Do not go stupid into that pumping blood

Learning to think is all about what another 20th-century philosopher, Karl Popper, came later to call ‘conjectures and refutations’. Everyday problem solving, suggested Dewey (and Popper), comprises a process a bit like going into a coconut shy: you put ideas up and you do your best to knock them down again; you shouldn’t just accept the first idea

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In the 1600s, John Amos Comenius, who is often referred to as “the grandfather of modern education” called schools “the slaughterhouse of the mind,” where he saw them devoted primarily to the boring and sometimes brutally-enforced study of Latin by “stuffing and flogging”. He went on to argue for education to follow “the lead of nature. A rational ... See more

we found that students exposed to smartboards and digital content actually fared worse in mathematics and writing compared to their peers in classrooms without digital tools.

The reasons were sobering. Teachers had not been adequately trained in using these technologies. Mathematics, which requires cognitive scaffolding and immediate feedback, suffe... See more