Cleverlands


By Lucy Crehan (2018)

Subtitled "The Secrets Behind the Success of the World's Education Superpowers", Crehan visited five of the top performing countries in the PISA checklist: Finland, Singapore, Japan, China and Canada.    Despite the superficial differences in education policy in the above countries, there are indeed lessons to be drawn from the exercise.  For example:  you can't build problem solving excellence in a vacuum - you need the expertise in the content.   All of the above systems, one way or another, help young people to build that expertise and the related problem solving ability.

In the last chapter, the author derives five key lessons from what she has seen.  Broadly speaking, the greater the respect for the neuroscience and the culture in which children are raised, the more successful the schooling.

It turns out the author has had some advisory role in the Department for Education in the UK, but sadly as yet, the department doesn't appear to have taken the lessons on board since they would otherwise have abolished Ofsted immediately and the curriculum would have been narrowed and deepened. (It has become way too broad in recent years to allow for the development of deep understanding and mastery in anything).  It is a horrible shame that UK policy makers haven't learnt anything from this book.

9/10


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Only Skill that Matters

Image
By Jonathan A. Levi (2019) One minor quibble I have about "The Only Skill That Matters" is that the title only accurately describes the contents if you take it as meaning, "How to Learn Efficiently", even though this overarching skill is subsequently broken down into quite a few distinct sub-skills that need to be acquired in different ways.   Having said that, all of what the author says makes a huge amount of sense, even if you will have seen most of it somewhere else already.  He rehashes the inspirational work of Harry Lorayne  on how to use visual mnemonics, discusses the various applications of the Pareto Principle, (that 80% of the benefits accrue for 20% of the input), about how to manage motivation, speed reading, pre-reading, the inter-related nature of knowledge, aka cross-pollination, the benefits of the brute force approach, self-quizzing and teaching, all of which we have come across before elsewhere but it is all condensed very neatly and a...
Read more

The War for Kindness: Building Empathy in a Fractured World

Image
by Jamil Zaki (2019) This is a clarion call for maximisation of the very best of human qualities, and given the increasing alienation, unhappiness and general antipathy that ail us, along with the global problems we face, this call doesn't come a moment too soon. It is an essential read - important for everyone - parents, policy makers and leaders of all sorts. Rating 10/10. 
Read more

The Little Book of Stoicism

Image
by Jonas Salzgeber (2019) This should be required reading for everyone on the planet.  It is a gem - a perfect summation of a perfect moral philosophy.  For many of my generation who, somewhere along the line, have lost their religious faith and with it have lost the nuggets of moral wisdom that were buried amongst the rubbish, this is what we have been waiting for. Most of the atheism of the generation of Dawkins and Hitchens was about the repudiation of theism and whilst we could agree whole-heartedly with that, we were left high and dry as regards to how to live our lives without a god of some description telling us what to do. And yet it was here all along!  The Stoics had worked it all out well before Christianity came on the scene, and it is infuriating that on account of the fact that Stoicism sounds all rather miserable and stiff upper lip, I had never thought to look it up before.  But miserablist it really isn't and in this regard, it mis-sells it...
Read more