My teacher was an excellent instructor, and I’m grateful for everything he taught me. But that day, by telling us there was a “trick,” he sent us the wrong message. There are no tricks. There never were any and there never will be. Believing in the existence of tricks is as toxic as believing in the existence of truths that are counterintuitive by

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They concluded that the ancillary benefits of “mental discipline” were “mythological” and that general skills, like memorization, were not nearly as transferable as had once been thought. “Pedagogues quickly realized that Thorndike’s experiments had undermined the rationale for the traditional curriculum,” writes the historian of education Diane

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