"Religion for atheists" by Alain de Botton

This wonderful book ends with the statement that: “The wisdom of the faiths belongs to all of mankind, even the most rational among us, and deserves to be selectively reabsorbed by the supernatural’s greatest enemies. Religions are intermittently too useful, effective and intelligent to be abandoned to the religious alone.” (10.iii.3) It proposes that the secular world learns how religions pass on their message, which is, after all, a message intended to support the fragile human psyche through its many times of troubles, in order to enable such support without the use of the supernatural. He asserts that religions are fundamentally false (“No one intent on starting a new religion from scratch in the modern era would dream of proposing anything as hoary and improbable as the rituals and precepts bequeathed to us by our ancestors.”; 10.ii.1), that they were invented, but he then suggests that: “We invented religions to serve two central needs ... first, the need to live together in communities in harmony, despite our deeply rooted selfish and violent impulses. And second, the need to cope with terrifying degrees of pain which arise from our vulnerability to professional failure, to troubled relationships, to the death of loved ones and too our decay and demise.” (1.2) Given that these needs still exist, we need to develop secular systems which will promote social harmony and support vulnerable individuals without the mumbo-jumbo.

Then, in eloquent writing which sometimes reaches the heights of lyrical beauty, he proposes how this can be done.

Community
“One of the losses modern society feels most keenly is that of a sense of community. We tend to imagine that there once existed a degree of neighbourliness which has been replaced by ruthless anonymity.” (2.i.1) He recognises that this is partly due to overcrowding: “Whereas the Bedouin whose tent surveys a hundred kilometres of desolate sand has the psychological wherewithal to offer each stranger a warm welcome, his urban contemporaries, though at heart no less well meaning or generous, must - in order to preserve a modicum of inner serenity - give no sign of even noticing the millions of humans eating, sleeping, arguing, copulating and dying only centimetres away from them all sides.” (2.i.2)  But churches are places where strangers from all walks of life meet. Often they are beautiful places. People are instructed to move together: when to kneel, when to stand or sit, when to sing together, when to listen. Importantly, the weakest are welcomed as well as the strongest. And he points out that the Christian mass began as a meal: “Sitting down at a table with a group of strangers has the incomparable and off benefit of making it a little more difficult to hate them with impunity. Prejudice and ethnic strife feed off abstraction. However the proximity required by a meal ... disrupts our ability to cling to the belief that the outsiders who wear unusual clothes and speak in distinctive accents deserve to be sent home or assaulted.” (2.i.6) 

Apologies

AdB suggests that we institutionalize apologies, as with the Jewish Day of Atonement or the Catholic Confession. He suggests that we are all nasty in some ways to other people and this causes two lots of suffering:

• “As victims of hurt, we frequently don't bring up what ails us, because so many wounds look absurd in the light of day. It appals our reason to face up to how much we suffer from the missing invitation or the unanswered letter, how many hours of torment we've given to the unkind remark.” (2.ii.2)
• If we have offended we may “feel intolerably guilty” so that we “run away from our victims and act with strange rudeness towards them” so making them suffer twice. (2.ii.2)

One problem is that we don't like being told we are naughty by someone else. It provokes the 'who do you think you are' response and one of the flaws of religions is that often the priest is promoted as Mr Perfect Pants. “Among religions’ more unpalatable features is the tendency of their clergies to speak to people as if they, and they alone, were in possession of maturity and moral authority.” (3.i.7) AdB argues that the concept of Original Sin is that we are all flawed. “The doctrine of original sin encourages us to inch towards moral improvement by understanding the faults we despise in ourselves are inevitable features of the species. We can therefore admit to them candidly and attempt to rectify them in the light of day. The doctrine knows that shame is not a helpful emotion for us to be weighed down with as we work towards having a little less to be ashamed about.”. (3.i.7)

He then proposes that in order to get the message across we need to institutionalize the secular church. He shows how institutions have vastly more wealth, and power, and influence than even the greatest individual thinker. He contrasts the cottage industry of wellness gurus with the brand recognition of the church. He suggests we advertise our secular beliefs by beautiful paintings, for example, and by beautiful architecture. (I take issue with his idea that beauty somehow equates with goodness: there is sufficient cult today of beautiful people and the downside of beauty = goodness is to suggest that the ugly should be shunned; besides, his two pictures contrasting a protestant chapel with a Roman Catholic chapel are presumably intended to suggested that the lush ornamentation of the RC ceiling is preferable whereas I personally prefer the elegance of the protestant building; beauty is even more individual perhaps than ethics.)

He considers the universities should have the duty to teach courses in eg How to have a successful marriage, and How to Die, and that these courses should be illustrated with extracts from great literature but he sees that the present universities have missed their way by considering literature as texts to be studied rather than improving moral works: “We are by no means lacking in material which we might call into service to replace the holy texts; we are simply treating that material in the wrong way. We are unwilling to consider secular culture ... as a source of guidance.” (4.i.4) “The redesigned universities of the future would draw upon the same rich catalogue of culture treated by their traditional counterparts ... but they would teach this material with a view to illuminating students lives ... Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary would that be assigned in a course on understanding the tensions of marriage ... Epicurus and Seneca would appear in a syllabus for a course about dying.” (4.i.7)

He also suggests that universities, by relying on a single method of transmission, the (often boring) lecture, have missed the goal. 

• “Christianity pictures the mind as a sluggish and fickle organ ... the central issue for education is not so much how to counteract ignorance as how we can combat our reluctance to act upon ideas which we have already fully understood at a theoretical level. It follows the Greek sophists in insisting that all lessons should appeal to both reason (logos) and emotion (pathos)” (4.ii.1) 
• “Ever since Plato attacked the Greek sophists for being more concerned with speaking well than thinking honestly, Western intellectuals have been intransigently suspicious of eloquence.” (4.ii.2)
• “Secular education will never succeed in reaching its potential until humanities lecturers are sent to be trained by African-American Pentecostal preachers.” (4.ii.3)

Finally he proposes that we lack perspective, being insufficiently pessimistic about our powerlessness in the face of the cosmos. This is interesting given that others suggest that it was the Coperbnican revolution that displaced mankind and the earth from its position of centrality in the Universe. But de Botton states:

•  “Our secular world ... surreptitiously invites us to think of the present moment as the summit of history” (7.2)
• “Being put in our place by something larger, older, greater than ourselves is not a humiliation; it should be accepted as a relief from our insanely hopeful ambitions for our lives.” (7.3) 

Other important ideas

• “In the past, we got to know others because we have no option but to ask them for help” because there were no social safety nets. “We are from a purely financial point of view greatly more generous than our ancestors ever were, surrendering up to half of that income for the common good” but this is through taxation which tends to leave us resentful imagining that “our money is being used to support unnecessary bureaucracies” rather than considering “those less fortunate members of the policy for whom our taxes also buy clean sheets, soup, shelter or a daily dose of insulin.” (2.i.2)
• We get our ideas of strangers from the media so we think “that all strangers will be murderers, swindlers or paedophiles” although when disasters strike and we are actually vulnerable “we tend to marvel that our fellow citizens have shown surprisingly little interest in slicing us in half or molesting our children and may even be surprisingly good-natured and ready to help.” (2.i.2)
• “The flaws whose exposure we so dread, the indiscretions we know we would be mocked for, the secrets that keep our conversations with our so-called friends superficial and inert - all of these emerge as simply part of the human condition.” (2.i.3)
• “It is hard to attend most wedding parties without realising that these celebrations are at some level also marking a sorrow, the entombment of sexual liberty and individual curiosity for the sake of children and social stability, with compensation from the community being delivered through gifts and speeches.” (2.iii.3)
• “Wine barrels burst if from time to time we do not open them and let in some air. All of us men are barrels poorly put together.” 
• “Freedom has become our supreme political virtue ...the state should harbour no aspirations to tinker with the inner well-being or outward manners of its members.” (3.i.1)
• “ Heady romantic longings are fragile materials with which to construct a relationship. We grow thoughtless and mendacious towards each other. We surprise ourselves with our rudeness. We become deceitful and vindictive.” (3.i.5)
• “It seems clear that the origins of religious ethics lay in the pragmatic need of the earliest communities to control their members’ tendencies towards violence, and to foster in them contrary habits of harmony and forgiveness. Religious codes began as cautionary precepts, which were then projected into the sky and reflected back to earth in disembodied and majestic forms ... But if we can now own up to spiritualising our ethical laws, we have no cause to do away with the laws themselves. ... We no longer have to be brought into line by the threat of hell or the promise of paradise; we merely have to be reminded that it is we ourselves ... who want to live the sort of life which we want imagine supernatural beings demanded of us.” (3.i.6)
• “We will never discover cast-iron rules of good conduct which will answer every question that might arise about how human beings can live peacefully and well together.” (3.1.8)
• “We would be advised to focus our attention on relatively small scale, undramatic kinds of misconduct. ... Rudeness and emotional humiliation maybe just as corrosive to a well-functioning society as robbery and murder.” (3.1.8)
• “Consider ... how belatedly and how bluntly the modern state enters into our lives ... It intervenes when it is already far too late, after we have picked up the gun.” (3.i.8)
• “Literature, previously dismissed as being worthy of study only by adolescent girls and convalescents, was recognised as a serious subject ... The newfound prestige of novels and poems was based on the realization that these forms, much like the Gospels, could deliver complex moral messages embedded within emotionally charged narratives, and therefore prompt affective identification and self-examination.” (4.i.4)
• “There is in truth no maturity without an adequate negotiation with the infantile and no such thing as a grown-up who does not regularly yearn to be comforted like a child.” (5.3)
• “If there is a problem with Christianity’s approach, it is that ... the need for comfort has come to be overly identified with a need for Mary herself, instead of being seen for what it really is: an eternal appetite which began long before the Gospels, originating at the very moment when the first child was picked up by his or her mother and soothed amid the darkness and cold of the first underground cave.” (5.4)
• “The signal danger of life in a godless society is that it lacks reminders of the transcendent and therefore leaves us unprepared for disappointment and eventual annihilation. When God is dead, human beings ... are at risk of taking psychological centre stage. They imagine themselves to be commanders of their own destinies, they trample upon nature, forget the rhythms of the earth, deny death and shy away from valuing and honouring all that slips through their grasp, until at last they must collide catastrophically with the sharp edges of reality.” (7.2)
• “Tourists making their way around some of the world's great museums ... appear to want to be transformed by art, but the lightning bolts they are waiting for seem never to strike. They resemble the disappointed participants in a failed seance.” (8.2)
• “Art ...is a medium to remind us about what matters. It exists to guide us to what we should worship and revile if we wish to be sane, good people in possession of well-ordered souls.” (8.3)
• “The unsympathetic assessments we make of others are usually the result of nothing more sinister than our habit of looking at them in the wrong way, through lenses clouded by distraction, exhaustion and fear, which blind us to the fact that they are really, despite a thousand differences, just altered versions of ourselves: fellow fragile, uncertain, flawed beings likewise craving love and in urgent need of forgiveness.” (8.5)
• “If our bodies were immune to pain or decay, we would be monsters.” (8.5)
• “There are places which by virtue of their remoteness, solitude, beauty or cultural richness retain an ability to salve the wounded parts of us.” (9.3)
• “Romanticism has taught us to mock the ponderousness and strictures of institutions, their tendencies to corruption and the tolerance of mediocrity. The ideal of the intellectual has been that of a free spirit living beyond the confines of any system, disdainful of money, and cut off from practical affairs.” (10.i.1)
• “Why should only phones and shampoos benefit from coherent retail identities?” (10.i.3)
• “Because we are embodied creatures - sensory animals as well as rational beings - we stand to be lastingly influenced by concepts only when they come at us through a variety of channels ... in what we wear, eat, sing, decorate our houses with and bathe in.” (10.i.4)

An incredibly thought-provoking (and timely) book. Beautifully written, both easy to read and lyrical, and with many illustrations who, together with their captions, add a considerable amount to the text,

Alain de Botton has also written How Proust can change your life

August 2019; 312

"Surpassing Ourselves" by Carl Bereiter and Marlene Scardamalia

This is an inquiry into the nature of expertise. It is a carefully crafted academic study. However, you could use it as a self-help book if you wanted to become an expert. Beware! It is not easy and this book promises no short cuts.

The characteristics of expertise are:

• That it is effortful: “If ease and naturalness are the criteria, then ... fish are expert swimmers and Olympic breaststrokers are not" (p 4). “Many experts ... are active, striving people. They work long hours, usually at something they consider to be quite difficult, and they tend to set standards for themselves and others that are always at least slightly beyond reach. When at liberty to do so, one of the first things they will admit is that they are deplorable ignorant.” (p 34) “A distinguishing characteristic of the most creative people in many fields is the sheer volume of their productivity.” (p 124)
• It may involve specialization but it is not just specialization. 
• It probably involves formal knowledge but it certainly involves informal knowledge. This is the sort of impressionistic knowledge, often based on formal knowledge, which is displayed in 'connoiseurship': "Connoisseurs are experts who possess highly developed impressionistic knowledge of whatever their speciality entails.” (p 55)
• Fundamentally experts "choose to address the problems of their field at the upper limit of the complexity they can handle” (p 20). And they develop from novices to their position of expertise by "progressive problem solving" (passim); that is by never resting on their laurels but instead always “seeking out more difficult problems” (p 93) or “tackling more complex representations of recurrent problems” (p 94). "They work at the edge of their competence ... Working at the edge of competence is risky and taxing, but it yields two great benefits. It results in superior accomplishments ... and it leads to further growth as competence advances” (p 98). “Experts, we propose, tackle problems that increase their expertise, whereas non-experts tend to tackle problems for which they do not have to extend themselves.” (p 78). Non-experts seek to proceduralise their knowledge: “These processes of proceduralization continue until the originally problem-fraught activity becomes, as is said, ‘automatic’. Automaticity is the great freer of mental resources, but it is obtained at a cost. The cost is loss of conscious access. It becomes difficult to modify a well-practiced procedure.” (p 89) But the aim is to develop “performance that is ‘good enough’.” (p 91) After all, imost subcultures, as one learns “life becomes less problematic and learning tapers off ... the process of expertise is deviant.” (p 105) Experts seek continual improvement. The early ability to proceduralise provides “mental resources available to re-invest ... in the pursuit of new goals.” (p 79 -80)
• This can result in the "experience of sustained pleasure" known as "flow" (p 103). “Flow ... requires a nice balance between ability and challenge. If challenge exceeds ability, the result is anxiety and frustration rather than flow. If ability exceeds challenge, the result is boredom. Combined with the inevitable effect of learning, this means that repetition of the same activity will eventually cease to produce the flow experience. It will get too easy. Something must be done to increase the level of challenge so as to bring it into harmony with the increasing level of ability.” (p 102)

But “if the process of expertise is so addictively enjoyable ... why doesn't everyone practice it and thus become an expert? Flow is much harder to achieve in some situations than others ... In many highly routinized jobs it is difficult to perceive problems. ... [In] work situations in which people perceive problems as insoluble ... anxiety is the dominant experience” (p 103 - 104). The sorts of environments in which expertise can be developed include:

• Competitive sports in which as one improves one challenges others to improve which in turn challenges oneself to improve further. This is a bit like the dog eat cat aspect of natural selection results in evolution.
• Science in which each scientist continually builds on the work of others in a partly competitive but essentially cooperative endeavour. “People outside the academic world who are aware of the amount of effort academicians put into journal articles are sometimes amazed or even outraged to learn that the journals do not pay their contributors anything.” (p 206) The motives involved in those who contribute include “desire for recognition and respect from the people one regards as peers ... desire to have impact ... and desire to participate in significant discourse.” (p 207)
• Arts in which each artist puts their work out there and therefore is encouraged by comparing their work with others; this is quite similar to the way in which science works.

Therefore an expert-developing environment is one "in which the conditions to which people must adapt change progressively as a result of the successes of other people in the environment.” (p 106) “One adapts to changes that keep raising the ante, by setting a higher standard of performance ... through adapting, one raises the ante for others.” (p 106). Importantly, this implies that one can see the work of others. “The norm is for expertise to be shared.” (p 227) Those who work in isolation, for example teachers in their individual classrooms, will therefore find it more difficult to develop expertise. The development of wikipedia, too late for this book, makes this point: by changing the environment one achieved a cooperative but challenging development of expertise. Perhaps it should be the norm for learners to share the essays they write or to always work on problems on some sort of class wiki.

Experts also challenge themselves. They take risks. “The process of expertise is inherently venturesome.” (p 141)“What distinguishes creative experts from the common herd is ... that they take bigger risks ... and through this experience they develop a kind of knowledge that increases their likelihood of success. This is what we will call knowledge of promisingness.” (p 125) Critique is a good way of developing promisingness, “discovering elements of promise in a composition and helping the student develop those into something.” (p 149) “People on an expert track of development are continually striving against limits of their competence. For beginners, this means striving against the limitations that insufficient prior knowledge places on their ability to learn. For experts, the problems of insufficient prior knowledge never go away, however. The expert track of development keeps rising toward levels of increasing complexity of performance and understanding. This means that present knowledge is always superficial, simplistic, and fragmented relative to the knowledge the expert is trying to achieve.” (p 175)

For experts, goals emerge. "You start out off with a general intent to understand or learn more about something, and as you pick up knowledge it becomes clearer what it is you are trying to understand and what kind of knowledge it is you are constructing.” (p 163 - 164)

Other interesting ideas:

• “Reinvestment involves both conserving resources, so as to have something to reinvest, and putting these resources back into the activity itself rather than dissipating them or directing them elsewhere.” (p 82)
• Experts learn patterns and this inevitably pushes them towards “deepening a rut that will eventually entrap them.” (p 109) but experts often avoid ruts for a longer than normal time because “tackling new problems has a rejuvenating effect ... old people who have started to shut down and vegetate can change dramatically by getting re-engaged in problem solving ... hormone levels and sperm count rise.” (p 110)
• “There are no experts who lack expert knowledge of their fields.” (p 44) 
• “People go through life trying to accomplish tasks and to understand things, using the existing skills and informal knowledge. From time to time these prove insufficient and people must resort to problem solving that draws on formal knowledge." (p 72)
• “Writers ... talk about how they go about the task of writing - how much revising they do, how they get from a vague notion to an actual draft, how they keep going.” (p 59)
• “The problem is not to explain originality. On close examination, practically everything we do from minute to minute is original. The problem is to explain how some people become expert at, so that they can fairly regularly, almost on demand, produce work that stands out from that of their peers.” (p 122)
• “Problem finding ... is part of virtually all real world problem solving. Real world problems are ...’ill-structured’, which means that one does not know in advance or knows only vaguely what would constitute a solution. In the course of problem solving the goal itself takes shape ... what one is after does not become fully specified until the task is finished. The goal ... emerges from the work itself.” (p 132)
• “Promisingness is the very thing that the student, because of inexperience, is least able to judge.” (p 135)
• “The requirements for developing creative expertise are deceptively simple: ... you must pursue creative goals and you must occasionally succeed ... an unbroken series of failures will not provide you with the knowledge of promisingness required for eventual success. For that reason, coaches or mentors can play a vital role in the early stages of a creative career, because they can start you along promising paths.” (p 147)
• “Students who are all trying hard to be good students may nevertheless be pursuing quite different goals - different notions of what it is to be a good student.” (p 160) 
• “In an expert subculture, the process of expertise is not exceptional. It is what people normally do.” (p 222)
• “We are trying to struggle along with the common law principle that you can do anything you want with what you happen to own or control, subject only to the constraints necessary to protect the rights of others. The potential consequences of actions taken by a giant petrochemical company, for instance, are too vast and long-range to be managed by such a feeble principle. Yet the only recognised alternative, central government planning, has failed so dramatically in Eastern Europe that the very idea survives only in remnants.” (p 223)

This is a beautifully written and thought-provoking book. August 2018; 247 pages

"The Educated Mind" by Kieron Egan

This fascinating book traces the development of thought in a human.


The Somatic phase (0 to 5 yo). This is prelinguistic. Egan argues that it carries on into later life too: "As when we become literate we do not cease to be oral-language users, so when we become oral-language users we do not cease to be prelinguistic sensemakers" (p 166)

The Mythic phase (5 to 10 yo) As language begins, so do myths. Egan points out that creation myths often include naming. Myths feature binary dualisms. Vygotsky noted that children assemble collections using contrast rather than similarity: in group, out group. Egan believes that binary oppositions are fundamental to all language eg "nouns (stasis) and verbs (change)" (p 39) "Organizing one's conceptual grasp on the physical world by initially forming binary structures ... allows an initial orientation over a range of otherwise bewilderingly complex phenomena." (p 40) Subsequently oppositions are used "to ascribe meaning to any intermediary terms" like putting warm between hot and cold. (p 40). Although some educators seem to assume that kids of this age cannot understand concepts such as "oppression and freedom, love and hate, good and bad, fear and security" (p 43) a kid couldn't understand Star Wars without such concepts.

The Romantic phase (10 to 15 yo) typified by the Histories of Herodotus which scorns the myths preceding it but tells history as the story of great men. This is the most fascinating part of Egan's thesis. He points out that aged 5 "magic is entirely unobjectionable" but aged 10 you need to know the details. (p 71) Bacchilega (1997, 8) states that "In folk and fairy tales the hero is neither frightened nor surprised when encountering the otherworld". Is this because they are aimed at an audience of five-year-olds? However, Egan understands that"In some cultures this transition from a world in which fantasy and magic perform explanatory work does not take place in anything like the form that is common in the West." (p 72)

"Romantic understanding represents crucial elements of rationality developing along with persisting features of myth" (p 80). He now makes observations about characteristics of this phase. Kids of this age are interested in extremes: "Why is the average ten-year-old so interested in who was the tallest person who ever lived?" (p 84) He thinks this is to do with self-contextualising. Similarly kids of this age collect. And finally kids of this age hero-worship because "When we are ten ... we are typically subject to endless rules and regulations - parental, societal, and , not least, natural. The person, institution, or team that the child associates with usually gives clear clues to the constraints found most problematic. ... The tension characteristic of romance comes from the desire to transcend a threatening reality while seeking to secure one's identity within it." (p 90)

The Philosophic phase (15 yo and older) is typified by Thucydides who attempted to explain history as a system (he used a disease metaphor. This is the world of the ideology. It is the world of the Enlightenment.

"Students begin to grasp that what we are does not result from romantic choices and associations but from laws of nature, human psychology, social interactions, history, and so on, which apply to our selves as to everyone else The fading of the importance of romantic associations, then, can appear more a matter of putting aside childish things; having seen as through a glass darkly, students can attain a fuller, theoretic, consciousness of their place in the world." (p 124)

"Establishing the truth about history, society, and the cosmos is serious business. When Philosophic understanding dominates the mind, it can work with powerful intensity. The seriousness of Philosophic concerns, and the focus on knowledge that supports or challenges any one general scheme, tends to reduce interest in the extremes and in the dramatic. Romantic knowledge thus is often dismissed as irrelevant, pointless, a trivial pursuit; Romantic hobbies and collections lose their interest. ... A note of earnestness common in modern Philosophic students echoes Victorian high seriousness." (p 125)

However "This form of intellectual activity can easily slip into narcissism." hence the popularity of anthropology, sociology and psychology (p 126) Furthermore, if the developed world view is seen to fail it can lead to "angst, tears, depression, suicide, pills" (p 131).

The final (?) Ironic phase: This is the postmodern world. "All generalizations are false" (p 137)
"A more common theme in the Western intellectual tradition is that without some clear foundation, come bedrock of truth, human life and our sense of the natural world are chaotic and meaningless. The fear of raw contingency has long driven the pursuit of truth. But in this century ... ironic voices have suggested that nothing much happens if we give up looking for foundations to knowledge, and even for meaning; the sky holds in place, daily life goes on." (p 139)
"What was so disturbing about Darwin's ideas was ... the mechanism of natural selection and its implication that we owe our precious consciousness not to God, framing our symmetry for some high purpose, but to blind chance, to raw contingency." (p 139)
"In the early dialogues ... Socrates lives up to his claim that he 'knows nothing and is ignorant of everything' ... he deconstructs other's claim to knowledge but offers nothing positive of his own in their place. He solves no problems, shows that all the proffered solutions are inadequate, and cheerfully leaves us to sort things out as best as we can. ... To Thrasymachus, this is merely a cheap rhetorical ploy, ensuring for Socrates that he cannot be caught in the contradictions in which he delights to catch others; but it is a ploy whose cost is often destructive and negative, establishing nothing, and as such is pointless and irritating." (p 140 - 141)
"After endless philosophical work by the greatest Western thinkers, almost nothing is agreed, nothing is uncontested. If the enterprise were possible, surely something would be secured by now." (p 153)

This is AFTER an introductory chapter in which he dissects education as having three old, incompatible ideas:
Socialization:  "to inculcate a restricted set of norms and beliefs - the set that constitutes the adult society the child will grow into. ... a prominent aim of schools is the homogenization of children" (p 11)
"Intellectual cultivation": "to connect children with the great cultural conversation" (p 14)
"Fulfilling the individual potential of each student" (p 16)

Beautifully written and powerfully convincing. But does it belong to the philosophic stage or the ironic stage?

Other brilliant moments:

• "The very structure of modern schools in the West ... can accommodate only a very limited range of nonconformity. ... pushed to extremes ... the socially necessary homogenizing process can become totalitarian in its demands for conformity." (p 11)
• "The crucial feature of stories is that they end" (p 63)
• Syllogisms "cannot be managed easily or at all by people who cannot read alphabetic script" (p 75)
• "The archetypal romantic figure is the hero. The hero lives, like the rest of us, within the constraints of the everyday world but, unlike the rest of us, manages somehow to transcend the constraints that hem us in." (p 88) 
• "We are born alone and we die alone, and in the short interval between, underneath our languages, histories, cultures, and socialized awareness, we live alone." (p 167)

October 2017; 279 pages

"Styles of learning" by Noel Entwistle

This book was mostly interesting because of how different researchers classified human personalities in different ways. For example, Wertheimer studied how students approached a maths problem The first type ducked the question by saying that they didn’t like maths or they hadn’t yet studied this topic. The second type searched their memories frantically using a strategy of saying everything they knew in the hope that something somewhere would be correct. The third type sought analogies or tried to classify the problem. The fourth type used what Wertheimer called “real thinking” (p 54)

Roy Heath in the 1960s and 70s divided students into three types the non committed, the hustlers, and the plungers. I loved these descriptions!

• The first type “views a commitment as a possible entanglement which might reduce his freedom to get out of the way when travel threatens. When storm clouds do break he’ll hold on and hope for the best. In other words he takes a passive role in a conflict situation ... [a non-committer had a myth that] “he could do a lot of things ... if he really went all-out” (Entwistle p 67)
• The hustler “Is a great competitor. In his relations with others he is often aggressive and insensitive to their feelings. This is unfortunate for he possesses a strong desire to be received favourably and affectionately.” He “is impatient with the status quo. He must keep moving beyond his present level.Wasting time is for him a cardinal sin, a lost opportunity ... life is a battle. People must look out for themselves, must solve their own problems ... he is a study in antithesis ... a personality that is at war with itself. He is a strong-willed man couple with equally strong inhibitions and control over his deeper impulses.” (Entwistle 1996, 68)
• The plunger “Today he might feel on top of the world ... tomorrow might find him bitter, sad, alone ... whether high or low, he seems at the utter mercy of his feelings. He responds as strongly to guilt as he does to his urges ... he works and loves in spurts”. (Entwistle 1996, p 68)
• The ideal is the Reasonable Adventurer who can “attack the problems of everyday life with zest and originality. And he seems to do so with an air of playfulness” At times he is a believer and at other times a sceptic but he alternates these. (Entwistle 1996, 70) Rather too good to be true!

Entwistle is most famous for his distinction between 'deep' and 'surface' learning (I am always rather sceptical of any categorisation where it is obvious from the label where you 'ought' to be). He tells us that “It is impossible for a student adopting a surface approach ever to reach a deep level of understanding.” (p 79); this is partly because “Students adopting a deep approach also tended to spend longer in studying.” (p 80)

He is also slightly scornful of recently fashionable idea such as divergent thinking and holistic thinking. He points out that “The two major pathologies commonly found in learning are the failure to examine at the logical structure or the evidence in sufficient detail, and the failure to make use of appropriate analogies. ... The holist strategy involves looking at the whole area being learned, taking a broad perspective, seeking interconnection with other topics and making use of personal and idiosyncratic analogies. The examination of the logical structure and of the supportive evidence comes later when understanding is demanded, but left to himself the holist is likely to put off what he may see as the more boring parts of learning.” (p 93) Furthermore, “Imaginative thinking is important in problem solving in various ways. First it allows the problem to be reformulated, avoiding an exclusive focus on the most obvious interpretation. Then the review of possible solutions depends on a leisurely approach and a wide focus of attention which includes both likely and unlikely combinations of ideas. But the final stages of problem solving demand a return to tight, narrowly focused logical thinking.” (p 156)

There are also random facts which are just plain interesting:
“The Latin word persona originally described the painted mask which an actor held in front of his face to portray the person he was playing. The word subsequently was used to indicate the ‘front’ an individual presented to other people - how he wanted to be seen. It was also used to describe ‘the player behind the mask’” (p 179)
“In Greek, character meant engraving and implied a patent of traits in bothered in a distinctive life-style ... ‘characteristic’ remains a neutral term synonymous with ‘trait’.” (p 179)

A very well written book which reviews an important topic. September 2017; 272 pages

"The Origins and Growth of Modern Education" by Elizabeth Lawrence

This is an extraordinarily comprehensive account of the development of educational thought in western Europe, particularly Britain.

The author displays her bias clearly, applauding those who, hundreds of years ago, had views which might be interpreted as being support of Lawrence's educational ideals: for example: "Pestalozzi expresses clearly what is now accepted, if not acted upon, as an educational truth: that education can force nothing into children, but only draw out what is already there. ... This was not theory. It was put into practice and it succeeded, as anyone who has tried it knows that it does succeed." (p 199) Notwithstanding Socrates and his scripted tricks with Meno's slaveboy, I am not convinced that education can never be anything more than drawing out what is already inside and the uncompromising and unevidenced way in which she advances her doctrine seems unacademic at best. This is a rather whiggish view of the history of education in which progress is always progress. It rather assumes that "modern education" is now as good as it is going to get.

And certainly some of the practices of the old days (eg trying to beat knowledge into children) seem wrong although perhaps the biggest improvement is that nowadays, instead of having philosophers pontificate about what they believe about education we actually have people observing children and their learning.

It was interesting that some of the metaphors for learning are used time and again:
If you pour a liquid into a narrow necked bottle it will overflow (Quintillian, Comenius
(Erasmus says you shouldn't feed a child more meat than he can take which is similar)
Teaching is like igniting flames (Plutarch, Alciun,
Teaching is like gardening, tending plants (Plutarch, Origen, St Anselm, Vives, Sir Thomas Elyot, Francis Bacon, John Dury, Pestalozzi, Froebel
Learning is like digesting food
Curiosity is key: (St Augustine of Hippo, Montaigne, Locke, Fenelon, Rollin, Isaac Watts, Rousseau
Timing is important (Vives, Isaac Watts, Froebel, Piaget
You need to know the kids (Sir Thomas Elyot
Kids need to have things to do (Comenius, Locke, Rousseau, Robert Owen, Dewey


Selected quotes:
"Going to school has become accepted as a kind of sentence imposed on all, which must be served before one can be let free into the world." (p 9)
"In primitive societies ... children learn all they need to know in the life of the tribe, by imitating and taking part in its work and rituals. ... It was only with the invention of writing that a new kind of education arose ... which gave rise to schools, since the work of teaching was now too skilled to be carried out at home." (p 12)
"The future of the State, and indeed its survival, depend on the quality of its education." (p 19)
"In the story of the slave in the Meno he [Plato] showed that, before one can learn anything, it is necessary to know oneself and to realize the extent of one's ignorance." (p 27)
Clement wrote: (The Pedagogue 4:5): "To become as a little child - does not mean that adults should be unlearned or childish, but that, loosed from the world, they should touch the earth on tiptoe. That is the secret of the life-long springtime of youth." (p 49)
Peter Abelard (Sic et Non, Prologue) said "through doubt we are led to inquiry, and by inquiry we discern the truth." (p 55)
Comenius thought  that "Too much sitting still ... is not a good sign" (p 100)
"If they will put a Man's coat on a Child, the Child may yet be cumbered with his long and loose Habiliments, and yet be starved with Cold." Isaac Watts; (p 143)
"Children generally acquire speedily and certainly whatever they are not pressed to learn" Rousseau (p 164)
"Children are always in motion: quiet and meditation are their aversion" Rousseau (p 164)
"Education ... should enable the child to live in and make his own contribution to society." Rousseau (p 166)
"Education must be active experience"  David Williams (p 175)

"it is one thing to have learnt, and another to be able to teach" Arthur Hill (p 223)

"those brought up under the severest discipline should so frequently turn out the wildest of the wild." Spencer (p 282) 

"The child who teaches another ... teaches himself" Seguin (p 297)

"The first function of education is to lead the child to independence" so don't do things for kids Montessori (p 328)

"Most political newspapers are bristling with hate ... too many are socialistic because they hate the rich instead of loving the poor." AS Neill (p 347)

"We should never do for children what they are able to do for themselves." Edgeworth (p 206)
RLEdgeworth and novelist daughter Maria (who wrote Castle Rackrent, reviewed here) wrote Practical Education (1798) based on transcripts of children's conversation. They advocated learning by doing: "Children ... work hard at play" (p 205) though they advocated the use of the right toys.

M De Fellenberg's School of Industry at Hofwyl in Switzerland taught kids, including an ex beggar boy, after they had laboured all day in the fields; they wanted to learn and refused to go to bed

Massively comprehensive and written well enough to read without falling asleep. September 2017; 370 pages

"Open" by David Price

This immensely readable book starts with the author having a heart attack!

In many ways it follows the 'industry standard'. Price has a vision of the future of education which he wants to share with us. It is an education transformed by the practices which have transformed (part of) the business world since the massive disruption to the ecosystem known as the internet revolution. He outlines this vision by giving examples (mostly from the business world because education hasn't really been transformed yet) in which visionaries have transformed their industries. Many of these examples have been mentioned in similar books: an example is the development of Post-It notes by 3M. Price then distils the lessons to be learned from these examples into general principles: Share, be Open, be Free, and Trust. The major difference between Price's book and others such as 'The World is Flat' is that Price then applies these rules to the world of education.

But this is a cracking good read which uses its evidence base to entertain whilst providing 'eureka moment' insights and making you think. Not bad!

Price begins with a compelling analysis of the post-internet world. The knowledge economy has rather blown up in our faces: more graduates means that the laws of supply and demand have driven the monetary value of knowledge down as evidenced by  freelance auction sites such as elance.com. He looks at 'open' systems such as the Philosophy in Pubs movement and ‘open source learning’.

He indicts formal learning in traditional education settings. He rehearses the dichotomy of transmissive learning versus constructive learning and suggests that apprenticeships and internships offer blends between the didactic and experiential. Bravely, he asserts that: "We should be in no doubt that businesses, schools and colleges that continue with ‘command and control’ as their dominant forms of leadership and intellectual property strategies are facing extinction, possibly within five to ten years." He wants to see collaborative learning as the dominant model in schools: "If collaboration is a headache for learning in the workplace, it’s hard to know where to start with schools. First, most schools don’t call it ‘sharing’ anyway – they call it ‘cheating’."

Price seeks a new model for education which he calls the Global Learning Commons whose characteristics are participation, passion, purpose.

The six imperatives of the Global Learning Commons are:

• "Do it yourself [eg Linux, wikipedia]
• Do it now [eg Just in time learning]
• Do it with friends 
• Do unto others
• Do it for fun [eg foldit, a video game which helps scientists work out protein folding in viruses]
• Do it for the world to see" [eg that food blog from the scottish kid]

He considers 'Just in time' learning: "learning is most powerful when the learner acquires a piece of
information to solve an immediate problem.... there’s a reason why you get the airline safety briefing when the engines are running, and you’re buckled-up, and not when you’re booking your ticket."

He has some great one-liners (some are above):

• Over-testing is like "a gardener pulling up a plant by its roots so that he could see how well it was growing. If a love of learning were a human right (and I contend that it should be) our courts would be overflowing with abuse of rights claims from our young." [OK, that was a two-liner.]
• "Learning doesn’t really work as a spectator sport, as any disengaged school kid will confirm."

I have one or two quibbles:

• I would contend that the anti-authority revolution started long before the world wide web, perhaps beginning with the growth of universal state education (even if it is too formal). As Steven Pinker has suggested in The Better Angels of Our Nature, literacy enables people to read and therefore to become exposed to ideas and, especially in novels, to start to see the world through the point of view of someone else. 
• Surely the example of the BRICs in Chapter One emphasise the need to develop a better knowledge economy even though an inevitable consequence is that the monetary value of knowledge will reduce as supply outstrips demand.
• The 'Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité' motto was coined before 1835.

I was a little disappointed that the evidence base was a little narrow and relied heavily on the old favourites such as wikipedia, Google and 3M.

But on the whole this is a brilliantly readable and thought-provoking book. September 2014; 152 pages

"English education" by Kenneth Lindsay

Kenneth Lindsay was a politician who sat as an MP for National Labour, National Independent, and independent (the last MP for Combined English Universities), serving as a Lord of the Admiralty and as a Parliamentary Secretary to the Board of Education. This book was written in 1941, during the Second World War and before the Butler 1945 Education Act.

It is a very brief (wartime paper rationing?) utterly one-sided history of education with a brief look at what might happen next. Some wonderful quotes:

• HMI "move quietly among the schools befriending teachers".
• "A wise head leaves his staff free to compose their own syllabuses within a general framework."
• Examinations exercise "considerable control and sometimes tyranny over pupil and teacher alike".
• "All recent researches of psychology compel us to think more of the individual child .... it becomes more and more difficult to reconcile a rigid and centralised scheme of examinations with this."

August 2013; 48 pages

"Drive" by Daniel Pink

This is a fantastic and deeply thought provoking book.


 It is to do with what motivates human beings. Pink describes the two traditional types of motivation as our biological drive (food, sex etc) and externally imposed rewards and punishments. Then he points out that these are simply not enough. Children play. Adults volunteer. Health care workers do more than they are expected to: they talk to patients, they assist nurses. This happens all the time. Clearly there is a third form of motivation. Wikipedia works because of this third form.

Then he asks how we can use this third drive in business and schools. He describes what not to do. He shows how carrots can actually demotivate in the long term. If you start paying your kid to do chores he will (a) only do the chores if he is paid and (b) see chores as inherently unpleasant and lose enjoyment from doing things. Pink says the secret is to turn work into play and suggest that what traditional motivations have done for too long (especially perhaps in schooling) is to turn play into work.  And finally Pink explains how to use drive 3.0: by giving people autonomy and purpose and by encouraging them to seek mastery.
OK, so it's not that easy. But I have made note after note in the margins and I am going to try to adapt these ideas at my school big time.

Brilliant and potentially revolutionary. August 2012; 215 pages.

"Outliers" by Malcolm Gladwell

I massively enjoyed Gladwell's Tipping Point and quite enjoyed his Blink but I found this book rather lightweight in comparison. Like the others it was extraordinarily easy to read (less than two days) but the first two books seemed to be bursting with strange ideas whilst this one recycled a few ideas I had met before.

The book is an attempt to describe why some people (Bill Gates, Jewish lawyers, the Beatles) are especially successful. Here is the Gladwell formula:

1. You have to be born at the right time. He notes that star Canadian ice hockey players tend to be born in the first three months of the year. This is because the cut-off date for junior players is 1st January. Thus those born in January are physically more mature and stronger than their youth team mates born in December; this difference is crucial when talent scouts pick young players; those picked then get more practise and match experience and so develop into stars. Furthermore, Bill Gates was lucky to be young when the computer industry was taking off and the most successful Jewish lawyers were all born in 1930 or 1931 so they escaped both depression and WWII.
2. You have to put in 10,000 hours of practice. Getting the opportunity to do this is mostly luck. Bill Gates happened to go to a school which bought an early computer; he happened to live near a university that offered him free overnight access (there was a bug in the program so he got it free). The Beatles played Hamburg. Gladwell believes the success of Chinese immigrants to America is because of the culture of rice paddy farming: whilst European peasants worked hard at planting and harvest they lazed through the rest of the year; rice paddys need such careful planned cultivation that a rice farmer can never relax. 10,000 hours of hard work adds up to success.
3. You have to come from a culture that will allow you to succeed. The rice paddy example above is an obvious one but Gladwell also mentions deleterious cultures such as the vendetta culture of the Appalachians (imported from the Irish and Scottish border countries apparently) to the high PDI (power distance index) culture of Korea and Guatemala responsible for plane crashes (because First Officers don't dare to tell their Captains that they are running out of fuel or about to fly into a hillside).

Of particular interest to me were the bits about education. Gladwell points out that middle class children are parented in what he calls concerted cultivation. Thus through the holidays middle class kids are taken to museums and made to read books. On p257 he shows that children from every class (Low, Middle or High) make about the same improvement over their school year. But High class children continue to improve during the vacations. Middle class children improve slightly but much much less than High class; Low class children lose ground in holidays. "The school year in the United States is, on average, 180 days long. The South Korean school year is 220 days long. The Japanese school year is 243 days long" (p260).

I was, of course, also interested in what the aeroplane crashes taught about the dynamics of a management team.

An interesting book but, on the whole, a disappointment.

July 2009, 285 pages