things you've said, what, what about the persistent resistance to kind of mainstream grad grindy and Dickensian education, right? So Romantics like Rousseau and, and Froebel, and you know, it's not a new thing that people have questioned the mainstream way of educating children. And I'm talking in Europe largely and then in the US, but you know, so there's a separate question about that in a moment, but where is that coming from, do you think?

I think I always say anything can evolve and everything should evolve. If you've ever hit pinnacle or peak, go home, you're done. So when we say, and especially when I say something like education isn't broken, That doesn't mean put the cement in, we're locking it down, we're good to go. Yeah, that means 80 to 90% of everything we do is effective and it's working. That still gives us 10 to 20% where we're always gonna play. And I think a lot of people love to blow that 10 to 20% up into everything, but I think there will always be reason to say, no, wait a second, we can do this better, we can tweak this better. And I think that's where a lot of people are finding what— where's the gap in the present moment that I can leak some water in to start to make this crack grow a little bigger. With that said though, if you look at all the people who tend to push back against education very hard, in the list you just mentioned, all the people who are doing it now in tech, the joke is they were all very good at school. It's very hard to find somebody who sucked at school that would then have enough of a platform to come in and say, by the way, school is horrible. What you do is you see the people like Bill Gates saying we need to change education says the guy who made it through Stanford before dropping out because you knew more than anyone else about the topic you were studying. It's real easy if you— once you've trumped something to assume that that thing must suck and that it can be done better.

Yeah.

And realistically, no, you're at the cutting edge. Congratulate yourself, but recognize that you're— there are other people who are still benefiting greatly from this system, that if you start to change it to suit you, you're an outlier.

Yeah. The only thing— I definitely take that point. The only thing I would say on that is that a lot of those people benefited not from standardized classroom-based education. A lot of them will have benefited from aristocratic tutoring, right? So very personalized, one-to-one with real experts who were absolutely showing them and demonstrating.

Yeah.

Probably quite didactic, but they were the best around and they were tailoring the instruction very, very personally. To that person and then huge amounts of rich feedback and all of that kind of stuff. So I think that was happening as well.

So scale that.

Precisely, right? That is exactly the problem. And I completely agree with you. I think we have a major scaling problem in education. And what we end up with is trying to scale that, but poorly, right? We don't do that well because it's potentially impossible. And that's, I mean, there's a tech evangelism there that's happening now with AI and, you know, people talking about that for sure, which we'll come back to tech.

I definitely want to come back to that.

We will come back. But the other question I wanted to ask was, you say it works, but does it work for everyone?

Yeah.

And so there's, there's, there's a question mark around, we've designed for the average and the average doesn't exist. In the kind of Todd Rose, you know, but, but I think there's, there's validity to that argument, right? We've put all of these potential variations together, come up with some kind of mean average that doesn't really fit anyone entirely, but it's kind of good enough, so we'll go with that. Yeah. So who, who doesn't it work for? Does it work for everyone?

So I guess let me just go back to something you said, because I think it was great, is can we scale this? Will it ever work? I think the answer is a hard no. Absolutely not. It's impossible to scale. That's like trying to scale therapy on a group level. It's just the biology shifts as soon as you go from 2 people to 3 people, from 3 people to 10 people. Everything starts to shift and the feedback patterns really start to impact what works and what doesn't. And, and I think that's where now you go back and you say, how do you supplement that then? So you've got 2 choices. You can either say, look, we've tried to scale it and it's not working for everyone, ergo the whole thing is a wash, go home. Or you say, we've tried to scale it, what else do we need to supplement it? Say, wouldn't it be nice if parents could offer that one-on-one support?

Yeah.

And that's where I think you're gonna start to see a lot of differences, is the kids who have parental support, they're getting their one-on-one tutoring from a family member, from a sibling. They still are getting it, and that's the supplement that's making the school really fly. And there's just a lot of kids who aren't getting that. And so that— but that then speaks beyond education, where now people say, because parenting is so hard and a lot of parents parents aren't putting in the time. School is broken. You got to somehow pick up that slack, and it's impossible. We don't have the time. We don't have the, the resources. It won't work. So then if you go back and say, is it working for everyone? It's working as well as it can for everyone, is what I would say. Some people like it more than others. Some people have no reason to want to like it. They're told by their parents from day one that school is going to suck. Don't even worry about it. Why would we assume it would work for them? It wouldn't. So I, I guess if you then said, what would— would there be other models of school that could work better for different people. Sure, I've got no, no big significant problem with that. I think what you're going to find is a lot of those models are going to look very similar to how school looks now. They're just going to be slight tweaks in that 10 to 20% around the edges. The core is going to look the same. You're still going to have human beings interacting, one who knows stuff, others who don't. You need to guide them through a certain process. And so I think, and I guess this kind of goes back to that then difference between pedagogy and learning is now we're having a pedagogical discussion. And yeah, I think different people will respond differently to different pedagogies, but there's still going to be that underlying structure of schoolness to all of it. You will always recognize that you are in a school, and that's okay. That's just like I recognize when I'm in an office building. It's okay. That's part of the structure of what it is we've built. Yeah.

The, the other thing that I noticed though is, is quite, I don't know whether I can articulate this, but that there's a, a bias in relation to the fact that school already exists like that. Right.

Yeah.

You know, my, my background's in anthropology, right? So I, I, I would say there is deeply cultural conditioning around the concept of what school is. I had this exact conversation with, with Rachel Loftus on the previous episode. That it emerges from a particular cultural context, right?

Yeah.

And that's not written in stone. It didn't come down from the heavens as school, right? It developed in a particular way, culturally, responsively. And I think one of the things I really appreciate about a lot of the things you say implicitly or explicitly is that the context is incredibly important.

Yeah.

In the way that people, people respond, biology responds. Teachers respond. And so I think there's a cultural context to the emergence of the concept of school as it currently is. And therefore people who are arguing for maintaining the status quo are kind of almost at an advantage because they're just, well, it is like that. So the onus is on the people who want to change it or transform it, whatever the rhetoric is, the onus is on them to articulate what that new version would be like.

Boom. And that's always, you know, I think you're spot on is I think the baseline is what we have. And so if you want to change the baseline, sorry, we've, the burden of proof, the burden of evidence, the burden of change is on you.

Yeah.

And I think there's something to be said for that, that, oh, there are other options out there, but I'd still say, look, there are plenty of people trying. If you can come up with a model that works better than the model we have now, I promise you it will be adopted and it will be adopted widely. But what we tend to see are people who develop a model with about 10 students. It works really well. They do a TED Talk. Everyone's excited about it. Everyone tries to adopt it, and it doesn't work once you have 200 students. It's like, hmm, like that whole let's put an iPad in every slum in India. Great. That was an awesome TED Talk. That makes absolutely no sense in the real world. It just didn't actually work better than school. And so if you go back to it being the baseline, I think there's an interesting thing to suss out there, and this might be Jungian, right? The collective unconscious. If we think of this concept of emergence, and I, I think about this going from the top down, but other people think about it going from the bottom up, but we'll hit the same spot, so it's fine. If you just want to talk about reductionism building up, you'll get to the same spot I'm going to get. But I always think of emergence as when a bunch of things get together, something will emerge above that that can feed back and influence everything underneath it. And when a bunch of those things get together, something will emerge above that and can influence everything beneath it. So example, I got a bunch of cells. I put a bunch of cells together to make a tissue.

Cool.

A tissue can do its own thing. A tissue can do things that cells can't do, and it can feed back and change how cells work. Tissues make an organ. Organ makes me. Bunch of me's make a classroom. A bunch of classrooms make a city, make a state, make a country, make the world, make the universe. I just think it keeps going and we keep getting these feedback loops. So Carl Jung sits on the same basic wavelength as that, and he said Is there a collective unconscious? Because there's some sort of emergent property when a bunch of people get together. Is there something above us that is somewhat unified and will send back feedback in a very specific way that leads us all to act in a very similar way? And so his exploration into that was basically the archetypes. This is why he said there are 12 basic archetypes in the world, that no matter where you go, no matter what country you're in, no matter what culture you're— you kick in, you're going to see the same basic 12 archetypes. How is it humanly possible that we all landed on these same things? And so some people will say built up, that's biology, forces you to do that. Me and him say it's coming down somehow, that's being fed down from something emergent. So go back to school. Now we have the baseline of school the way we see it, and we see it basically the same in every culture around the world, even independently. So if we talk about it being a cultural thing, It's interesting that I can't find another model of education anywhere in the world that does anything significantly different. So is it possible that, that this is just the model that works, or that this is the model that's been fed down to us and we keep landing on the same thing because it's the one thing we're supposed to be doing?

Yeah, that, that interesting. I, I'm not sure I've got much of a comment on the Jungian collective unconscious. That feels a bit, a bit of a step too far for me. But let's, but let's just take it back to what you said there. What is it that you think is the similarity across cultures of the thing that you're calling education there?

Yep. So you'll always see it started basically on a one-to-one. It's parents teaching kids, or it's mentors teaching mentees, or it's adults teaching kids, whatever it's going to be. That will eventually scale to several. You'll have one person teaching several people simultaneously. That will then scale to a couple of people teaching a couple more people. Simultaneously. Eventually it becomes a little bit more structured where you start to say, well, wait a second, what should we be teaching them? And then you start to develop these ideas of set curricula. Then you start to say, well, wait a second, how do we make sure they're all learning at the same pace or that they're getting what they need? And you start to get these kind of class systems built out. Basically, in this, again, it can come top-down versus bottom-up. Because of the way human beings learn, mostly through mimicry and through observation, you're always going to hit the same basic schoolhouse situation. A bunch of kids in a room looking at a teacher. And that's why if you go to Nigeria now, you're gonna see that. If you go to Russia, you're gonna see that. If you go to the Philippines, you're gonna see that.

I would disagree on a number of things there, actually, but let's— so let's— I want to bring colonialism into the picture in a moment, but I, I don't think it's irrelevant to then talk about what we might call pedagogy at that point. In your earlier description, because yeah, I would say there is a cultural patterning, let's say, in particular places. So let's say with a, with a culture, a group that's more hierarchical or more collaborative, more dialogic, or more fill in the blank, right? Could be lots of different patterns. And I think the way that the human beings interact in that culture with their young would pattern differently based on those other contextual influences. So I don't necessarily think that therefore the fact that those humans are interacting at group level to, with mimicry and, and, you know, instruction that you could say might develops into instruction. Sure. And I, you know, I think, I think there are some biologists or ethologists would, that would argue that those patterns happen in the animal kingdom. Yep. Elders teaching in inverted commas, they're young, right? So there's something deep about education that's going on there. But I do think the fact that therefore you can extrapolate that to the schoolhouse in a more or less universal way is a step too far.

I can, I totally hear that. And I think it would, that's, it becomes a pretty easy objective way to suss that out is just go through history or go through the world today and just find what models of education did everyone land on? It's really difficult today just because of globalization. We're all talking the same basic language. So if you just go back even 100 years, if the move from individual instruction to group-wide instruction is culturally bound, then we should see uniquely different educational systems in each country, or at least in each significant culture.

Except that's where colonialism comes in, right? Because you, you also can't extract power from the frame, right? Because at a certain point, we've developed a concept of school in a European context, let's say, with a bit of variation, but pretty broadly similar. And we've then exported that violently around the world.

So take it back then before— take it back 1,000 years. Go to any culture you want and say, how are they teaching? You probably won't have a structured school system like we have now, but you can still say, how are they instructing the next generation? Yeah, and you're going to see the same basic thing. So I mean, again, I could be totally wrong, but all I need is one hard example of a culture at any point in history doing something significantly different than what we think of as schooling, and I'll eat my hat. I'll put everything away and I'll say, cool, now we can have a conversation. But until then, it's all conjecture. It's all very cute. And all the data we do have suggests that we do end up in the same spot.

Sure, that's interesting because that— but again, as you said, the burden of proof is on the people who want to change it from what it is. So I'm not, I'm not totally sure.

Like, I feel it. And this is my big— this is where I always clash with, with, with a lot of progressive educators is I feel it, man. I hear you completely. And there's nothing you've said that's wrong. The only thing there isn't is any evidence of what you've said as being meaningful in the context of developing education in this case. And so that's where I always just keep coming back to. If that were accurate, there are so many things. And now this is academia in a nutshell. We've got theories for everything, man. We got theories for tying your shoes. We got theories for birds and this. We got them all. 99% of that theory, those theories are never going to reflect reality in any way, shape, or form. And that's fine. We're in academia. We don't care. I'm not talking about reality. I'm talking about what I feel like talking about. And so, so there's theories I hear that I love and I agree with completely. And then I go look in the real world. I'm just stuck going, but where is it? How is it like— so like, I was in Australia for 12 years. So the Aboriginal culture, probably the oldest culture in the world, how do they teach their kids? It basically was around a campfire. They would sing and tell stories, and it was the same basic patterning where you— granted, you don't have a desk and you don't have a chalkboard, but it's one person, the elder, or in this case the singer, passing along information to groups of people all at the same time. Yeah, it's the same basic thing.

Yeah. If you describe the same basic thing in quite general terms, then I, I'm 100% with you.

Yeah.

Because there's deep patterns there, right? And I think the way, for example, Zach Stein talks about teacherly authority, and I think in Aboriginal culture and many cultures where those kinds of patterns have persisted for, as you say, like thousands and thousands of years, there is a cultural context in which young people and elders are in a relation. A right relation of teacherly authority, and it's the young people who are, you know, there's something bigger than themselves. They're being enculturated into the norms of— that's all really important, great stuff that still goes on now.

Yeah.

I think it's not insignificant, as you said, there's no chalkboards, there's no desks, because actually that's the thing that quite a lot of people push back against from a progressive side is when, you know, you hear it in the trope of the industrial system, right? The industrial education system. It's actually not the deep human passing on and nurturing and, and norm teaching and all of those things. It's the thing that then got scaled in an industrial way. So the, you know, the explanation would go, yeah, beyond the Dunbar number, beyond, you know, intimate human relations in, in a particular local context connected to place and with all of the cosmologies and all of the epistemologies from that culture. You know, it, it got decontextualized and industrialized. And I, you know, personally I have a lot of sympathy for that narrative because I think that is what we're seeing now in terms of longer-term impacts of that. But it, it's so multivariate that it's basically impossible to pin that back on the education system. Right.

And that's, that's where I always come back is I, I, I think we put everything you just outlined is spot on. And I think education becomes the easy scapegoat to blame for all that, when in actuality the blame, if you want to find another scapegoat, is just globalization. The industrialization wasn't school, it was culture, it was everything. Yeah, it was people, it was work. So school was just another part of that mess. And so if you really want to talk progressive, it can't just be about one aspect of a giant picture. I'm much more happier talking about that giant picture. And saying, okay, we got to go back to, say, communities. We got to go back to a single schoolroom where kids around the neighborhood of all ages go at the same time. That's fine. That does not faze me in the least. That to me does not say education is broken. That says the culture we've built is really dysfunctional, and probably we need to be talking on a larger scale. Yeah, but it's so hard to say. I think people do rightly say work is broken, but it's hard to say we are all inherently broken. We've built something that's not working, so we pick the easiest thing to point at, and that is, where does my kid go 6 hours a day every day, and just yell at that.

No, I'm 100% with you on that, because I think what you also notice in, like, for example, the conversations around, as you've described, how do we respond socioculturally, politically, economically in relation to the climate emergency, for example, right?

Yeah.

And you know, you have all these very, very smart people, way smarter than me, philosophers, scientists, whatever, talking about how to respond or describing the problem. But then when, as soon as they start talking about, so what do we do about this? So often those conversations end up back in, well, we need to reform the education system because we need to teach people about these things so that they understand the limits of growth and, you know, they, they understand the climate impacts or whatever it is, fill in the blank. It's always that the education system clears up the mess. Of the society or the culture. And that is a real problem. But I mean, I can understand why to some extent, but it is a, it's a big problem for us who work in education.

Okay, and it seems like another easy answer. We got it, it's got to be teaching. But the part, it's never worked. We've been doing that for hundreds of years. Teach the kids, the next generation, to do this. And the problem is, and this is just another sign that it's not the educational system that we're actually talking about, the context is— take something like bullying, right? We run these massive anti-bullying campaigns. Let's teach kids about bullying, and that will help them be better to not bully. What happens? Bullying goes up almost without fail. Let's have D.A.R.E. Let's have drug education awareness programs. Let's teach kids about drugs. That's going to fight the drug. What happens? Drug use goes up. What the hell just happened? Context. Context is everything. We can talk till the cows come home about global warming, about the need to love yourself and your neighbor, about all of these things. But so long as the context continues to dictate that, no, this is actually how the world works, kids will always evolve to the context, to the environment we are in, rather than the words we are told.

Yeah.

And so we come back to this idea is you can tell kids, you can spend the next 14 years teaching them about climate change, but if the context of the world says you need to make money by doing anything you can at any cost. And so what? You can buy fracking credits, that's fine. They're going to adapt to the world we live in. Nothing's going to change because it wasn't knowledge, it was context that seemed to matter more.

So this is beautiful because my next episode is going to be a conversation with Alicia Barrero, Cuban lady who's just amazing philosopher who's written a book called Context Changes Everything. Yeah. Hard science and philosophy perspective. Very, very interesting. So there's, there's that piece, but also it's a really nice segue into, 'cause I, I really do want to talk to you about the translation problem. 'Cause I think we're talking very big and meta about the whole kind of situation, which, which is great. But I think there is also the, just the reality that people want to work in education with teachers, with educators, with leaders to try and improve or reform or transform whatever your position is, but move things on. So one of the things that in the Mary Helen Immordino-Yang paper that she talks about, the authors effectively, you know, they put 5 patterns or perspectives that are coming out of science that they argue have an influence, have something to say about what we do in education. And one of those is sociocultural embeddedness. So to your point about context, I think the science, the philosophy, the anthropology, whatever, there's a lot more people talking about that importance of embeddedness and context and the influence of place and, and time and relation on the things that emerge. So, yeah, so that's great. I think we can probably all agree on that with Mary Helen. Great. Yep.

Not a problem. That is, that is not a controversial theory at all.

Yep. We get a little bit more tricky when we start talking about some of the other things that they put in there. For example, epigenetics, right? And that was one of the points that we were discussing online before. So the fact of epigenetics, a biological widely accepted theory now.

Yeah.

That human development is self-organizing through interaction and learning, and that is not predetermined by genetic program.

Yep.

Then we have a translation issue, right? So, so, and this is where you are identifying is that we extrapolate from that biological fact into an educational context. Yes. So now take it away. What's the problem with that?

I feel like, I feel like Mr. Negative. I, there's no, no problem with any of this. What you start to see is you've just got what's called a levels of organization problem, and that then leads to an emergence problem, which then leads to a translation problem. So okay, we've got levels of organization. So let's go back to what we were saying earlier. We've got cells. Put a bunch of cells together, you make a tissue. Put a bunch of tissues together, you make an organ. These are all different levels of organization. Now we can define something like learning at any one of those levels. What does it mean to learn at a cellular level? What does it mean to learn at an organelle level? What does it mean to learn at a quantum level, at a social level? In each of those levels, we're going to be talking about learning. But because of emergence, because at each of those levels new things pop up, that can't be explained by anything else, those definitions are going to be unique and only meaningful at each of those levels. So when I talk about learning at a biological level, that's typically not the same definition as learning when we talk about school-wide learning or learning at a, at a universal level. So now we start to get this issue of, okay, if I know something about learning here, how does that then move into the classroom? If I know something about genetics, what does that mean for pedagogy? What does that mean for teachers and students? And the answer is, by and large, nothing. Doesn't mean a damn thing. And it's not because it's wrong, it's simply too far removed and it ignores any emergent property that comes after it that really matters to a teacher and a student in a classroom. So let's just, as a simple example, because genetics can get fun— I, by the way, I love genetics, I think it's hilarious. I, I've got— I think genetics has ended up being— and we're in a spot now where we've basically acknowledged most people except for maybe Robert Plowman have acknowledged that genetics has just wasted 100 years. They had the complete wrong understanding of what genes were and what they did, and they used that to push about 100 years of research. And we're now having one of those paradigm shifts where we're like, shit, we got all this data to answer a question that was never a question to begin with. It's a totally wrong question.

So just out of interest, do you mean pre-Human Genome Project?

Or, you know, it even— I'd say up to about 20. So the Human Genome Project. So here's one of my favorite little stats. So sorry, I get to geek out.

Yeah, yeah, do it.

19— what is it, about '56? Nobel Prize goes to a pair of guys who say one gene, one protein. We figured out how genes work. They make proteins, proteins make your cells, cells make you. Boom. We figured this out. And they ask, okay, how many genes then do we have? They say we have to have 100,000. There's about 100,000 different proteins in a human body. That's how many genes we're going to have. Cut to 2000. We finally cracked the human genome. And we're like, this is it, we got it.

This is—

we're going to answer the question. Give me the book of human life, I think is what the president called it at the time. We count up the number of protein coding genes. It was 25,000.

Hmm.

A little less than we expected, but that's okay. We can make this work. Then we kept getting more data, dropped to 22,000. Today it is at 19,000. To put that into context, a banana has 36,000 protein coding genes. So this means either bananas are twice as complex as humans or something else is going on here. And then over the next, from about 2005 to about 2000, really '18, there was a lot of futzing going on where people were talking about, uh-oh, the polygenetics. What if we mix and match all these? And now it's, it's roundly accepted. This came out of Stanford around 2019, 2020. It's called omnigenics, which basically says every single gene you have will impact every single trait you have. There will be absolutely no way to parse out what's happening. And every single gene you have will do completely different things based on the context they find themselves in. So the same gene— so example, there's one gene in fruit flies that can code for something like 28,000 different proteins based on the context it's in. Yeah.

And so, so amazing.

Basically, we're now realizing that all the questions of genetics we were asking— what genes make you— it was a stupid question. It didn't make sense.

Yeah. Yeah, that's, that's awesome. But also, do you know what's really funny? The other place that I've heard that story is from Mary Helen Immordino-Yang in a keynote that she gives.

Yeah. Oh, so it's perfect. So it's good.

We're on the same— we're on the same wavelength somehow.

So that's where now Mary Helen seems to think that that then would mean something for pedagogy. And it just frankly doesn't. Whether you know about epigenetics or not doesn't change how I teach reading, doesn't change the best way to teach kids math. And that becomes the translation issue. So, okay, so let's accept that as read. Here's a simple example of translation: the human brain runs on a single chemical, by and large, sugar. The brain runs on glucose. Awesome. That means tomorrow I need all teachers to be giving sugar to their kids because it's gonna make their brains work better. Now, is that wrong? No, technically that's a complete and utter truth. What it does is that it ignores all the emergent properties that come after it. Yes, if you pump glucose into a brain, the brain works better. Step up to the next level of organization, put a brain with a bunch of other systems to create a person. Now when you pump sugar in, everything upregulates. It's not just the brain that starts going, the muscles start going, the heart starts going, the stomach starts going, and now you start to get a little bit of hyperactivity. Go up to the next level of organization. When you give 30 kids sugar simultaneously, they start to feed off of one another, and now you lose control of the classroom. So it's not that it was wrong, it was simply too far removed from the day-to-day practice And it ignores way too many emergent properties to be useful.

That's so good. And that's particularly good, I think, because we are obsessed with first-order agency, right? First-order cause, like efficient cause, right? And this is one of the things I'll talk to Alicia about next week, is that the Newtonian concept of efficient cause has gone viral, right? That's everywhere.

Yeah.

So actually what you are talking about there is second-order, nth-order cause and effect, right? Or, you know, nonlinear, whatever you want to call it. But that's—

that—

I think that's a really, really important insight about where we're getting things wrong.

Yeah.

And this is where you now start to— and I think this is one of the most important things that I ever figured out and that I hopefully teach— is that that means teachers are experts at pedagogy. Literally no one in the world will understand how to run a classroom like a teacher will, because the emergent properties unique to a classroom can never be understood in a lab. They can't be understood at the global level of education of a district or 10 schools at once. It is— a teacher in a classroom is itself its own unique thing that you can develop expertise in. And by the definition of expertise, the only way you develop expertise is to practice something endlessly. Congratulations, that means teachers, we can finally acknowledge that, yeah, they are experts and we need them to— we need to start respecting them. And then they are the ones who do that final translation. So like in a lab, we say, hey, epigenetics matters. And then a psychologist says, yeah, I think that means people can change their mind. And then a teacher says, cool, let me tell you what that all means in a classroom. Once I got 30 minds all thinking together, because what you'll find is, yeah, if you got one mind, that mind can very easily change itself. If you've got 30 minds all fighting each other, it's much harder to change that mind because it's got a lot more feedback loops. Telling it, no, you can't change. So it's not that it's wrong, it's just there's so many— this, by the way, is the silo issue. People hate the concept of science or thinking being, being siloed up into all these different fields. And so the big movement for about 20 years was interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary, and the joke is, doesn't work, never has worked. You go look at any reviews on the impact of transdisciplinary work in science, and what you'll see is it's not actually happening. When we say something is transdisciplinary, what that really means is I take my expertise, you take your expertise, we come, we talk, and then we go do our own expertise. We go right back into our silos. And it's the emergence problem.

No, that's an interesting point because— so I love what you're saying about practice, I think, and I like— I love what you write in the book about practice, about it being contextualized, naturalistic, and value-laden. I made a note of that because I think that's spot on, right? And I really like way you value that experiential practice-based learning. But I also, just what you were saying there about interdisciplinary, John Vervaeke talks about synoptic integration in cognitive science, and I find that quite interesting because, so he, he's talking about that in relation to the replication crisis in psychology, right? So yeah, that was one of the things I wanted to ask you about, what is, whether psychology is a better basis for making pedagogical educational decisions than biology. But I think there's major issues in psychology with the replication crisis and what he talks about in relation to the— they're not necessarily doing interdisciplinary science, but there's— the fact is that there is a common integrating set of concepts or inquiries that they're moving towards in some kind of complementary way is an important dynamic in cognitive science. So you've got philosophy kind of providing some complementarity to cognitive psychology or to computational science, whatever. So you've got different things kind of almost trading off against each other too, because not one thing can say everything. So I think, I don't know, I just want to say I love that.

I think that's, that's, that's where I love, that's where I sit basically. That's where I think the best, I always tell my new PhD students, you could, you do your entire career without doing another lick of research. There is plenty of research out there for the last 200 years. We don't need more data. What we need is synthesis of that data. We need to find where the overlaps are so we can start to tell some sort of coherent story. And so that's basically what I do with my life now. I'm a translator. I sit in between neuroscience, psychology, education, and now unfortunately AI. And I try and say, okay, where are all the overlaps to say here are the big themes coming out that can help us understand how learning works. And the trick to recognize though is, so that translation doesn't require interdisciplinary. It requires knowledge of each of the disciplines, so you can kind of draw bridges, but the disciplines stay the same. And if you ever really get to true interdisciplinary work, what happens is you end up building a new silo. And this is, again, this is the— if you ever want to read, this is the Feyerabend problem. So we had— so cognitive science is an umbrella term, kind of like philosophy. If you told a philosopher, I study philosophy, they'd be like, The hell are you talking about? That doesn't mean anything. Cognitive science is just an umbrella term. Underneath it, you have all these individual silos. And at one point you had neuroscience and you had psychology and people said, hey, why don't we bring those two together? So neuroscience, cognitive neuroscience, and cognitive psychology should fit together. And they didn't. We went from having two fields, neuroscience and psychology, to having three fields: neuroscience, psychology, and cognitive neuroscience. Or behavioral psych, as you might hear it said sometimes. So basically, by squishing these two together, we didn't bridge anything. We just built a whole new field that you can now get a degree in, and you will not be a psychologist, you will not be a neuroscientist, you will be this. And, and that makes sense though, is in order to do work at any level, because of those emergent properties, you need to have your unique definitions, you have to have your unique tools, you have to have your unique boundaries. What is a relevant question? What is an irrelevant question? What constitutes data? What does not count as data? And once we start to bleed those, that's where things get confusing. Is so like my favorite is so John Hattie, right? Visible Learning. And Marzano does the same thing here. Dunlosky does the same thing in the UK. I love these guys. We know each other. They're, they're awesome human beings. But a lot of people forget they're not teachers. They're not pulling out data from a classroom. They're pulling out data from academic research. And because they're statisticians, there are only certain things that are accepted as viable data for them. And for them, it has to be a quantifiable thing. You have to be able to count it. You have to be able to turn it into some sort of value. You have to be able to rank it, so on and so forth.

Yeah.

A lot of people think, well, that means then, cool, that's the evidence we must use in classrooms. And you go, well, no, every field gets to determine and define its own source of evidence. Just because statisticians do not accept anecdote as evidence, does that mean no field gets to accept anecdotal evidence? It's now done. No, that means anthropologists come in and say, sweet, anecdote is all I care about. I don't want to count a damn thing. Lawyers come in and say, I don't care about either of those things. I need precedent. Every field decides it has its own unique system that it works within. And that's what makes interdisciplinary so hard. And that's what makes translation so hard. Just because the brain acts a certain way, and it does, that never can dictate what we do in a classroom. That has nothing to say about how we want to structure education. At a cultural level. Just because epigenetics is real, and it absolutely is, so what? It's been real for 2,000 years. That has absolutely nothing to say about what we want from our children. Imagine it wasn't real. Would that change our conversation at all right now? No, it has nothing to say about what we're trying to achieve at the sociological level.

No, absolutely. I mean, I Absolutely take that. So what does, I suppose, would be my curiosity then? Like, on what basis can we make valid claims, normative claims, about education?

This is where I'm going to put a big split, is when we say education, that's going to constitute two different things. One is learning, one is teaching. And I think when it comes to learning, we can make very specific claims about learning from any field that hopefully when we pool neuro, when we pull physics, when we pull psychology, when we pull all those things together, hopefully we will be seeing some patterns that seem to be across the board that we can say, yes, regardless of emergent properties, this seems to be a key pattern of how attention works. Regardless of the emergent properties, this seems to be how memory works. This seems to be how people move through the learning process. Learning is completely different than teaching, unfortunately. I could know everything about learning and be an absolutely horrible teacher. So the two are dissociable. This is the theory versus practice. I can know everything about learning, but having to walk someone through that learning process, totally different thing. So if we're talking about now pedagogy— what do I do in a classroom to move kids through that process— that data can only and will only ever come from classrooms. That has to come. And this is one of the biggest— I don't want to say problems, but one of the biggest issues right now we have in education is teaching is the only expertise I know of. That doesn't have a body of knowledge backing it up. Every other field that I— even plumbing. If you say, hey, what do you do as a plumber? They can point to a bookshelf and say, there's the last 300 years of plumbing. Read all of that, then I'll tell you how— what we're doing. Neuroscience, there's a whole library over there. Read that and you're going to start where I'm at. Teaching, we just never documented any of our work. We've had thousands of years of incredible work done in pedagogy and no one wrote a thing down. So we're stuck in this spot where we have no body of knowledge upon which to start looking for those patterns to say, wait a second, maybe there are ways to think about pedagogy that are very consistent and very effective. We just never collected the damn data.

And yeah, no, that's, that is interesting. And I mean, I don't know if you know Gert Biester's work, but I really enjoy his take on that in, in the fact that education definitely has its own integrity. It's, you know, it's not an instrument for other things. It has its own coherence and integrity. And to your point, it has never really valued that to the extent that it has then become a discipline in itself. It's always just something that serves, you know, back to our earlier point, right? It just serves as an instrument of society or culture or the economy or industry, whatever.

And maybe that's why it is such an easy scapegoat, because if you wanted to blame neuroscience, you'd— in order to blame us for everything, you'd have to somehow square that blame with the last 100 years of data. If you wanted to blame industry, you'd have to somehow square that blame with the last 100 years of output from industry. If you want to blame education, you don't have to square it with anything. You can say anything you want about education, and we're just like, okay, I guess you're right.

And everybody's got an opinion, right? Because everybody went to school.

Bingo, bingo.

This is true. This is good, man. So I can't finish without asking you about edtech, because I just want to let you loose just for a few minutes. So you recently brought out a video called What? Why the Edtech Revolution Has Failed. Is that right?

The Case Against Computers, Smartphones, and AI.

Yep.

There we go. So clearly this is gonna, you know, with, with advanced AI and all of the stuff we've seen over the last 18 months, complete hysteria around tech and education again. So lay it out for me, the 3-minute version.

Here's the big thesis: there has not been a shred of evidence over the last 40 years to suggest that edtech improves learning, and there has been a lot of evidence to show that it harms learning. And it's not just me, the OECD will flat out say it, J-PAL will say any research organization you see, once you start pooling the data, you realize any time you bring edtech into a situation, digital technology, learning goes down. Now, people always get miffed at me. What about the kid who can't read? I'm not an idiot, man. That's called common sense. If you've got a kid who literally will not be able to engage with something outside of tech, then of course you use tech. It's not an all or nothing. If you have no other option, like during COVID lockdown, then you use tech because something will always be better than nothing. But as soon as you go to normal situations and you have a choice, do I do tech do I not do tech? Not doing tech works better 10 times out of 10. And this is for reading, this is for writing, this is for learning, this is for simulation, this is for math. Everything we look at. In fact, there was a paper came out a couple years ago, it was my favorite one. It was looking at moderators in tertiary, so college settings. They looked at 50 different pedagogies, things you can use. The worst, anything digital tech. They said if you invest your money in anything other than digital tech, your learning will go up compared to digital tech. Now that doesn't mean you can't learn from tech. Again, we can. It just means that it's worse than everything else we've ever seen. And I always say it. And so like people are like, eh, but it's good. Look, just show me the data. A, I'm totally happy to have this discussion. I just had this discussion literally 2 weeks ago with like the top guy. I won't say his name because I love him to death, so I won't. Him, put him on the spot, the like head guy in AI right now around the world. He's everywhere talking about artificial intelligence and education. And it took me all of 30 minutes for him to say, you're actually right. I'm like, I know I am. It's because I'm not making this stuff up. Whereas you're just talking about promises. You're talking about what education might be someday, what AI could possibly do. I'm talking about what it's actually doing. And there is no evidence that it's ever done anything of benefit when it comes to student learning. So now I, I just, I would have to point out so people, so you know why the reason why tech and it's all digital tech is so bad for learning. It's not that you can't use it for learning. It's that we already lost the battle. If computers only existed in schools, they would probably be the best learning tool we ever created. They'd be absolutely incredible. But the second computers entered the home and more importantly started to enter our pockets, They no longer became a learning tool. Now people realized, wait a second, I can use this for things not learning. I can use it to watch movies. I can use it to listen to music. I can. And what happens is students now spend over 2,000 hours a year basically multitasking on a computer. That's all they do. They just jump between random things, social media, all this. They only spend about 200 hours trying to learn. So now when I say, hey kids, time to learn, they have literally spent thousands of hours depending on how old they are. They might have spent up to 20,000 hours training themselves literally not to learn on this tool. And now I come in and say, time to learn. They'll make it about 5 to 10 minutes and then they go right back to doing what they know how to do on that tool, which is futz around. But if I were to give you a book instead of a screen and say, read this, no one has trained themselves to do anything other than read on that. So I can choose not to read. But my other option is better just sit down and do it. So you still have the engagement issue, but tech, you have this new issue of, uh-oh, I'm trying to overcome something that you've spent decades building and it's just not going to happen biologically. They're already tuned to do one thing with it.

And it's, I mean, that's the attention wars, isn't it? I mean, it's one of the things that's interesting is that schooling then engages or almost has to engage in a race to the bottom with the tech in the fight for attention.

Right.

And that, that's an incredibly, I mean, you know, you see it all the time playing out and people will reach for different pieces of evidence to justify either side of the argument. But you know, the banning mobile phones in schools now, almost to put a stake in the ground to say that actually we don't wanna play that game anymore. We don't want to fight. Or maybe actually, maybe they are still playing that game, but they're just going authoritarian and just saying I think we're going to create a safe space away from it.

We're sick of being a guinea pig. We're basically beta testers. These companies come out with these new edtech tools, they have enough money to pump it into all of us, they don't know the first thing about learning, and they certainly don't know anything about pedagogy. And so they pump it in. Now we as teachers have to waste our time figuring it out. How much time did you waste with virtual chalkboards? Those— remember those digital whiteboards? Freaking sucked. Pokémon Go, AR goggles, all these random things are thrown at us. They're just like, we can make money in edtech. We become the beta testers, the kids become a guinea pig, and 2 years later when we realize we just harmed their learning for 2 years, here's the next product, and we just keep cycling. And I like that. I like the idea that with smartphones at least, I think that's gonna be step 1. I think post-smartphones, people are gonna start hard banning 1-to-1 laptops, which they should, The data on 1-to-1 laptops is filth. You would hear— here's a little tidbit for you. If you invest in air conditioning, make sure every classroom in your school has air conditioning, you will see better learning than if you insist every kid has a laptop. We get better learning results from temperature than we do from 1-to-1 laptops. That's how bad those things become. So I think eventually we're going to see that phased out, and then we're going to see people banning computers wholesale. And I think it was Switzerland just did it, and people were up in arms like, why are you banning tech? And they said, it's for learning purposes. The data suggests that it's just not helping learning. Let's go back to the things that we know are gonna be more meaningful when it comes to learning.

Yeah. No, I mean, the distraction issue is just rife and, and monstrous, isn't it? But the, I mean, the other thing that is clear is that a lot of the conversations around some of these 21st century skills are significantly corrupted by the initial push in the early 2000s by the big tech companies to create the coalition of 21st century skills because it would create the next generation of customers by getting these laptops into schools. So I think there is something, again, it's just, you know, you can't remove any of these conversations from the economic considerations, the industrial, the cultural, the, you know, all of those things, the glo— you know, as you said, the globalization. There's so many agendas at play that even the whole concept of 21st century skills, which I know you love.

My favorite, it's my favorite thing in the world.

Is tainted right from the beginning because Cisco and Dell and Apple and all of the, you know, all of these big tech companies with the US government in this 21st century skills coalition.

That's what a lot of people don't recognize is the whole 21st century skills movement, creativity, curiosity, critical thinking, communication. Those were selected by tech companies for the express purpose. They flat out in 2001, they selected those 4 competencies and said, because these competencies are important to our employees right now, and they will be more important to our employees in the future. So the 21st century skills movement is the Prussian factory model of education, just new. We only adopted them in schools to make sure kids were more employable once they graduated. And I love it because a lot of progressive educators, they hang their hat on these. They're like, this is the future of education. We don't want to go back to just making workers. We want to make humans. I'm like, dude, you're literally making workers. That was the entire reason we adopted that in the first place. So I have nothing against 21st century skills. I think creativity and curiosity is fine. I love all that stuff. It's just pull it back. Why are we doing it? And you'll see a lot of what we're serving, the master we're serving isn't the one we think we are. Are. And there's reasons. So does that mean we don't focus on creativity? No, of course it does. But it means we start to do it in a context that's somewhat different than the outside. This is what I like. I think hospitals are really good— not in the US, everywhere else— insulating themselves from the larger context. They are an institution that no matter what is going on around them, they seem to be able to build their own little narrative. Here's what we're doing here, in you come. I think schools could be doing the same thing. I think we have the potential to insulate ourselves from that bigger picture once we build a narrative. Why are we here? What is it we are literally trying to do? Once we build that narrative— and I don't just mean a wish and a dream, I'm talking about a capital N narrative— this is something— in order for something to be a narrative, basically a narrative has to be able to explain the past. How did we get here? It has to be able to situate your identity in the present. What are we doing here now? And it has to be able to basically predict or guide the future. What does that mean the next step needs to be? So a lot of people say school should be about finding yourself. That's not a narrative. That's, that's awesome, but that's not a narrative. School should be about kids actualizing themselves. That's not a narrative. That's wonderful, but you're basically saying nothing. So once we come up with, like, right now the narrative being used in schools is the narrative being used in the culture, economic consumers. The history of the world can be understood by workers and non-workers, by people making products, people using products. Right now your job is to figure out what are the best skills needed to bank, to build the next product. In the future we're going to build more pro— and that's the reason why it's so powerful. It's a beautiful narrative. I don't love it, but it works perfectly well until we can come up with a counter-narrative. Once we do, then I think we can insulate school. It can become like medicine. It can become its own little thing where when you're in this world, we're not always being pushed by the outside. We're now doing our thing.

So I'm having a problem right now remembering all of the pieces of that you've just said that I disagree with. So I'm gonna try, I'm gonna try. Right. First thing, it's not working very well for the planet, right?

Yeah.

So there are externalizations that are fundamentally exterminating for a species, for many species, for the human species potentially. So there's, so there's, there's that piece. Yes, it might work to make a whole bunch of people richer. It might bring living standards up. Cost of that, you know, is potentially species extinction, right?

Oh, you, you're talking about the, the economic consumer narrative.

Sorry. Yes.

Oh yes. Oh, I hate it. Oh, I'm with you. I completely hate it.

So there's that point. I think going back, I've never, I've never heard that comparison with the hospital or the, you know, the kind of medical framing. And I think that's interesting, but I think So I, I would agree with you that there is clearly so much disagreement about the narratives in education.

Yeah.

I'm not optimistic that any of that will ever go away because I think there is so much skin in the game in education as to why we need this to play all these other roles in our lives, right? Fundamentally because we love our children so much, we want all these things for them and then we want the education system to provide all those things for them, right? So I think it comes from, comes from a place of love actually. But the comparison with the hospital, I think is, so my wife was a midwife and we had a conversation off air about our children and the damage and the violence that the narrative of bio, the biomedical model does to women in labor as one example. And there are many other examples. So I, I just raised that point because I think, yes, to have a strong narrative is protective, but then it's also, it's incredibly myopic in the way that it excludes and violently potentially excludes.

So it can be potentially dangerous.

Exactly.

Absolutely.

And hey, don't, don't take my argument to mean I love the medical model, but I was, I, I'm 100% with you. All, basically most of what medicine does and this is why I say especially in the US, it's totally irrelevant, and now it's driven by money. So what I— the problem was, but at least there was a unified system there. No longer in the US is there one, because now it's opened its doors basically to for-profit models, and so everything is just kind of screwy now here. But if you go elsewhere— but so I'm thinking, so I guess your kind of counter is then this, is let's run school without a narrative. In which case, narrative hates a vacuum. If there's ever a vacuum, something's gonna come in. And so long as we don't have a clear narrative, we will use the larger narrative around us. And so the larger narrative around us is social consumers.

So true.

We do.

It's economic consumers. So true. No, I completely agree with that, but I would, I guess I'm, as I said, I'm just not optimistic that we can generate a narrative because that narrative can't be a top-down narrative, right? Because so it has to be a bottom-up narrative that emerges to use your language from earlier. You can't impose a top-down narrative on, on the education system.

If you— you can. Catholic education, Islamic or Jewish education, military— these are examples of education, of schooling, that everyone, when we talk about education, we tend to kind of like leave. Like the Jewish schools, we never talk about the Jewish schools. They're fantastic, and they freaking are. If you go down to Australia, I got to work with some of them. They're the top schools in every state across the board. And the reason is, is because they're insulated. They have a very clear narrative, which I think is top-down. I— that's tricky to see where religion would come in, but it's so interesting to see how they're, they're inoculated against so much crap because it's very clear that if you go to that school, here's what we're gonna be doing. So maybe it's not that we need to find the narrative for education. Maybe we now go into what you were talking about earlier. What if there are dozens of narratives? Yeah, and but you're very clear on what those narratives are so that if you choose to go in that education, that is going to be the narrative you are going to be following.

So that I'm much more inclined to agree with you on because I think, so like, that's one example. I've been voyeuristically fascinated by Michaela Community School in London, which is run by Catherine Birbal-Singh, who's like Britain's strictest headteacher, right?

Yep.

Amazing. Always in the newspapers, always controversy, so much hate directed towards the school, incredible results. Like amazing, amazing example of a strong narrative as you're talking about, right? There's a unifying narrative and, and some people will argue that it's completely oppressive as a narrative, but it's working in adver— in commerce in terms of value add and, you know, incredible academic results for young people from really deprived socioeconomic groups within London. It's fascinating what's going on there. But my feeling about that, I would never send my children right? Personally, I would never want my children to go there. And I'm not saying therefore it's fine for other people's children. What I'm saying is there's something about the strength of the narrative that provides coherence as an attractive— like, you know, you get this coherence in this organization, in this community of people. And that actually is what we were talking about, as you, you know, you brought in the Aboriginal communities. I think there was much more internal coherence at those times, pre-colonial times, and therefore that coherence provides a lot of stability and a lot of clarity around the kinds of decisions that we're going to make together, et cetera, et cetera. It almost doesn't matter what kind, where the narrative is coming from in a way.

It's the strength of it.

But the strength of it.

And what that does is that gives you a common thing to start bouncing your ideas against. Now we have a common measure that we can talk to. And I think you— I love everything you're just talking about because that most of the debates we have in education are form. There are debates about form. What— how do I teach? What is my pedagogy? Do I follow this framework? Do I follow this? Is it Ganag? Is it VL? What am I going to do? And I've always found those totally irrelevant because we have nothing to assess that against. You can argue form cows come home, and we will, and we do. And it will continue to go on like this, just spinning wheel, because there is no narrative to pin them to, to say, we don't know. But if you had a strong narrative, now watch all those debates of form become really meaningful, is now we have something to say. What would be the better pedagogy for this outcome? What pedagogy better suits the narrative we are building here? And without that narrative, that's why I think when you have multiple narratives in one school or one or no clear narrative, You just get a bunch of people talking about, this is the right way to teach. No, this is the right way to teach. This is the right way. And it's all just spitting in the wind.

Absolutely.

Until we have something to put it against.

Yeah. And I would also say when you then scale out to the more meta level of that, what you want, what you want, I don't know, it's not necessarily a normative claim, but there's something about the resilience of the diversity of that ecosystem of education.

Right. Yeah.

So actually what evolution does do is it creates pluralism, right? This isn't relativism. This is like the resilience comes from the diversity, right? And that I think is one of the biggest things that we have lost with the industrialization of one version of what education can be, is we've lost that ability to have different communities doing different things with differently strong narratives about the thing that they're doing. Because, yeah, and sure, that's not easy because you've got a— there's potential conflicts that arise between them. But you know, that's human beings, right, showing up.

Look, I could see that. I could see that if you had, say, 15 different schooling models with 15 different narratives, and it all kind of— they all basically holding each other up in society. The trick then we're going to come back to is— and it's where I always start— is I still feel like learning and teaching is going very similar in all those schools. Sure, the narrative is going to be different, but I don't think the system is gonna change all that drastically. We're just gonna have a reason for it. And if you think about it, they exist now. We have art school, we have that here where you learn a trade, vocational, vocational training. We've got flight school, which is basically entrepreneurial school here. We've got religious schools, we've got military academies, we've got different narratives going on now. It's just I think we're all talking about that one which would be called basically public education, and that has no narrative right now. That's the one that's just kind of floundering. So I think it'd be interesting if we got a bunch of narratives and everyone got into that. It would still look industrial. It would still look the same. I don't see it like magically looking any different. It would just be being done for unique purposes, which might then inspire kids to engage more, which might inspire the teachers to want to teach more, whatever it's going to be. And I think that would all be a benefit., but I don't think that's significantly a different type of education.

And it's probably, it's probably just semantics, but, or, or rhetorical, but I would say they, that is not necessarily industrial. It's deeply human. There's something very human about people coming together in place to support and nurture and socialize children and all of, you know, all of that stuff we've just talked about. I just, I don't like the word industrial cuz it sounds cheap.

I think we're doing that now. But I know, I hear you. I hear you. If we did it for more specific purposes, we were more clear on why we're doing it, it becomes more humanistic because everyone has a reason to be there and to want to be there.

And to, I would say, to invoke Zack again, Zack Stein, he talks about using technology in a way that creates more opportunities for face-to-face connection, not less.

Which in itself becomes another pie in the sky. I cannot tell you how many arguments are like, This is what technology could do. These are the promissory arguments about how we should be using technology. The— my least favorite word in the English language is potential. Potential is literally what a human being isn't. If you say this kid has potential, you're telling me what that kid is not doing right now. If you say this tool has potential, great, you're telling me that it's not doing that. So what is it actually doing? And the one thing it's doing is driving a wedge between us. The one thing it is not doing is facilitating face-to-face interaction.

Sure. So there's some empiricism there, but I think going back to your genome example, there's a whole bunch of potential in the human genome, right? It's full of potential.

Exactly.

There's potential. Based on context.

So let me know what context you're in. You could have all the potential. That was like with the gifted and talented programs, they're like, find the kids with high potential. Hell are you talking about? Why don't you select the kids that are doing the best work? If a kid is showing you that they're doing something, surely that's going to be more important than the kid who should be showing you they're doing something but isn't doing it. It. I'm working on a documentary right now on genius. So there's 6 episodes. The first 3 basically deal with genius as a trait. Genius is something you are. Genius is something you have. And all the arguments for genius as potential are genetic. They come from the brain, they come from IQ, these ideas of intelligence, and they all fall apart. You push, you just give it the smallest push, and all of those things fall right down. And at some point, you got to stop saying 'Who are geniuses?' And you gotta start saying, 'What do all geniuses do?' Not, 'What do they all share in common?' What is the one thing they all do in common? And when you make the switch from potential to action, then all of a sudden it becomes really easy to make sense of what genius is. How does creativity work? Where does all this come from? And so that's— when it comes to human beings, I love this, the potential idea. We all have potential to be a tadpole, man. You got the genes to be anything you freaking want to be. I'm not interested in that. What I'm interested in is the actuality. What are you doing right now? And that's the only thing I can hang my hat on. So when people come and say tech can be the equalizer, great, hadn't done it so far. Maybe it could, maybe it will someday in the future, but why should I adopt it until you can clearly demonstrate how, when, why to make it work the way you want it to?

Yeah, yeah, no, I think that, I think that's fair. I guess that I would also though say that there are different bases on which we make decisions. And I, what I hear from you and what I see, you know, in a lot of your work, you're coming from a science, a scientist's frame of empirical data. And you know, there's, that's not values-free, right? That's not ideology-free either. Yeah. Right. So I guess all I would say is in conversations around any of the things we've talked about, there are other ways, ethical or, you know, values-based ways to make decisions. Yeah, that are not necessarily empirical, but that doesn't— that doesn't therefore make them wrong. No, unless you are only using science as a measuring stick on which to decide whether things are right or wrong.

It simply makes it different. And but the thing that where I push back, I got no problem. Believe it or not, I'm a scientist who hates science. My final book that I'm going to write in about 10 years is going to show why science is basically nonsense. There are dozens of other ways to understand the world, but where I stand is all of those ways still have to have their own definition of evidence. They cannot just be words. They have to be words matched with some way to measure those words or assess those words, bounce those words off of something to see if those words are actually ringing true.

Is—

isn't that bringing in a science? I, you know, I suppose this is a more general point that it's important for me not to let the scientific frame, yeah, pervade everything. Because I think that does happen in education. We, we end up making decisions on the basis of what we can measure. And if we can't measure it, we can't see it, it's not explicit, it doesn't exist, and therefore we don't do it. And that's a—

what—

that's one way of being in the world and interacting with the world, but it's a very narrow —way of—

It is a very narrow, but that's the problem with scale, and maybe that's the industrial aspect that you dislike about school is if I had a classroom with one kid, I can do literally anything I want to. I got no one to answer to. I got no one to show. But as soon as I have 100 kids and I've got 100 teachers I need to answer to and a government that's going to fund me, all of a sudden they're going to ask for, how do you know the impact you're having? And I totally believe— how do I know I love my daughter? There's no way to prove that. But my God, I hope my behaviors show it. If you ever had to measure it, you're not going to measure it through chemicals in my blood. You're going to measure it by saying, you know what, he's there, he does this, he's trying this. We're going to use that as a proxy for what we hope is love. And that's, I guess, kind of the big trick with education. So believe it or not, I'm not a big proponent of measuring. So if you take a course with me at uni on the very first day of the course, I will tell everyone in the classroom, you have an A+ in my class and I'm not lying. Congratulations, we're done. If you do not want to be here, you don't have to be here anymore. Everyone gets an A+ and 40% of my kids will never come back and they get an A+. I don't care. I'm not lying. I literally have given out the grade before we've even started. Now that we're past that bullshit, let's learn. Now we learn, now we talk. And so believe it or not, I'm not measuring a thing. I got no love for tests. I hate standardized tests. I think it's all nonsense. But while I'm learning and we're teaching, there are certain things that I'm going to be looking for and I'll never know. Like, I want my kids to say, understand this topic. The problem is I don't know if anyone understands anything. I don't even know if I understand it. So the best I can do is say, I believe someone who understands this topic should be able to point that out to me, or should be able to do this. And so I am looking for behaviors that I hope are proxies for these internal things, simply because I will never see inside of my kid's body. It's off-limits to me. And I think that's kind of the The biggest trick about education is we work in a humanistic field. We care about cognition, we care about emotions, we care about love, we care about sense of identity. And that's all I want to do. I don't know how to understand if I'm pushing you in the right direction unless I have some behavior to bounce it off of. So we work in a cognitive kind of realm, but we're stuck in a behavioral world. And so the best I can ever do is say, I think if you've started to establish an identity, you should be able to push back against me when I make this argument. And maybe you haven't got an identity, but for me, that's where I'm like, cool, I've done my job, off you go. So we're all measuring something. Yeah. And it's not the direct thing. Like, we will never measure intelligence, we'll never measure love, we'll never measure passion, we'll never measure well-being. Those things are off the table. So what we do is we look for behaviors and we hope we're going in the right direction. I want to see my kid be able to do the alphabet, and if I do, I'm going to assume that means she understands the off of that.

100%. No, I mean, I'm with you, man. And so, so the approximation, the hope and the approximation that you're talking about there requires, demands, I think, humility from everybody in the conversation. And that's what I don't see a lot of in the education space because everybody suddenly has their dogmatic answer about how things should be. But yeah, what you've just described, I completely agree. I think we are all to some extent, you know, fumbling around to try and get to some approximations of the things that we value and we want to see more of. And so therefore, humility has got to be a big part of the way we show up to do that.

I like that. I can get behind that 100%. I know I don't sound humble. I hope I am. I'll work on my humility. Beautiful. No, no, no.

This is awesome, man. And yeah, let's stop while we agree on something. That's good.

Perfect. Dude, thank you so much for this talk. This has been awesome. I've really enjoyed this.

Good night. Thank you, Josh. Good stuff.

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