Education Articles

OnLine Uni

• A free online course at Stanford University on artificial intelligence, to be taught this fall by two leading experts from Silicon Valley, has attracted more than 58,000 students around the globe - a class nearly four times the size of Stanford's entire student body.
  
  The course is one of three being offered experimentally by the Stanford computer science department to extend technology knowledge and skills beyond this elite campus to the entire world, the university is announcing on Tuesday. The online students will not get Stanford grades or credit, but they will be ranked in comparison to the work of other online students and will receive a statement of accomplishment.
  
  For the artificial intelligence course, students may need some higher math, like linear algebra and probability theory, but there are no restrictions to online participation. So far, the age range is from high school to retirees, and the course has attracted interest from more than 175 countries. The instructors are Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig, two of the world's best-known artificial intelligence experts. In 2005 Dr. Thrun led a team of Stanford students and professors in building a robotic car that won a Pentagon-sponsored challenge by driving 132 miles over unpaved roads in a California desert. More recently he has led a secret Google project to develop autonomous vehicles that have driven more than 100,000 miles on California public roads.Dr. Norvig is a former NASA scientist who is now Google's director of research and the author of a leading textbook on artificial intelligence.
  
  The computer scientists said they were uncertain about why the A.I. class had drawn such a large audience. Dr. Thrun said he had tried to advertise the course this summer by distributing notices at an academic conference in Spain, but had gotten only 80 registrants. Then, several weeks ago he e-mailed an announcement to Carol Hamilton, the executive director of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence. She forwarded the e-mail widely, and the announcement spread virally.
  
  The two scientists said they had been inspired by the recent work of Salman Khan, an M.I.T.-educated electrical engineer who in 2006 established a nonprofit organization to provide video tutorials to students around the world on a variety of subjects via YouTube.
  
  "The vision is: change the world by bringing education to places that can't be reached today," said Dr. Thrun.
  
  The rapid increase in the availability of high-bandwidth Internet service, coupled with a wide array of interactive software, has touched off a new wave of experimentation in education. For example, the Khan Academy, which focuses on high school and middle school, intentionally turns the relationship of the classroom and homework upside down. Students watch lectures at home, then work on problem sets in class, where the teacher can assist them one on one.
  
  The Stanford scientists said they were focused on going beyond early Internet education efforts, which frequently involved uploading online videos of lectures given by professors and did little to motivate students to do the coursework required to master subjects. The three online courses, which will employ both streaming Internet video and interactive technologies for quizzes and grading, have in the past been taught to smaller groups of Stanford students in campus lecture halls. Last year, for example, Introduction to Artificial Intelligence drew 177 students. The two additional courses will be an introductory course on database software, taught by Jennifer Widom, chairwoman of the computer science department, and an introduction to machine learning, taught by Andrew Ng.
  
  Dr. Widom said she had recorded her video lectures during the summer and would use classroom sessions to work with smaller groups of students on projects that might be competitive and to bring in people from the industry to give special lectures. Unlike the A.I. course, this one will compare online students with one another and not with the Stanford students.
  
  How will the artificial intelligence instructors grade 58,000 students? The scientists said they would make extensive use of technology. "We have a system running on the Amazon cloud, so we think it will hold up," Dr. Norvig said. In place of office hours, they will use the Google moderator service, software that will allow students to vote on the best questions for the professors to respond to in an online chat and possibly video format. They are considering ways to personalize the exams to minimize cheating. Part of the instructional software was developed by Know Labs, a company Dr. Thrun helped start.
  
  Although the three courses are described as an experiment, the researchers say they expect university classes to be made more widely accessible via the Internet. "I personally would like to see the equivalent of a Stanford computer science degree on the Web," Dr. Ng said. Dr. Widom said that having Stanford courses freely available could both assist and compete with other colleges and universities. A small college might not have the faculty members to offer a particular course, but could supplement its offerings with the Stanford lectures.
  
  There has also been some discussion at Stanford about whether making the courses freely available would prove to be a threat to the university, which charges high fees for tuition. Dr. Thrun dismissed that idea.
  
  "I'm much more interested in bringing Stanford to the world," he said. "I see the developing world having colossal educational needs."
  
  Hal Abelson, a computer scientist at M.I.T. who helped develop an earlier generation of educational offerings that began in 2002, said the Stanford course showed how rapidly the online world was evolving. "The idea that you could put up open content at all was risky 10 years ago, and we decided to be very conservative," he said. "Now the question is how do you move into something that is more interactive and collaborative, and we will see lots and lots of models over the next four or five years."

School Reunions

Facing a class reunion can be daunting enough to make a teetotaler crave a bracing cocktail. But fear not. It's worth the effort. For at least one sweet, nostalgic night you can revisit the best parts of high school without worrying about the silly stuff.

I used to wonder why high school reunions seem to mean so much more to people than other reunions. I think the late, great editor and columnist Meg Greenfield put it in her memoir: "So far as I have been able to discover, nobody, regardless of station, gets over high school." Indeed, class reunions help you to get over high school, no matter how nervous you might be about getting over your class reunion.

High school is where we begin to shape the adults we are about to become for the rest of our lives. It is a monstrous task confronted by complete amateurs. I would not face it again if you paid me in Powerball winnings.

Class reunions are, by comparison, low stress. We become history detectives, probing our past to take a fresh look at who we were and what we put up with before we reinvented ourselves into postgraduates. Reunions have a therapeutic value. They prove how right your parents were when they assured you, back in the throes of teen angst, that time heals all wounds - and wounds all heels.

The bullies, snobs, hustlers and clowns who once brought you daily torment may be passed away by now or simply humbled as we all are by advancing years and slowed metabolism.

I graduated from the public high school in Middletown, Ohio, in 1965, a time that seemed to me like "only yesterday," until the stories that I used to watch on television began to appear in my son's history exams.

It took some of us 20 years to work up enough nerve to show up at a class reunion. It took that long for the residue of teenage hubris, angst and embarrassing relationships to fade. In other words, it took long enough for most of us to have high school kids of our own. After 40 years, you're happy merely to see who's still alive and able to show up.

"No politics tonight," said Bob Hayden, one of the event's organizers, with whom I have been debating politics since Lyndon Johnson beat Barry Goldwater. No problem. It was good to be back in the land of good Midwestern common sense after escaping Washington, which politics have turned into Mogadishu-on-the-Potomac.

I wasn't sure he could hear me over the music, provided by a band of fellow alumni called The Intruders. They were a popular local garage band for a couple of years in the mid-1960s until they broke up like countless other aspiring teen legends to pursue more conventional lives. Whatever hair they had left was gray and actually longer than it used to be in their old band photos, although these days it does not look nearly as rebellious as it used to.

We partied like it was, well, 1965. As Bridget Fonda's character says in the movie "Singles," "Somewhere around 25, bizarre becomes immature." After 60, bizarre becomes merely "eccentric."

Just one bit of advice if you're facing a class reunion: Resist the impulse to ask your fellow alumni, "Do you remember me?" This is particularly true if there is any chance that the other person doesn't remember you.

I used to find that question merely awkward or embarrassing. Now it can fill me with fear of early Alzheimer's.

Atlantic Article on Finnish Schools

Everyone agrees the United States needs to improve its education system dramatically, but how? One of the hottest trends in education reform lately is looking at the stunning success of the West's reigning education superpower, Finland. Trouble is, when it comes to the lessons that Finnish schools have to offer, most of the discussion seems to be missing the point.

The small Nordic country of Finland used to be known -- if it was known for anything at all -- as the home of Nokia, the mobile phone giant. But lately Finland has been attracting attention on global surveys of quality of life -- Newsweek ranked it number one last year -- and Finland's national education system has been receiving particular praise, because in recent years Finnish students have been turning in some of the highest test scores in the world.

Finland's schools owe their newfound fame primarily to one study: the PISA survey, conducted every three years by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). The survey compares 15-year-olds in different countries in reading, math, and science. Finland has ranked at or near the top in all three competencies on every survey since 2000, neck and neck with superachievers such as South Korea and Singapore. In the most recent survey in 2009 Finland slipped slightly, with students in Shanghai, China, taking the best scores, but the Finns are still near the very top. Throughout the same period, the PISA performance of the United States has been middling, at best.

Compared with the stereotype of the East Asian model -- long hours of exhaustive cramming and rote memorization -- Finland's success is especially intriguing because Finnish schools assign less homework and engage children in more creative play. All this has led to a continuous stream of foreign delegations making the pilgrimage to Finland to visit schools and talk with the nation's education experts, and constant coverage in the worldwide media marveling at the Finnish miracle.

So there was considerable interest in a recent visit to the U.S. by one of the leading Finnish authorities on education reform, Pasi Sahlberg, director of the Finnish Ministry of Education's Center for International Mobility and author of the new book Finnish Lessons: What Can the World Learn from Educational Change in Finland? Earlier this month, Sahlberg stopped by the Dwight School in New York City to speak with educators and students, and his visit received national media attention and generated much discussion.

And yet it wasn't clear that Sahlberg's message was actually getting through. As Sahlberg put it to me later, there are certain things nobody in America really wants to talk about.

During the afternoon that Sahlberg spent at the Dwight School, a photographer from the New York Times jockeyed for position with Dan Rather's TV crew as Sahlberg participated in a roundtable chat with students. The subsequent article in the Times about the event would focus on Finland as an "intriguing school-reform model."

Yet one of the most significant things Sahlberg said passed practically unnoticed. "Oh," he mentioned at one point, "and there are no private schools in Finland."

This notion may seem difficult for an American to digest, but it's true. Only a small number of independent schools exist in Finland, and even they are all publicly financed. None is allowed to charge tuition fees. There are no private universities, either. This means that practically every person in Finland attends public school, whether for pre-K or a Ph.D.

The irony of Sahlberg's making this comment during a talk at the Dwight School seemed obvious. Like many of America's best schools, Dwight is a private institution that costs high-school students upward of $35,000 a year to attend -- not to mention that Dwight, in particular, is run for profit, an increasing trend in the U.S. Yet no one in the room commented on Sahlberg's statement. I found this surprising. Sahlberg himself did not.

Sahlberg knows what Americans like to talk about when it comes to education, because he's become their go-to guy in Finland. The son of two teachers, he grew up in a Finnish school. He taught mathematics and physics in a junior high school in Helsinki, worked his way through a variety of positions in the Finnish Ministry of Education, and spent years as an education expert at the OECD, the World Bank, and other international organizations.

Now, in addition to his other duties, Sahlberg hosts about a hundred visits a year by foreign educators, including many Americans, who want to know the secret of Finland's success. Sahlberg's new book is partly an attempt to help answer the questions he always gets asked.

From his point of view, Americans are consistently obsessed with certain questions: How can you keep track of students' performance if you don't test them constantly? How can you improve teaching if you have no accountability for bad teachers or merit pay for good teachers? How do you foster competition and engage the private sector? How do you provide school choice?

The answers Finland provides seem to run counter to just about everything America's school reformers are trying to do.

For starters, Finland has no standardized tests. The only exception is what's called the National Matriculation Exam, which everyone takes at the end of a voluntary upper-secondary school, roughly the equivalent of American high school.

Instead, the public school system's teachers are trained to assess children in classrooms using independent tests they create themselves. All children receive a report card at the end of each semester, but these reports are based on individualized grading by each teacher. Periodically, the Ministry of Education tracks national progress by testing a few sample groups across a range of different schools.

As for accountability of teachers and administrators, Sahlberg shrugs. "There's no word for accountability in Finnish," he later told an audience at the Teachers College of Columbia University. "Accountability is something that is left when responsibility has been subtracted."

For Sahlberg what matters is that in Finland all teachers and administrators are given prestige, decent pay, and a lot of responsibility. A master's degree is required to enter the profession, and teacher training programs are among the most selective professional schools in the country. If a teacher is bad, it is the principal's responsibility to notice and deal with it.

And while Americans love to talk about competition, Sahlberg points out that nothing makes Finns more uncomfortable. In his book Sahlberg quotes a line from Finnish writer named Samuli Puronen: "Real winners do not compete." It's hard to think of a more un-American idea, but when it comes to education, Finland's success shows that the Finnish attitude might have merits. There are no lists of best schools or teachers in Finland. The main driver of education policy is not competition between teachers and between schools, but cooperation.

Finally, in Finland, school choice is noticeably not a priority, nor is engaging the private sector at all. Which brings us back to the silence after Sahlberg's comment at the Dwight School that schools like Dwight don't exist in Finland.

"Here in America," Sahlberg said at the Teachers College, "parents can choose to take their kids to private schools. It's the same idea of a marketplace that applies to, say, shops. Schools are a shop and parents can buy what ever they want. In Finland parents can also choose. But the options are all the same."

Herein lay the real shocker. As Sahlberg continued, his core message emerged, whether or not anyone in his American audience heard it.

Decades ago, when the Finnish school system was badly in need of reform, the goal of the program that Finland instituted, resulting in so much success today, was never excellence. It was equity.

Since the 1980s, the main driver of Finnish education policy has been the idea that every child should have exactly the same opportunity to learn, regardless of family background, income, or geographic location. Education has been seen first and foremost not as a way to produce star performers, but as an instrument to even out social inequality.

In the Finnish view, as Sahlberg describes it, this means that schools should be healthy, safe environments for children. This starts with the basics. Finland offers all pupils free school meals, easy access to health care, psychological counseling, and individualized student guidance.

In fact, since academic excellence wasn't a particular priority on the Finnish to-do list, when Finland's students scored so high on the first PISA survey in 2001, many Finns thought the results must be a mistake. But subsequent PISA tests confirmed that Finland -- unlike, say, very similar countries such as Norway -- was producing academic excellence through its particular policy focus on equity.

That this point is almost always ignored or brushed aside in the U.S. seems especially poignant at the moment, after the financial crisis and Occupy Wall Street movement have brought the problems of inequality in America into such sharp focus. The chasm between those who can afford $35,000 in tuition per child per year -- or even just the price of a house in a good public school district -- and the other "99 percent" is painfully plain to see.

Pasi Sahlberg goes out of his way to emphasize that his book Finnish Lessons is not meant as a how-to guide for fixing the education systems of other countries. All countries are different, and as many Americans point out, Finland is a small nation with a much more homogeneous population than the United States.

Yet Sahlberg doesn't think that questions of size or homogeneity should give Americans reason to dismiss the Finnish example. Finland is a relatively homogeneous country -- as of 2010, just 4.6 percent of Finnish residents had been born in another country, compared with 12.7 percent in the United States. But the number of foreign-born residents in Finland doubled during the decade leading up to 2010, and the country didn't lose its edge in education. Immigrants tended to concentrate in certain areas, causing some schools to become much more mixed than others, yet there has not been much change in the remarkable lack of variation between Finnish schools in the PISA surveys across the same period.

Samuel Abrams, a visiting scholar at Columbia University's Teachers College, has addressed the effects of size and homogeneity on a nation's education performance by comparing Finland with another Nordic country: Norway. Like Finland, Norway is small and not especially diverse overall, but unlike Finland it has taken an approach to education that is more American than Finnish. The result? Mediocre performance in the PISA survey. Educational policy, Abrams suggests, is probably more important to the success of a country's school system than the nation's size or ethnic makeup.

Indeed, Finland's population of 5.4 million can be compared to many an American state -- after all, most American education is managed at the state level. According to the Migration Policy Institute, a research organization in Washington, there were 18 states in the U.S. in 2010 with an identical or significantly smaller percentage of foreign-born residents than Finland.

What's more, despite their many differences, Finland and the U.S. have an educational goal in common. When Finnish policymakers decided to reform the country's education system in the 1970s, they did so because they realized that to be competitive, Finland couldn't rely on manufacturing or its scant natural resources and instead had to invest in a knowledge-based economy.

With America's manufacturing industries now in decline, the goal of educational policy in the U.S. -- as articulated by most everyone from President Obama on down -- is to preserve American competitiveness by doing the same thing. Finland's experience suggests that to win at that game, a country has to prepare not just some of its population well, but all of its population well, for the new economy. To possess some of the best schools in the world might still not be good enough if there are children being left behind.

Is that an impossible goal? Sahlberg says that while his book isn't meant to be a how-to manual, it is meant to be a "pamphlet of hope."

"When President Kennedy was making his appeal for advancing American science and technology by putting a man on the moon by the end of the 1960's, many said it couldn't be done," Sahlberg said during his visit to New York. "But he had a dream. Just like Martin Luther King a few years later had a dream. Those dreams came true. Finland's dream was that we want to have a good public education for every child regardless of where they go to school or what kind of families they come from, and many even in Finland said it couldn't be done."

Clearly, many were wrong. It is possible to create equality. And perhaps even more important -- as a challenge to the American way of thinking about education reform -- Finland's experience shows that it is possible to achieve excellence by focusing not on competition, but on cooperation, and not on choice, but on equity.

The problem facing education in America isn't the ethnic diversity of the population but the economic inequality of society, and this is precisely the problem that Finnish education reform addressed. More equity at home might just be what America needs to be more competitive abroad.

Motivating Learners

Michael Morpurgo, the bestselling children's author, is up in arms. The writer, whose book War Horse has been turned into a film by Steven Spielberg that premieres today, thinks lessons in state schools are boring.

Morpurgo, a former primary school teacher, blames the national curriculum and schools' focus on tests and exams for stifling children's natural curiosity and desire to learn.

"We've got ourselves into a really terrible trap," he said last week. "Successive governments have shouted about exams, exams, exams and tests, tests, tests. The curriculum has become tighter and narrower. They've forgotten the need to allow children to develop their creative talents."

As an antidote, Morpurgo, along with other writers including Louis de Bernieres and Gervase Phinn, is backing an enterprise that is fast spreading nationwide.

Morpurgo is chancellor of the Children's University, which is helping thousands of youngsters aged seven to 14 to develop their talents by encouraging them to take part in activities ranging from ceramics and Japanese classes to sports reporting, philosophy and astronomy.

The university validates activities at hundreds of centres across the country. They include Chatsworth house, the Royal Shakespeare Company, B&Q, dance studios, riding schools and after-school clubs.

"The great thing about the scheme is that it targets those children who need and want to learn more and spend time in a way that is fulfilling," says Morpurgo. "It's like a club for developing their talents that other children also belong to and that is fun and not just work."

Children are given a 'passport' to record their activities. So far about 20,000 have been issued. When they have completed 30 hours of weekend, after-school or holiday classes, they 'graduate' at a special ceremony.

"The kids wear miniature caps and gowns, their mums and dads turn up, it's a rather special day," says Ger Graus, chief executive of the Children's University, which is run from an office in Manchester with a staff of four. Investment banks, charities and the Department for Education are among those funding the non-profit-making organisation. The only charge to a child is $2 for the passport and the cost of any fee-paying activity.

There are rewards for those who continue to attend after completing 30 hours. Some time this year the first child to notch up 1,000 hours of activities will be named.

Helen Boyden, from Colchester, Essex, admits she cried at last year's graduation ceremony for her daughter Megan, now 15. A keen competitive swimmer, Megan took part in a sports reporting course, which included meeting journalists at the BBC and blogging from the press box at Colchester United and Arsenal football clubs. Since then she has spoken on stage about her experiences.

"It has given her immense confidence and opened a lot more doors for her," says Boyden, whose sister-in-law, a primary school teacher, was so inspired by Megan's efforts that she opened a sewing club after school so that her own pupils could start a passport.

Megan says: "I went to Manchester and spoke at a conference about my experiences. It was a lot more personal than lessons in school and it was fun." Now she is considering a career as a sports reporter.

The scheme was born after the government launched a new national curriculum in 2007. Tim Brighouse, then director of education in Birmingham, opened the first Children's University centre in the city that year.

Graus says: "The motivation was that because the national curriculum was pushing excitement out of the classroom, we decided that what teachers could no longer do in schools, we would do out of hours."

"I have a 14 and a 16-year-old. When I ask them why they go to school they say 'because I have to' and 'to pass exams'. Then they go to these out-of-hours activities and can't stop talking about them. We want children and their parents to realise that if you know why you are learning something, if you enjoy it and you see a purpose to it, the chances of you succeeding are much higher than if you are simply blindly following a national literacy and numeracy strategy."

Since 2007 the organisation has grown. The latest plan is to extend activities to five and six-year-olds, which will happen later this year.

Research shows children who are members of the university do better at school. For the past three years John MacBeath, a Cambridge professor, has been monitoring the progress of participants aged seven, 11 and 14. In 2010 he found that a sample of 1,270 children who had attended the university "did better on what we call the three As: attendance, attitude and attainment" than a matched sample who were not members. This included achieving higher scores at national tests in English, maths and science.

For Morpurgo, it is the Children's University's encouragement of creative writing and love of drama that he finds most valuable."When I was teaching, you had freedom in our little primary school to read stories for a half hour at the end of the day or to listen to the children's own stories. You had time and you had room. That's been taken away and that's one of the things that's going on at the Children's University. It's a brilliant way to get children inspired again."

An Example

DANIEL RILEY, a young trainee teacher from west London, attended a school so bad that it was shut down while he was there. It was, he recalls with commendable understatement, an 'unstructured' place. Fewer than 20% of pupils achieved five good GCSE passes, including mathematics and English (the main benchmark for secondary students, involving exams commonly taken at 16). There were fights. Some, involving knives, ended with arrests. There were drugs - the school drew its pupils from tough housing estates, and gangs prowled at the gates. The teaching was "not inspired," Mr Riley says, sticking with the understatement. He recalls lessons spent copying texts from books.

As happened to a few dozen failing institutions under the previous Labour government, Mr Riley's school was turned into an academy - a state school removed from local council control and given new freedoms over staffing and teaching methods. Six years on, Paddington Academy draws its pupils from the same estates. But the school is unrecognisable.

Last summer 69% of pupils met the benchmark for good GCSEs, easily beating the national average. More than half come from homes poor enough to earn free school meals and more than three-quarters do not speak English as a first language, making its intake exceptionally 'challenging', in Whitehall jargon.

Now when Mr Riley meets teenage students they seek advice about university. His dream is to return to Paddington Academy to teach full-time. It is easy to see why. The school is a success, recently earning an 'Outstanding' grade from Ofsted school inspectors. It is, more subjectively, an impressive place. It feels calm and academically ambitious. It hums with optimism.

The Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition has put great faith in school autonomy: there are now 1,500 academies in England. A single column cannot pretend to prove that faith right or wrong. Bagehot spent time at Paddington last month with a more modest goal, to look at one successful school and try to discern what makes it different. Two big lessons jumped out.

First, Paddington is built around remarkable people. An unusually high proportion of staff come from Teach First, a programme that sends highly-qualified graduates into challenging schools for at least two years. Staff stay late for homework clubs that run until ten at night (many pupils come from crowded homes) and volunteer for weekend workshops. A teacher guiding 15-year-olds through a thoughtful debate on British manufacturing was a Treasury economist before switching career. His economics GCSE class is an experiment, part of a policy of promoting more academic subjects. Maths is the most popular subject for the oldest, sixth-form pupils, followed by sciences. Create an expectation that students can take hard subjects, and they will demand them, the teacher says. Thanks to pupil lobbying, the school now offers the astronomy GCSE.

The students' families - from Africa, Bangladesh, Iraq, Kosovo and the Caribbean in the main - are remarkable, too. Many went through trials and tribulations to reach Britain, explains a 15-year-old girl who plans to be a doctor, so "we like a challenge".

Second, Paddington uses distinctive methods. A motto is: "the street stops at the gates". There is a strict uniform code, and pupils must remove hooded tops and caps as they arrive. Pupils are educated for the professional world, says a teacher: if they call a boss 'Bruv', value judgments will be made about them. Pupils agree. Using street slang would be an easy option in school, says a teenage boy. Alas, the world "out there" will not be easy.

Competition is embraced. Pupils are ranked on progress against individual targets every six weeks, with results posted publicly on a board. A difficult home life triggers support but not excuses. Some pupils arrive speaking no English: they are offered up to four years' specialist help, but expectations are not lowered.

Staff enforce the small details of behaviour ceaselessly, with meaningful looks, a warning finger briefly held up, or a word of praise every few seconds. The goal is not Gradgrindian discipline, but the avoidance of bigger confrontations. Good deeds are consistently rewarded, lapses always have consequences. Pupils' blazer lapels sag with enamel badges for choir, language-learning, mentoring younger pupils and so on. When the school gained its 'Outstanding' grade, pupils were crestfallen to hear that this did not bring a badge. The school's excellent and tireless principal, Oli Tomlinson, finally had 'Outstanding' badges made in blue and gold enamel, bearing the Ofsted logo.

No excuses, no barriers

A common charge from academy critics(notably teachers' unions)is that they practise selection on the sly by excluding difficult pupils. Early on, Paddington did expel some pupils from the old school, but now takes hard cases itself. At a morning meeting, staff discussed the progress of a new pupil rejected by all neighbouring schools: it went well, they agreed, considering it was his first day out of prison. Yet students feel safe. It's better than primary school here, says a 12 year old: "People respect you."

Paddington Academy is a brilliant school. That is great for its 1,200 pupils. But for others to benefit, Paddington's strengths - its remarkable people and methods - must be echoed elsewhere. Methods can be copied. It helps that Paddington is part of a chain of academies sponsored by a charity, the United Learning Trust, driving the spread of good ideas. It also helps that school league tables are being beefed up with much more data, making Paddington's success more visible. Remarkable people are harder to reproduce. Yet Paddington's dynamic young teachers talk of their luck at working at a school which transforms lives. Mr Riley, fresh from university, longs to join them. The country needs more Mr Rileys. Schools as inspiring as Paddington are a good first step.

Computer Teaching

Emotion-sensing computer software that models and responds to students' cognitive and emotional states -- including frustration and boredom -- has been developed by University of Notre Dame Assistant Professor of Psychology Sidney D'Mello, Art Graesser from the University of Memphis and a colleague from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. D'Mello also is a concurrent assistant professor of computer science and engineering.

The new technology, which matches the interaction of human tutors, not only offers tremendous learning possibilities for students, but also redefines human-computer interaction.

"AutoTutor" and "Affective AutoTutor" can gauge the student's level of knowledge by asking probing questions; analyzing the student's responses to those questions; proactively identifying and correcting misconceptions; responding to the student's own questions, gripes and comments; and even sensing a student's frustration or boredom through facial expression and body posture and dynamically changing its strategies to help the student conquer those negative emotions.

"Most of the 20th-century systems required humans to communicate with computers through windows, icons, menus and pointing devices," says D'Mello, who specializes in human-computer interaction and artificial intelligence in education. "But humans have always communicated with each other through speech and a host of nonverbal cues such as facial expressions, eye contact, posture and gesture. In addition to enhancing the content of the message, the new technology provides information regarding the cognitive states, motivation levels and social dynamics of the students."

AutoTutor is an Intelligent Tutoring System (ITS) that helps students learn complex technical content in Newtonian physics, computer literacy and critical thinking by holding a conversation in natural language; simulating teaching and motivational strategies of human tutors; modeling students' cognitive states; using its student model to dynamically tailor the interaction to individual students; answering students' questions; identifying and correcting misconceptions; and keeping students engaged with images, animations and simulations. In addition to these capabilities, Affective AutoTutor adds emotion-sensitive capabilities by monitoring facial features, body language and conversational cues; regulating negative states such as frustration and boredom; and synthesizing emotions via the content of its verbal responses, speech intonation and facial expressions of an animated teacher.

D'Mello's study, titled "AutoTutor and Affective AutoTutor: Learning by Talking with Cognitively and Emotionally Intelligent Computers that Talk Back," that details this new technology will be published in special edition of ACM Transactions on Interactive Intelligent Systems that highlights innovative technology of the last decade.

"Much like a gifted human tutor, AutoTutor and Affective AutoTutor attempt to keep the student balanced between the extremes of boredom and bewilderment by subtly modulating the pace, direction and complexity of the learning task," D'Mello says. Considerable empirical evidence has shown that one-on-one human tutoring is extremely effective when compared to typical classroom environments, and AutoTutor and Affective AutoTutor closely model the pedagogical styles, dialogue patterns, language and gestures of human tutors. They are also one of the few ITSs that help learning by engaging students in natural language dialogues that closely mirror human-human tutorial dialogues.

Tested on more than 1,000 students, AutoTutor produces learning gains of approximately one letter grade -- gains that have proven to outperform novice human tutors and almost reach the bar of expert human tutors.

Computer Teacher

Emotion-sensing computer software that models and responds to students' cognitive and emotional states -- including frustration and boredom -- has been developed by University of Notre Dame Assistant Professor of Psychology Sidney D'Mello, Art Graesser from the University of Memphis and a colleague from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. D'Mello also is a concurrent assistant professor of computer science and engineering.

The new technology, which matches the interaction of human tutors, not only offers tremendous learning possibilities for students, but also redefines human-computer interaction.

"AutoTutor" and "Affective AutoTutor" can gauge the student's level of knowledge by asking probing questions; analyzing the student's responses to those questions; proactively identifying and correcting misconceptions; responding to the student's own questions, gripes and comments; and even sensing a student's frustration or boredom through facial expression and body posture and dynamically changing its strategies to help the student conquer those negative emotions.

"Most of the 20th-century systems required humans to communicate with computers through windows, icons, menus and pointing devices," says D'Mello, who specializes in human-computer interaction and artificial intelligence in education. "But humans have always communicated with each other through speech and a host of nonverbal cues such as facial expressions, eye contact, posture and gesture. In addition to enhancing the content of the message, the new technology provides information regarding the cognitive states, motivation levels and social dynamics of the students."

AutoTutor is an Intelligent Tutoring System (ITS) that helps students learn complex technical content in Newtonian physics, computer literacy and critical thinking by holding a conversation in natural language; simulating teaching and motivational strategies of human tutors; modeling students' cognitive states; using its student model to dynamically tailor the interaction to individual students; answering students' questions; identifying and correcting misconceptions; and keeping students engaged with images, animations and simulations. In addition to these capabilities, Affective AutoTutor adds emotion-sensitive capabilities by monitoring facial features, body language and conversational cues; regulating negative states such as frustration and boredom; and synthesizing emotions via the content of its verbal responses, speech intonation and facial expressions of an animated teacher.

D'Mello's study, titled "AutoTutor and Affective AutoTutor: Learning by Talking with Cognitively and Emotionally Intelligent Computers that Talk Back," that details this new technology will be published in special edition of ACM Transactions on Interactive Intelligent Systems that highlights innovative technology of the last decade.

"Much like a gifted human tutor, AutoTutor and Affective AutoTutor attempt to keep the student balanced between the extremes of boredom and bewilderment by subtly modulating the pace, direction and complexity of the learning task," D'Mello says. Considerable empirical evidence has shown that one-on-one human tutoring is extremely effective when compared to typical classroom environments, and AutoTutor and Affective AutoTutor closely model the pedagogical styles, dialogue patterns, language and gestures of human tutors. They are also one of the few ITSs that help learning by engaging students in natural language dialogues that closely mirror human-human tutorial dialogues.

Tested on more than 1,000 students, AutoTutor produces learning gains of approximately one letter grade -- gains that have proven to outperform novice human tutors and almost reach the bar of expert human tutors.

Worthless Degrees

College is a great place to learn and have fun. But let’s not kid ourselves, some degrees are as useless as the plot in a Michael Bay film. Here’s a list of 10 degrees that may be interesting, but do jack shit for you in the real world. (Warning! NSFW language)

the 10 most worthless college majors

The Khan Academy

Salman Khan’s simply narrated, faceless home videos on everything from algebra to French history have been viewed half a billion times.

Last year, a number of schools began “flipping” their classrooms, having students study Khan videos by night and do homework with teachers by day.

His staff has been ramped up to 32, including the recent high-profile addition of Google’s first hired employee, programming ace Craig Silverstein. The staff’s immediate mission is to further broaden the site’s content and improve assessment and feedback features so the Khan Academy experience becomes more interactive.

This summer, he’ll launch the first Khan Academy Discovery Lab in Palo Alto, Calif., a small, project-based summer camp “that’s like a lab for us, so we can learn more about how kids learn,” he says. If it’s a hit, the labs will expand nationwide next year.

And after, perhaps a bricks-and-mortar Khan Academy.

Khan Academy is part of a looming tech-education iceberg, says Victor Hu, head of education technology and services for Goldman Sachs. ”Technology is doing to education what it’s done to countless other industries: disrupting it,” Hu says. “Where education once was static, bound to a textbook, now it’s moving to a global, interdisciplinary model.”.

Khan notes that Stanford will soon put medical classes on his website. “But hopefully they realize from what I’ve done that it can’t be a professor at a whiteboard with PowerPoint. It has to be bite-size and conversational, and no faces.”

“When I started, you wouldn’t have imagined that some crazy dude in a closet making videos would help lead this charge. But my mission is to have every precocious 13-year-old in the world have access to every bit of information they could ever want.”

Longer School Year

• It was the last Sunday in July, and Bethany and Garvin Phillips were pulling price tags off brand-new backpacks and stuffing them with binders and pencils.
  
  While other children around the country readied for beach vacations or the last weeks of summer camp, Bethany, 11, and Garvin, 9, were preparing for the first day of the new school year at Griffith Elementary, just six weeks after the start of their summer vacation.
  
  Griffith, one of five schools in the Balsz Elementary School District here, is one of a handful of public schools across the country that has lengthened the school year in an effort to increase learning time.
  
  A typical public school calendar is 180 days, but the Balsz district, where 90 percent of the students qualify for free or reduced lunch, is in session for 200 days, adding about a month to the academic year.
  
  According to the National Center on Time and Learning, a nonprofit research group in Boston, about 170 schools — more than 140 of them charter schools — across the country have extended their calendars in recent years to 190 days or longer.
  
  Neither Bethany, who plans to run for student council president, nor Garvin, who was excited about his fourth-grade teacher, seemed bothered by the change. “The kids’ education is more important than all of these breaks that we have,” said their mother, Debra Phillips.
  
  A growing group of education advocates is agitating for more time in schools, arguing that low-income children in particular need more time to catch up as schools face increasing pressure to improve student test scores.
  
  “It’s not as simple as ‘Oh, if we just went 12 hours every kid would be Einstein,’” said Chris Gabrieli, chairman of the Boston group. “On the other hand, the more time you spend practicing or preparing to do something, the better you get at it.”
  
  Education advocates have been calling for more school time at least since the 1983 “Nation at Risk” report presented an apocalyptic vision of American education.
  
  Teachers’ unions, parents who want to preserve summers for family vacations and those who worry that children already come under too much academic stress argue that extended school time is not the answer. Research on longer school days or years also shows mixed results.
  
  But studies also show that during the summer break, students — particularly those from low-income families — tend to forget what they learned in the school year. Getting back to school early, supporters of a longer calendar say, is one of the best ways to narrow an achievement gap between rich and poor students.
  
  Many charter schools, including those in the academically successful KIPP network, attribute their achievement in part to longer days and calendars. President Obama has repeatedly promoted expanded school time, even inspiring “Saturday Night Live” to poke fun, with Seth Meyers saying in his Weekend Update segment that only “Catherine, the fifth grader nobody likes,” would support such a proposal.
  
  Within the last two years, both the Ford Foundation and the Wallace Foundation have made multimillion dollar commitments to help nonprofit groups work with school districts to restructure the school day and year.
  
  Advocates of longer school years say that the 180-day school year is an outdated artifact.
  
  “The fact that our calendar has been based on the agrarian economy when almost none of our kids work in the field anymore,” said Arne Duncan, secretary of education, “doesn’t make any sense whatsoever.”
  
  Yet several recent efforts to lengthen the school calendar have foundered. The Woodland Hills Academy in Pittsburgh extended its school year to 195 days in 2009, but this year it will return to the traditional 180-day calendar because of state budget cuts. Similarly, Parkside Elementary in Coral Springs, Fla., tried a 200-day calendar for one year before abandoning it because of insufficient financing.
  
  Last year, legislators in Arkansas and New Mexico introduced bills to institute a 200-day school calendar, but both stalled. In Iowa, after Gov. Terry E. Branstad discussed the possibility of lengthening the school year at several town-hall-style meetings, protesters prompted the state to convene a study group to examine the issue.
  
  Critics say that with so many schools already failing, giving them more time would do little to help students.
  
  “It is true that we have an unfair society, and it is true that kids who are coming from the poorer backgrounds and whose parents don’t do a lot of reading are losing reading skills over the summer,” said Peter Gray, research professor of psychology at Boston College. “But let’s look at other solutions.” He added, “Whatever job we give to the school system, they ruin it.”
  
  Advocates say that schools need to plan carefully how they will use the extra time. Some say that adding the kinds of art, music and other activities that more affluent students typically get outside school is as important as beefing up academics. In Chicago, Mayor Rahm Emanuel and the teachers’ union have been battling over his plan to lengthen the school day; an agreement was reached last month when the school district agreed to hire back teachers for more enrichment programs rather than simply forcing classroom teachers to work longer hours.
  
  “Better is as important as the more,” said Jeannie Oakes, director of educational opportunity and scholarship programs at the Ford Foundation.
  
  When Jeffrey Smith, superintendent of the Balsz district, arrived in 2008, he inherited a district where two of the five schools had been rated underperforming for several years running and the district was at risk of being taken over by the state.
  
  With the recession pinching state and local budgets, Mr. Smith seized on an Arizona law that gave an additional 5 percent of state financing to districts that added 20 days to the school year.
  
  While many parents supported the initiative, some teachers resisted, worried that they would not receive enough extra pay to compensate for the additional time. The school board voted in 2009 to extend the year, and with the additional state financing and a local property tax increase, the district raised teacher salaries by 9 percent.
  
  Since the district transitioned to the longer calendar, the proportion of students passing state reading tests has gone to 65 percent from 51 percent, and math scores are also improving.
  
  Some teachers say that it is a new curriculum, targeted tutoring and two hours of professional development a week, as much as the extra days, that have helped raise achievement.
  
  “Quantity is great, if you have the quality to back it up,” said Kathleen Puryear, a 20-year veteran fourth-grade teacher.
  
  The district has lost several teachers since the longer school year began. At Griffith, Alexis Wilson, the principal, said 10 out of 23 classroom teachers retired or resigned last year, some citing the 200-day schedule.
  
  Given the choice, many children would also rather be out playing than sitting behind a desk. But Riziki Gloria, a fifth grader at David Crockett Elementary, a Balsz school that serves many refugees and homeless children, said that she was keen to get back to school. “Sometimes summer is really boring,” she said. “We just sit there and watch TV.”
  
  Outside Griffith Elementary early last Monday morning, children and their parents arrived early, eager to start. Sheena Padia said she had chosen to send her sons Isaiah and Elias Mercado to Griffith even though they live outside the district, in part because of the 200-day calendar.
  
  “I love it because it is more education for them,” said Ms. Padia, as Isaiah, 7, showed off new black-and-white Adidas sneakers and Elias, 5, brandished a mechanical pencil.
  
  The shorter summer break seemed to help the students adjust quickly to being back in school. After the morning Pledge of Allegiance, Ms. Puryear’s fourth graders easily recited the school’s mantra: “No one has the right to interfere with the learning, safety or well-being of others.”
  
  Down the hall, Sarah Ravel used the morning to review school disciplinary codes, and she played get-to-know-you games with her new sixth graders. By afternoon, it was down to schoolwork as she handed out a math review sheet.
  
  Ms. Ravel sat at the front of the class, her left hand magnified to several times its size as she projected the work sheet onto a digital white board. Hands shot into the air, waving urgently. The class had hit a tricky problem: subtract 2 hours and 45 minutes from 5 hours and 20 minutes. Ms. Ravel carefully explained how to work out the solution.
  
  “If you are not comfortable with that, know that we are going to do one of those every day for the next 200 days,” she said. “I guess I should say the next 199 days,” she amended. “So we are going to get really comfortable.”

Making Education Brain Science

LAST month, two kindergarten classes at the Blue School were hard at work doing what many kindergartners do: drawing. One group pursued a variation on the self-portrait. “That’s me thinking about my brain,” one 5-year-old-girl said of her picture. Down the hall, children with oil pastels in hand were illustrating their emotions, mapping where they started and where they ended. For one girl, sadness ended at home with a yummy drink and her teddy bear.

Grappling so directly with thoughts and emotions may seem odd for such young brains, but it is part of the DNA of the Blue School, a downtown Manhattan private school that began six years ago as a play group. From the beginning, the founders wanted to incorporate scientific research about childhood development into the classroom. Having rapidly grown to more than 200 students in preschool through third grade, the school has become a kind of national laboratory for integrating cognitive neuroscience and cutting-edge educational theory into curriculum, professional development and school design.

“Schools were not applying this new neurological science out there to how we teach children,” said Lindsey Russo, whose unusual title, director of curriculum documentation and research, hints at how seriously the Blue School takes this mission. “Our aim is to take those research tools and adapt them to what we do in the school.”

So young children at the Blue School learn about what has been called “the amygdala hijack” — what happens to their brains when they flip out. Teachers try to get children into a “toward state,” in which they are open to new ideas. Periods of reflection are built into the day for students and teachers alike, because reflection helps executive function — the ability to process information in an orderly way, focus on tasks and exhibit self-control. Last year, the curriculum guide was amended to include the term “meta-cognition”: the ability to think about thinking.

“Having language for these mental experiences gives children more chances to regulate their emotions,” said David Rock, who is a member of the Blue School’s board and a founder of NeuroLeadership Institute, a global research group dedicated to understanding the brain science of leadership.

That language is then filtered through a 6-year-old’s brain.

Miles, one of the kindergartners drawing their emotions, showed off his picture and described the battle it depicted between happiness and anger this way: “The happy fights angry, but angry gets blocked by the force field and can’t get out.” Happiness could escape through his mouth, Miles explained. But anger got trapped, turning into sadness.

With ample research showing that negative emotions impede learning while positive emotions broaden children’s attention and their ability to acquire and retain information, strategies for regulating emotions are getting more emphasis in progressive schools across the country.

“The science of learning is something teachers are paying more and more attention to,” said Mariale Hardiman, director of the Neuro-Education Initiative at the Johns Hopkins University School of Education. She was not familiar with the Blue School but said she would endorse any school trying to integrate academic and emotional education.

“We can no longer think that the two systems are separate,” Dr. Hardiman said, “and that children should leave their emotions at the door.”

For all the attention brain science is receiving in schools, experts say it is too soon to know whether its application will lead to improved academic outcomes. And some researchers say that while they embrace new ideas — especially around self-control — they personally prefer a more traditional approach to pedagogy.

“The older approach has led to some very good outcomes,” said Sam Wang, an associate professor of molecular biology and neuroscience at Princeton University and co-author of “Welcome to Your Child’s Brain,” a child development primer for parents.

But the Blue School clearly has its appeal. This year, it had eight applications for each spot in its program for 3-year-olds, making it a typically hypercompetitive Manhattan private school. Tuition for students in kindergarten through third grade is $31,910 a year.

“I’m never anxious about academics,” said Thomas Bierer, the father of first-grade twins who have been at the school for two years. “My main thing is how they will interact with others and what kind of people will they be.”

Started in 2006 by members of the Blue Man Group, an alternative theater troupe, and their wives, the school’s original mission was to “reimagine education for a changing world.” The goal was to nurture creative and adaptive learners, not to teach students to digest and regurgitate facts and formulas. It considers itself a lab school, where teachers, parents and students collaborate; there are plans to have a teacher training program by 2013.

Teachers ask questions but rarely offer answers, instead helping students learn from one another. “Learning is not an individual act,” David Kelly, the school’s director of curriculum, said. “It’s a social act.”

In November, Shanon Greenfield asked her first graders what they wanted to study. Sharks and leaves each developed a strong following. Over weeks of discussion, the students decided they should go to an aquarium to learn more about one of the topics they had picked. Ms. Greenfield posted a road map for their research. What do they know? What do they want to know? How will they find it out?

The students set goals: Pick an aquarium, figure out how to get there, plan what to do while there and afterward. By mid-January, they were pondering transportation options: school bus (free) or ferry (one student thought it was most direct). They set a deadline for the trip, and in February visited the New York Aquarium in Coney Island — by bus.

“The end goal is not facts about sharks,” Ms. Greenfield said. “It’s not to recreate anything. The end goal is the process.”

Other progressive schools in Manhattan and across the country take a child-centered approach to education, with a heavy dose of social and emotional learning. But many of them turn toward a traditional academic curriculum by second or third grade. Testing, with all of its anxiety, kicks in, and content, not process, becomes paramount.

This being New York, even Blue School parents are not immune. Starting last year, when the oldest children in the school became second graders, parents began voicing increasing concern about the school’s lack of traditional assessments. The school had been preoccupied with moving almost every previous year. But with a permanent home established on Water Street, the parents, in town hall-style meetings and group discussions, asked the school to do more testing.

One parent who supported the push was David Beal, an adviser to the president of National Geographic, who noted that the school will end at fifth grade and that the children will be thrust into a test-happy world. “We don’t want to find out after we’ve left that we’ve missed some important chunk of learning,” he said.

The school responded. Four-year-olds are now being given a standard private school assessment, and this year for the first time, third graders will take the E.R.B., a widely used test.

Even with the changes, the Blue School is not for everyone. Emily Glickman, founder of Abacus Guide Educational Consulting, said her clients found it a “little too artsy and alternative.”

“I find more and more, for their tuition dollars, families want tradition, structure and the three R’s,” she said.

Dr. Daniel J. Siegel, a neuropsychiatrist and co-author of the parenting guide “The Whole-Brain Child,” who is also an adviser to the school, said there were three others R’s: reflection, relationships and resilience — and schools should teach those, too.

He spent three days at the school in late March working with students, teachers and parents on topics ranging from what learning is to why multitasking was not good for the brain (concentration is better at creating neural connections, which result in long-term synaptic change, otherwise known as learning). “Kids who learn social and emotional skills do better academically,” Dr. Siegel said. “They are happier, and their emotions are more rewarding.”

So what happens when you do too much multitasking, he asked some third graders. “Your brain explodes,” said one girl, squirming. “Ew.”

Patchwork Online Education

• A group of online-learning ventures is collaborating on a new kind of free class to be offered this fall, known as a mechanical MOOC (for “massive open online course”), that will teach a computer-programming language by patching together existing resources from open-learning sites.
  
  Unlike courses already available online, the new class will not require a traditional instructor, or a large start-up investment.
  
  The new course, “A Gentle Introduction to Python,” will blend content from M.I.T.’s OpenCourseWare, instant-feedback exercises and quizzes from Codecademy, and study groups organized by OpenStudy, and will be coordinated through an e-mail list operated by Peer 2 Peer University.
  
  “The MOOCs that have come out in the last six months are really incredible and have truly moved the needle for online learning, but they are based on very sophisticated central platforms and require significant resources to develop,” Philipp Schmidt, Peer 2 Peer University’s co-founder, said in a statement.
  
  “The mechanical MOOC is an attempt to leverage the power of the open Web, by loosely joining together a set of independent building blocks,” he said.
  
  The mechanical MOOC will not be as tightly structured as the free courses now offered by leading universities like Harvard, Berkeley, Stanford and the University of Pennsylvania through Coursera or edX, which have enrolled more than a million students. (While M.I.T. is involved in both edX and the new project, they are separate.)
  
  Unlike edX courses, the mechanical MOOC will not offer a certificate of completion. However, students can earn a badge from Codecademy to document their achievement.
  
  The collaborators say that the components of education — content, community and assessment — all exist online, although not in one place. Combining top sites for each, they say, should result in a course that is as good as the far more costly approach taken by Coursera, edX and others, albeit a less polished experience, where the pieces are not custom-created to fit together neatly. If the first course works, they say, it could spur many more similar offerings.
  
  OpenStudy will provide a forum where all learners in the class can choose to participate in a mass study group, or can be assigned to a study group of 10.
  
  The creators of the mechanical MOOC hope that the new model will help increase the percentage of students who complete their courses.
  
  Currently, only one in 10, or fewer, who sign up for MOOCs make it all the way through, either because they signed up while casually browsing, or because they are unable to keep up with the hours of work required each week.
  
  In the mechanical MOOC, those who fall behind can repeat units where needed and work at their own pace.
  
  “We want to do more than sign up tens of thousands of students and have only a fraction succeed,” Preetha Ram, the co-founder of OpenStudy, said in a statement. “Our goal is to have everyone who participates succeed.”

Reading To Dogs

• Parents who are used to witnessing the exquisite agony of a child learning to read will appreciate that Jamie Gardner’s experience is not typical. There is no fidgeting, no sliding off the chair, no sudden interest in what’s happening outside the window — just intense focus and quiet concentration.
  
  Jamie, 8, is reading to Teddy, a golden retriever “reading dog”, who has been visiting his school for the past year. As he reads, he strokes Teddy’s paw then squeezes his tail gently when he stumbles over a difficult word. For his part, Teddy cocks his ear at certain points in the story and appears for all the world to be listening intently.
  
  “I agree it does sound mad, but all I can say is that it works,” says Jo Hussey, deputy head of Fairchildes Primary in New Addington, Surrey, who brought the scheme to the school last year. “All the children who read to Teddy have made incredible improvements: one went from reading simple “Biff and Chip” reading scheme books to lengthy chapter books within four months.”
  
  About 100 primary schools in Britain are experimenting with dog-reading programmes after the success of similar schemes in the US. Many schools, such as Fairchildes, target children who are struggling with their reading — especially boys — but other schools say it helps stretch bright children, too.
  
  Head teachers are under immense pressure to try anything to improve reading levels after Ofsted’s new chief inspector, Sir Michael Wilshaw, earlier this year pointed out that literacy standards in primary schools hadn’t improved since 2005. One in five children leave primary school below the required reading standard. “This was a real out-of-the-box idea that we thought was worth trying on children where other provisions — such as extra time with teaching assistants — hadn’t worked,” Hussey says. Each child in the programme — 13 boys and one girl — gets one session a week with Teddy. After reading to him for 15 minutes, in the presence of his owner and a teaching assistant, they “high-five” his paw and feed him treats, something that provokes much envy among the other children.
  
  The results are startling. The Kennel Club, which helps fund these programmes in the UK, found that children reading once a week to a dog increased their reading age by 14 months in under eight months.
  
  In a recent study by Tufts University in the US, a group of six-year-olds read with a dog once a week during the summer break; another group read to an adult volunteer. Those reading to the dog showed an improvement by the start of the new school year, whereas the others had dipped — and a third of the children reading to adults dropped out of the programme altogether.
  
  Why, and precisely how, it works so well is not yet clear because research is at an early stage. In one Canadian study of four schools, published in April, researchers concluded that it was a clever combination of several elements. The children built up an “emotionally safe and caring connection” to the dog, which increased their confidence. They also felt important because they believed they were helping to look after the dog, and they relished their role reversal as “teacher” to the animal.
  
  This chimes with the experience of Carol Petley, Teddy’s owner and a former teacher. “Children reading to an adult will tend to feel inferior because the adult is better at it, but when they are reading to Teddy, they are the ones telling the story — they feel they are teaching him,” she says. “They are also incredibly relaxed sitting with him — they’ll stroke him or put their hand on his back as they read and will feel he is their friend.”
  
  Unlike adults, a dog doesn’t interrupt, try to hurry them or judge their efforts, points out Fairchildes’s specialist teaching assistant Lee Bacon. “We find that children know if they are no good at reading, so they lose confidence and don’t want to read aloud, even in small groups. Now they fly through books with Teddy. They also don’t seem to need correcting as they read: if they make a mistake they will calmly go back and read that bit again. It’s incredible to watch.”
  
  Although the research has been done mainly with children who struggle with reading, children of all abilities respond, says Louise Buist, a teacher at Pennycross Primary School in Plymouth, who introduced the scheme to Year 3 and 4 children two years ago. “I have children who read to their parents every night and are above average readers, but they get so much out of reading to Kenny, the lurcher who comes to school every Monday. It makes reading more exciting for them. We will also discuss whether Kenny enjoyed the book — what did he think of the characters and the plot? We talk about quite complex ideas through Kenny’s experience, which is a useful tool for bright children.”
  
  Heidi Ancell, of the Kennel Club, believes the power of a dog is that it can be a great listener that does not judge. “Reading aloud can be intimidating whatever standard you are, and reading to a dog can increase a child’s confidence,” she says. Tracey Berridge, whose charity, Dogs Helping Kids, funds four dogs who work in schools in Devon, with some 20 more in training, including dogs in Wales, Gloucestershire and Sussex, says the presence of an animal changes a classroom dynamic, too. “When a dog is there, children tend to calm down. It keeps them focused, because they are aware that the dog is sitting in the room. And also if they are good they’ll get to pet him at the end.”
  
  Berridge, who has trained Dexter, a shih tzu-poodle cross to take reading sessions in Barnstaple library, Devon, says parents are often amazed by the experience. “It is astonishing the difference between a child going into a session and coming out. Often they might arrive quiet and shy and when they come out they cannot stop talking. One little girl recently told her parents how she was helping Dexter with the words that she too was struggling with.”

Intelligent Textbook

• Want to know more about your subject? Type in your own question and artificially intelligent software will construct a new page to answer your query.
  
  SITTING down with the Inquire system is, at first, a lot like trying to cosy up to an intimidatingly dense biology textbook. Sure, its presentation on the iPad is slick, but that can't hide the fact that you are in for a tough old read.
  
  That is until you highlight the first bit of particularly impenetrable text. Suddenly a list of questions pops up in the right-hand margin. Touch one and you are whisked away to a Wikipedia-like page full of information specific to the concept you are stuck on. Terms like "chloroplast" and "plasma membrane" are succinctly defined, and the page explains how each concept fits into the wider field of biology.
  
  Want to know more? Type in your own question and artificially intelligent software will construct a new page to answer your query.
  
  The aim of Inquire is to provide students with the world's first intelligent textbook, says its creator David Gunning of Seattle-based Vulcan. At first glance, the system just looks like an electronic version of Campbell Biology, the tome that forms the bedrock of biology classes for first-year university and advanced high school students in the US. But behind the scenes is a machine-readable concept map of the 5000 or so ideas covered in the book, along with information on how they are all related.
  
  When a student asks a question - "what does a protein do?", for instance - the system first converts it into a more structured query, such as "what is the function of a protein?", and then uses this to search and find results from the concept map.
  
  Earlier this year, the team recruited 72 first-year students from De Anza College in Cupertino, California, to put the system to the test. Students were given either the full Inquire system, the Inquire system with the query function switched off, or a paper copy of Campbell Biology. They were then asked to spend 60 minutes reading a section of the book, 90 minutes on homework problems, and to take a 20-minute-long quiz.
  
  Students who used the full Inquire system scored a grade better on the quiz, on average, than the other groups. "When we did our assessment, we didn't see any Ds or Fs, which we did see in the control groups," says Debbie Frazier, a high school biology teacher who works on the project. "Our students could use Inquire as a tool and ask it questions that they might be embarrassed to ask a teacher in person because it makes them feel stupid."
  
  While such results are promising, perhaps it's a little soon to crown Inquire the future of textbooks. For starters, after two years of work the system is still only half-finished. The team plan to encode the rest of the 1400-page Campbell Biology by the end of 2013, but they expect a team of 18 biologists will be needed to do so. This raises concerns about whether the project could be expanded to cover other areas of science, let alone other subjects.
  
  Still, adhering to the textbook format makes sense because it means students won't have to wade through reams of irrelevant information, as they do when searching the web, says Benedict du Boulay of the University of Sussex in Brighton, UK.
  
  Such habits are common, says Inquire team member Adam Overholtzer, of SRI International in Menlo Park, California. "I'm not going to name names, but all of the students go to Wikipedia to study," he says. "It's open while they are reading their books."

Educate With Games

• Smart phones, tablets and video game systems are often seen as distractions to school children in developed countries, which tend to adhere to a strict teacher-student educational model. At Technology Review‘s Emerging Technologies (EmTech) conference here on October 25, a panel of technologists and educators posited that it’s time to embrace students’ use of such technologies and rethink learning in both developed and developing countries.
  
  “The issue isn’t education or schools—it’s learning,” panelist Nicholas Negroponte, founder and chairman emeritus of M.I.T.’s Media Lab and the chairman of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) foundation, said. “The fork in the road is the difference between knowing and understanding. We test people on what they know, but they might not understand a thing.”
  
  Not a new argument, but Negroponte’s approach to resolving it has been novel. Although OLPC’s efforts to put low-cost computers in the hands of underprivileged students has met with varying degrees of success, his latest focus is on what he says are the 100 million children worldwide without access to any formal education. While it’s impractical for a single organization to try to build schools for all of these children living in remote areas across the globe, an alternative might be giving these children tools and technology they can use to teach themselves, one another and their parents.
  
  To test this, OLPC in April delivered boxes containing more than a dozen tablet computers loaded with books, games and other apps—in English—to an isolated village in the Ethiopian highlands. No instructions were given to the village children regarding what was in the boxes or what to do with them. The villagers have no reading or writing skills, nor have many of them ever seen so much as a written word, not even on a sign or bottle, Negroponte said. “I thought they’d [just] play with the boxes,” he added.
  
  Instead, within four minutes the village children had opened the boxes and learned how to turn on the tablets, he said. Within a few months they had learned the A, B, Cs and were singing the alphabet song in English.
  
  The question now is whether those Ethiopian children learn to read and write in English, and how quickly they might do it, Negroponte said. This is critical because “if you can learn to read, you can read to learn. If they can do that it [could] not only impact the 100 million kids who can’t go to school but might also help us understand how to help the educational system here,” he added.
  
  The key to learning, Negroponte’s fellow panelists agreed, is to engage children rather than simply talk at them. And one of the most effective ways of doing this is through play.
  
  Panelist Idit Harel Caperton, founder and president of education app developer World Wide Workshop, sees learning as a process of hands-on construction and reconstruction rather than simply information transfer. “You can’t understand something unless you go through the process of [building it],” she said Thursday.
  
  So Harel Caperton launched Globaloria, an educational program that encourages children to learn by setting and meeting goals that can be achieved through software, whether it’s explaining climate change or communicating a message to discourage bullying. Coding and computer languages are essential to learning, to the point where a lack of understanding of programming in the future will be like being illiterate, she said.
  
  Panelist Brian Waniewski, managing director of Institute of Play said he and his organization are using games to stimulate interest in learning among a group of New York City middle schoolers. “Games create a need to know,” Waniewski said. “You find things out as you progress toward your goal.”

Free Online Education

• Students anywhere are being offered free instruction online. What will that do to the trillion-dollar education business?
  
  Why It Matters
  
  Free, advanced education over the Web is a step forward for civilization.
  
  If you were asked to name the most important innovation in transportation over the last 200 years, you might say the combustion engine, air travel, Henry Ford’s Model-T production line, or even the bicycle. The list goes on.
  
  Now answer this one: what’s been the single biggest innovation in education?
  
  Don’t worry if you come up blank. You’re supposed to. The question is a gambit used by Anant Agarwal, the computer scientist named this year to head edX, a $60 million MIT-Harvard effort to stream a college education over the Web, free, to anyone who wants one. His point: it’s rare to see major technological advances in how people learn.
  
  Agarwal believes that education is about to change dramatically. The reason is the power of the Web and its associated data-crunching technologies. Thanks to these changes, it’s now possible to stream video classes with sophisticated interactive elements, and researchers can scoop up student data that could help them make teaching more effective. The technology is powerful, fairly cheap, and global in its reach. EdX has said it hopes to teach a billion students.
  
  Online education isn’t new—in the United States more than 700,000 students now study in full-time "distance learning" programs. What’s different is the scale of technology being applied by leaders who mix high-minded goals with sharp-elbowed, low-priced Internet business models. In the stories that will follow in this month’s business report, MIT Technology Review will chart the impact of free online education, particularly the “massive open online courses,” or MOOCs, offered by new education ventures like edX, Coursera, and Udacity, to name the most prominent (see “The Crisis in Higher Education”).
  
  These ideas affect markets so large that their value is difficult to quantify. Just consider that a quarter of the American population, 80 million people, is enrolled in K–12 education, college, or graduate school. Direct expenditures by government exceed $800 billion. Add to that figure private education and corporate training.
  
  Because education is economically important yet appears inefficient and static with respect to technology, it’s often cited (along with health care) as the next industry ripe for a major “disruption.” This belief has been promoted by Clayton Christensen, the influential Harvard Business School professor who coined the term “disruptive technology.” In two books on education, he laid a blueprint for online learning: it will continue to spread and get better, and eventually it will topple many ideas about how we teach—and possibly some institutions as well.
  
  In Christensen’s view, disruptive technologies find success initially in markets “where the alternative is nothing.” This accounts for why online learning is already important in the adult education market (think low-end MBAs and nursing degrees). It also explains the sudden rise of organizations such as Khan Academy, the nonprofit whose free online math videos have won funding from Bill Gates and adoring attention from the media. Khan gained its first foothold among parents who couldn’t afford $125 an hour for a private math tutor. For them, Salman Khan, the charming narrator of the videos, was a plausible substitute.
  
  Khan’s simple videos aren’t without their critics, who wonder whether his tutorials really teach math so well. “We agree 100 percent we aren’t going to solve education’s problems,” Khan responds. But he says the point to keep in mind is that technology-wise, “we’re in the top of the first inning.” He’ll be pouring about $10 million a year into making his videos better—already there are embedded exercises and analytics that let teachers track 50 or 100 students at once. Pretty soon, Khan told me, his free stuff “will be as good or better than anything anyone is charging money for.”
  
  Digital instruction faces limits. Online, you will never smell a burning resistor or get your hands wet in a biology lab. Yet the economics of distributing instruction over the Web are so favorable that they seem to threaten anyone building a campus or hiring teachers. At edX, Agarwal says, the same three-person team of a professor plus assistants that used to teach analog circuit design to 400 students at MIT now handles 10,000 online and could take a hundred times more.
  
  So where are we on the online education curve? According to a study from Babson College, the number of U.S. college students who took at least one online course increased from 1.6 million in 2002 to 6.1 million, or about a third of all college students, in 2010. The researchers, I. Elaine Allen and Jeff Seaman, found signs that the growth rate of online classes might be starting to slow. But their study didn’t anticipate the sudden entry of premier universities into online education this year. Coursera, an alliance between Stanford and two dozen other schools, claims that it had 1.5 million students sign up.
  
  Even though only a small fraction of those will actually complete a class, the rise of the MOOCs means we can begin thinking about how free, top-quality education could change the world. Khan’s videos are popular in India, and the MOOC purveyors have found that 60 percent of their sign-ups are self-starters from knowledge-hungry nations like Brazil and China. Nobody knows what a liberal application of high-octane educational propellant might do. Will it supersize innovation globally by knocking away barriers to good instruction? Will frightened governments censor teachers as they have the Web?
  
  Technology will define where online education goes next. All those millions of students clicking online can have their progress tracked, logged, studied, and probably influenced, too. Talk to Khan or anyone behind the MOOCs (which largely sprang from university departments interested in computer intelligence) and they’ll all say their eventual goal isn’t to stream videos but to perfect education through the scientific use of data. Just imagine, they say, software that maps an individual’s knowledge and offers a lesson plan unique to him or her.
  
  Will they succeed and create something truly different? If they do, we’ll have the answer to our question: online learning will be the most important innovation in education in the last 200 years.

Free College Textbooks

• Ask Ariel Diaz why he’s taking on the college textbook industry and he’ll tell you, “Quaternions.”
  
  Quaternions are a number system used for calculating three-dimensional motion, popular in computer graphics. And Diaz needed a crash course to help him with a consulting gig after his online video platform startup, Youcastr, had failed. He started with Wikipedia and found it was surprisingly good at explaining this complicated mathematics.
  
  Diaz, who still resents how much he’d paid for textbooks in college and graduate school, realized he’d hit on his next business idea. In 2011, he started Boundless Learning, a Boston company that has begun giving away free electronic textbooks covering college subjects like American history, anatomy and physiology, economics, and psychology.
  
  What’s controversial is how Boundless creates these texts. The company trawls for public material on sites like Wikipedia and then crafts it into online books whose chapters track closely to those of top-selling college titles. In April, Boundless was sued by several large publishers who accused the startup of engaging in “the business model of theft.”
  
  Theft or not, the college textbook industry is ripe for a disruptive shock from the Internet. Publishers today operate using what Mark Perry, a professor at the University of Michigan, calls a “cartel-style” model: students are required to buy specific texts at high prices. Perry has calculated that prices for textbooks have been rising at three times the rate of inflation since the 1980s.
  
  On average, college students spend around $1,200 each year on books and supplies. Those costs, which sometimes exceed the tuition at a community college, are prompting a wider rebellion against commercial publishers. In February, California legislators passed a law directing the state to produce free versions of texts used in the state’s 50 most popular college courses. In October, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said printed textbooks, a $6 billion industry in the United States (when sales of both used and new books are tallied), should be made “obsolete.”
  
  Unlike publishers, who market their books to professors, Diaz’s company is aiming directly at students. Starting in the summer of 2011, Boundless sent marketers to hand out flyers on four campuses, including Boston University and Florida State University. Diaz says that within weeks the company had students signing up from 1,000 campuses, although he declines to say how many students have downloaded Boundless textbooks.
  
  In their lawsuit, filed in March, publishers Cengage Learning, Pearson Education, and MacMillan Higher Education accused Boundless of copyright infringement, false advertising, and unfair competition. Diaz denies all the charges. He says his company uses only public information and doesn’t actually make or sell textbooks. “We don’t look at ourselves as an e-book or an online textbook or even textbook 2.0,” he says. “We see it as how do you create the next-generation content platform, which is much more than a textbook.”
  
  For now, however, replacing textbooks like N. Gregory Mankiw’s Principles of Economics (which retails for $294 new) or Campbell and Reece’s Biology ($208) does appear to be Boundless’s primary activity. When students type in the name of either text on Boundless’s website, they are greeted by a flashing message that says, “Aligning your book.” Soon, a table of contents pops up on the screen.
  
  In the case of Mankiw’s Principles, Boundless offers a stripped-down text covering the same core economic concepts. Mankiw is a snappy writer who starts off his chapter on taxes with an anecdote about Al Capone. Boundless’s version reads more like a reference text, but its organization closely apes that of Mankiw’s. Both have 36 chapters and even share the same first sentence: “The word economy comes from the Greek word oikonomos, which means one who manages a household.”
  
  Boundless’s replacement books are appealing to students like Heather Haygood, in her third year at Pikes Peak Community College in Colorado Springs, Colorado. She is using the Boundless version of Biology, which her school sells for $178. “I just refuse to spend that much on a book,” Haygood said in an e-mail interview. “It’s a known fact that college kids are generally poor/broke so why are you charging us so much for books??? … lucky me i found it for free!!” She calls the Boundless edition a “pretty dead-on” copy.
  
  Aaron White, Boundless’s cofounder and CTO, says the company uses a mix of human editors and technology to create its texts. It employs editors to locate public content from sources like Wikipedia, government websites, and Connextions, a repository of open-source academic material. That information goes into a content management system, which lets the company reuse explanations—say, of how DNA replicates—in multiple texts.
  
  Commercial publishers are moving as fast as they can toward digital formats. Most now sell lower-cost electronic books through sites such as CourseMate, Kno, and Apple’s iTunes. “We are in the heart of disruption now,” says Bethlam Forsa, a vice president at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, the largest K–12 textbook publisher in the United States.
  
  Publishers of paper textbooks still enjoy some advantages. In K–12 education, states can’t demand that poor students buy a computer or tablet, so they continue to distribute paper books. At the collegiate level, professors are reluctant to switch texts because they would have to revamp their courses.
  
  Such barriers help explain why the open-source textbook movement, which has been around for a decade, has never gotten very far. “The marketing realities of distribution have a lot to do with why there hasn’t been disruption,” says Sanford Forte, founder and director of the 11-year-old California Open Source Textbook Project. “The resources and skills to do that don’t lie within the academic sector.”
  
  Now some companies think they can make money with free books. Diaz says Boundless’s strategy is to use free books to amass a large audience to which it can later sell other “freemium” services, such as tutoring. Diaz is vague about the paid products, which might not be introduced for another year or two.
  
  Though no one has said publicly how Boundless might make money, the company was able to raise $8 million in venture capital in February. Mike Tyrrell, a partner at Venrock, which led the investment, says he was attracted by the idea that education in the United States is a $750 billion business still operating much as it did in the 1960s.
  
  “The combination of what’s available with online content, online tools, and the variety of devices being applied against an industry that hasn’t really changed and clearly hasn’t been disrupted—that makes for an interesting area to invest in,” Tyrrell says.

• Who is Calvin Hollywood? In the world of Photoshop instruction in Germany, Hollywood’s name towers above the rest.
  
  A self-styled maverick of online Photoshop tutorials, Hollywood sticks to his strengths: retouching photographs, teaching others to do the same, and marketing himself. It’s an expansive and lucrative enterprise.
  
  His business includes DVDs, live online webinars, and $30 downloadable courses that people can complete on their own time and schedules. To help generate Internet sales, Hollywood does appearances at shows like “Horror Nights,” a dance party frequented by people dressed as vampires and zombies. Hollywood says online teaching earns him as much as $16,000 a month.
  
  The Web is starting to change education (see “The Most Important Educational Technology in 200 Years”) and perhaps nowhere are its transforming effects so apparent as among teachers. Teaching is among the worst paid professions in the U.S. (starting salaries are $30,377 a year). But the Web is rewriting the rules of supply and demand. For popular instructors like Hollywood, who reach beyond physical classrooms, teaching has never offered a greater chance to become rich and famous.
  
  This effect of technology was dubbed the “Superstar Phenomenon” in a now canonical 1981 paper by the labor economist Sherwin Rosen. In his study, The Economics of Superstars, Rosen described mathematically how new media, like radio and TV, concentrated earnings among fewer performers or bestsellers. It did so by increasing the audience of stars, and because consumers flocked to the product they considered the best.
  
  The Web, with its ability to broadcast video, live exercises, and interactive documents, is extending the superstar rule to teachers of everything from computer programming to probability analysis. One expected result, say economists, is that a small number of popular teachers could end up winning the vast share of teaching income. The Wall Street Journal, which discovered a guitar teacher streaming paid classes for 1,500 people from his basement computer, concluded that although we will always need teachers, we may need “fewer of them.”
  
  Because teaching is a performance art, online education is favoring those like Hollywood, who has a flamboyant style, or others able to connect with their audience. Salman Khan, the stock-picker-turned-tutor whose YouTube math lessons have been viewed over 200 million times (see “Q&A: Salman Khan”), was recently judged by Yuri Milner, the Russian Internet investor, as the world’s “first superstar teacher.”
  
  Now more teachers are looking for online outlets, including on commercial websites such like Lynda.com and Udemy, which act as digital adult-education catalogs. Udemy broadcasts classes; any teacher can join in exchange for a 30 percent cut of their revenue. The company’s most popular classes include courses like “Become a Web Developer from Scratch,” taught by Victor Bastos, a 32-year-old Spanish programmer living in Lisbon, Portugal.
  
  Hollywood, who is 36, says he did not know how to use Photoshop until 2005. At the time, he was a boot camp instructor in Germany’s Air Force. But after seeing a friend stitch together two images using the program, Hollywood says, it was Liebe auf den ersten Blick, or “love at first sight.” He bought a DSLR camera, a Nikon D70, just so he could have pictures to retouch.
  
  He began teaching Photoshop to Air Force colleagues, eventually branching out into DVDs and seminars, and taking on his stage name, Calvin Hollywood (he declined to reveal his real name). The first time he put a seminar online, he says, 100 spots sold out in 10 minutes. These days, he does most of his Web teaching during the winter. “September to March, where the weather is not good here in Germany,” says Hollywood. “People don’t like to travel.”
  
  The Web’s new celebrity teachers don’t necessarily need any academic credentials. Hollywood says he never got further than middle school. What counts is personal style and knowledge to impart. In Hollywood’s case, what he teaches is an unusually heavy style of digital photo enhancement he calls “Calvinization.” He recalls how other Photoshop teachers scolded him: “You can’t do that. You don’t do that. Calvin Hollywood, ‘Oh my god you can’t do that!’”
  
  Katrin Eismann, chair of the digital photography department at New York’s School of Visual Arts, hosted Hollywood on his first trip to the United States in 2008. She says he is part of a new generation of Photoshop teachers who are turning retouching into a form of illustration. That’s different than how Adobe’s image-editing program was used in the past, which was more about correction than creation, and not very glamorous.
  
  Internet instruction has changed that, at least for Hollywood. “He has good energy, he’s fun, and he … doesn’t take himself too seriously,” says Eismann. “He even says that his way is not [necessarily] the right way. As an educator, I admire that.”

A Clever Business Model For OnLine Ed

• Duolingo

Acquiring Truth

• As many of you know, right before the election I made a $50 bet with Hank Campbell that Nate Silver would get at least 48 out of 50 states correct for the 2008 presidential election. I also got one of Hank’s readers to sign on to the same bet. Additionally, a few readers and Twitter followers got in on the wager; they were bullish on Romney’s prospects, and I was not (more honestly, I was moderately sure they were self-delusional, and willing to take their money to make them more cautious about their self-delusional biases in the future). But there’s a major precondition that needs to be stated here: I hedged.
  
  Last February a friend told me he was 100% confident that Barack Hussein Obama would be reelected. This prompted me to ask for favorable terms on a bet. The logic was simple, if he was 100% confident, then it shouldn’t be a major issue for him, because he was collecting anyhow. As it happens he gave me 5 to 1 odds, so that I would collect $5 for every $1 he might collect. I told him beforehand that I actually thought that Obama had a 60-70% chance of winning, so I went into the wager assuming I’d be out a modest amount of money. But that was no concern. My goal was now to convince those who were irrationally supportive of Romney to take the other side of the bet. For whatever reason people have an inordinate bias toward their hoped-for-candidate in terms of who they think will win, as opposed to who they wish to win. The future ought gets confused with the future is.* I got people to take the other side, which means that I was going to make money no matter who won.
  
  At this point one might wonder about my comment that I suspected that those who were bullish on Romney were delusional. It’s rather strong, and my reasoning is actually rather strange. Overall I accepted the polling averages. A few years back I was an economic determinist in election outcomes, but Nate Silver had convinced me that the sample size was too small to get a good sense of the real proportion of variation being predicted here. In short, the economy matters, but I stepped back from the supposition that it was determinative (as it happens, purely economic models that were excellent at predicting past elections face-planted this time). So that’s why I relied on the polls. Though I leaned on Nate Silver, I didn’t think he was particularly oracular, and I’d say that I’m mildly skeptical of the excessive faith some put in his particular person. When I put a link up to Colby Cosh’s mild take-down of Silvermania I received a few moderately belligerent comments. This despite the fact that I was willing to put money on Silver’s prediction.
  
  But after soft-pedaling my confidence in polling averages, why did I think the pro-Romney people were delusional? The simple answer is 2004 and 2008. When the polling runs against you consistently and persistently motivated reasoning comes out of the wood-work. There’s a particularly desperate stink to it, and I smelled it with the “polls-are-skewed” promoters of 2012. In 2004 there were many plausible arguments for why the polls underestimated John F. Kerry’s final tally. And in 2008 there were even weirder arguments for why McCain might win. In 2012 it went up to a whole new level, with a lot of the politically conservative pundit class signing on board because of desperation.
  
  The reality is that out of the space of plausible models you can find something congenial to your own proposition. I very studiously avoided reading much about the debates about skewed polls, even in the comments of this weblog. For example, Dwight E. Howell left this note on September 29th:
  
  You might want to go back and look at how accurate polls have been at predicting elections in the past. The track record isn’t great. Even the exit polls in WI were wrong. It appears the Democrats who wanted the governor out stopped and chatted and the people who voted to keep him largely walked on by including a significant number of Democrats who had to have voted for him.
  
  There is also the non trivial question of how many of the various sub groups are actually going to show up on election day. If you assume that blacks will turn out in the same numbers as his last election you get one result. If you note that the black community has not fared well during his tenure in office and he has deeply offended many black Christians you have to wonder if some of these people are going to bother to show up and vote for him. The Jews have to know his position relating to the Jewish state, etc. He pretty much had a solid Catholic vote last time but he’s at war with the Catholic church. What does this all mean? You’ll find out after the votes are counted.
  
  The votes have been counted, and Dwight E. Howell was full of shit. In fact I badgered Howell on Twitter and on these comment boards to put a wager down on the election, and he finally begged off after he couldn’t evade me, claiming he wasn’t a betting man. I have a hard time dismissing the possibility that Howell himself knew he was a delusional crank full of bullshit on some level! And yet what he said wasn’t crazy.
  
  The reality is that I didn’t read most of Howell’s comment until after the election. The same with the very similar comments that came through in Howell’s wake on that thread (I did not post them, I simply skimmed the first few sentences). A similarity of content across the comments suggested that these individuals were just regurgitating plausible nuggets and feeding their motivating reasoning bugs. And that’s why I avoided detailed inquiry into the issues: I didn’t want to bias my own perspective! This was part of the source of Hank Campbell’s confusion as to my somewhat erratic response on Twitter as I frantically tried to make a bet with him on the election: I didn’t really care about Hank’s theories about the polls, I suspected that the polls were right because I strongly scented a lot of bullshit on the Republican side. I wanted to get Hank down on some bet, and I wasn’t too concerned with the details. In contrast to the odor wafting up from the Republicans, the Democrats seemed sincerely and guilelessly accepting of the polls which favored them. My intuition here could have been wrong, or the perceptions of the parties of interest may have been wrong. But that was really the situation and context which motivated my behavior at the time.
  
  After the election was over I actually started reading some of the arguments about why the polls were skewed, and I find that they are extremely plausible to me. And not just me, John Hawks owes me a drink because he simply didn’t believe the turnout models which suggested a demographic more like 2008. The reality is that my instinct was to go with John. I too was very skeptical of the proposition that Obama could turnout the same voters as he did in 2008. And yet he did turnout those voters!
  
  What does this tell me after the fact? The plausibility of any given datum can’t outweigh the aggregate. Dwight E. Howell et al. have a lot of plausible historical data. Granted, you have some obvious bullshit “SHOCK POLL” headlines, but only idiots believe those outliers (there are plenty). Rather, if you have a model, there are plenty of data points you can populate to get the appropriate outcome. That was my suspicion and worry, and I find that I’m highly susceptible to some of the more cogent and eloquent arguments about turnout models (not Dwight’s comment specifically, most of the non-specialists signal that they are just echoing the specialists by garbling and muddling transparently). My initial instinct to not allow myself to info-overload, and then filter it out to the subset which confirmed my model, seems to have been wise.
  
  And importantly I relied on the expertise of others. I’m just not that motivated or interested in horse-race politics (though I am interested in political history, philosophy, and economy). I assumed that “political junkies” of partisan sentiment would keep track of the likely outcomes, and when Right and Republican leaning individuals started making desperate sounding arguments with the intent of converting themselves, I believed that that signaled that Obama was on the rise. Similarly, I also defer to the collective wisdom of the polls. This does not mean that these two are infallible (my judgement of people bullshitting, or, the wisdom of the polls). But it’s better than nothing, and I ended up the richer.
  
  All this brings me to Nate Silver’s The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don’t and Jim Manzi’s Uncontrolled: The Surprising Payoff of Trial-and-Error for Business, Politics, and Society. These two authors are class acts, and I follow both of their pronouncements closely. I have long appreciated Silver’s contribution to the broader discourse, and though Jim Manzi may not be as prominent, he is an important voice for empiricism on the modern political Right, which too often seems to simply be a reiteration of old hopeful ideals. But ultimately if you are a long time reader I’d have to say that you should go with Uncontrolled and not The Signal and the Noise.
  
  First, I will touch upon an issue that may seem superficial to many: style. Jim Manzi may not have the most limpid of prose. He is of course spending a great deal of time on epistemology, history of science, and quantitative business strategy. But Silver is a far better blogger than he is a narrative nonfiction writer. Many of the chapters in The Signal and the Noise have a formulaic quality, insofar as the focus is clearly on the ideas, but there are often pro forma biographical introductions of important thinkers. There are writers who do this well. I doubt I would; I’m more interested in ideas than the people generating them. And I suspect so is Silver. He almost certainly finds Futarchy more fascinating than Robin Hanson. The main exceptions tend to be in areas where Nate Silver has some personal connection. The chapters on the quantitative revolution in professional sports scouting and gambling are more lively, with more loving attention to the dramatis personae. And that makes sense if you have some priors in hand: Silver comes out of a quantitative sports analyst background, and, he was a professional poker player at one point.
  
  But more importantly as a work of popularized statistical inference The Signal and the Noise probably would not add much novel data or cognitive tools to the typical core reader of GNXP. Most of you are presumably aware of Bayesian probability, and the abuses of modern Frequentism. If this is Greek to you, then I would recommend The Signal and the Noise! And perhaps check out the Less Wrong Wiki. If you don’t know that economists are notoriously bad at predicting recessions, or that political prediction models based on a few economic or social indices are notoriously good at predicting the past but bad at predicting the future, then The Signal and the Noise may also be for you. And reading this book reiterated to me that Nate Silver is a great blogger whose Weltanschauung is broadly similar to mine. But The Signal and the Noise did not present to me any grand revelations. It was an exploration of topics which I developed interests in in striking parallel with Nate Silver over the aughts. I suspect this is a function of the change in our relationship to data due to the power of computers in terms of both storage and analysis. Silver is a reflection of the age, a herald, not a prophet. We are part of the same army.
  
  Jim Manzi’s Uncontrolled is a somewhat different work, insofar as within the author explicitly outlines the relatively constrained scope of his ambition. The core of Manzi’s argument is that public policy would benefit from more randomized controlled trials (also known as randomized field trials). This seems a plainly sensible project, but Manzi’s assertion is that too often enormous public policy ideas are proposed, and then implemented on a massive and indiscriminate scale. Whether the policy was ever effective or not can often be litigated, because there was never a “control.” In the end Uncontrolled is a plea for experimentation, epistemological humility, and incremental gains on the margin. Obviously Manzi is not presenting himself as Prometheus. Rather, this is a small vision executed on a massive scale. Manzi has seen this work in the business work, and he wants to translate these private sector successes to the public domain.
  
  But perhaps what Uncontrolled does better than convince you of the efficacy of randomized controlled trials in public policy is that there are limits to the power of elements of the scientific method in particular domains. This is the old hierarchy of knowledge idea, so Manzi is treading over ground familiar to many. In short, physics is easy, and economics is hard. Grand general theories with a few variables have generally failed in economics where they have succeeded in physics. That is not due to the lack of ingenuity of economists (many of whom come from a physics background!), but simply due to the fact that economic phenomena are much more complex than many physical phenomena. In Manzian terms they have “high causal density.” There are so many possibilities that simple models and obvious large correlations are not going to be robust or existent.
  
  This goes back to why I was very cautious about reading too much about the skepticism of polls before the election. There are so many possibilities it is incredibly easy to conjure up a plausible skepticism of the received wisdom, and present an alternative. True aficionados who wallow in the data can filter the good from the bad, but we civilians rarely can. Importantly I would like to add that this is something Silver acknowledges in The Signal and the Noise. Formal quantitative analysis supplemented by qualitative knowledge trumps quantitative analysis alone. If the pundits who criticize the quants have true knowledge, they will only benefit. If they don’t have true knowledge, as Philip Tetlock has reported, then they have much to fear.
  
  All things leads us to the common sense conclusion that the process to attain knowledge is hard. Powerful math and statistics can give us only so much. Experiment without theory is not illuminating. A theory devoid of empirical data is not persuasive. Randomized experiments without any guiding model or hypothesis may be lacking in insight. These are the outward aspects. But what about the personal strategies for attaining knowledge? If one is focused on one’s domain, one need not over-think this. Presumably, you know your shit. But when you move out of domain your need to be very careful, because you are on alien topography. One suggestion I might make is be careful of looking too hard for data confirming your prejudices; it is all too easy if you are clever. Rather, look only modestly, and withdraw quickly if you don’t find what you are looking for. If it was all that clear and obvious, it would have been clear and obvious to you initially. The bold and plain truth does not hide.

PreSchool Ed In China

• Chinese families pay tutors to teach children before they’re even a year old.
  
  Zuming receives a series of one-on-one tutorial sessions every day in a rich variety of brain-expanding disciplines. The boy’s parents, grandparents and nanny have all received training to enhance their powers as his auxiliary teachers. Some RMB1 million (£100,000) has already been invested in Zuming’s education and the next five years of intensive learning have been meticulously planned. He is from Guangzhou and he is almost 12 months old.
  
  If Zuming were ever to wonder what the next few years have in store for him, he could seek guidance from his big sister Maiwen’s schedule — a packed agenda comprising a normal day of kindergarten followed by extra classes in maths, English, Mandarin, piano and handicrafts. Only 90 minutes every 24 hours are not spent sleeping, eating or in some form of education. Her weekends are spent at museums and exhibitions. Having reached the dizzying age of five, Maiwen is about to undergo a private educational assessment that will inform her parents, among other things, what career might ultimately suit their toddler.
  
  “I think we will definitely push my son harder than we push the five year old,” says Amanda Zheng, a highly successful entrepreneur in the clothing industry and the mother of Zuming and Maiwen, “in the end, the boy will have more responsibility to shoulder. We may only let him have 60 minutes free-time every day.”
  
  At the moment, she is primarily investing money and effort to ensure that her children are competitive in the domestic context. “But when they are older they will be competing with children everywhere in the world, including Britain,” she says, adding that Western parents should feel concern at the single-mindedness of their Chinese counterparts.
  
  “For me, and for a lot of Chinese parents, we think in 20-30 year terms from before they are born — looking at what the world might be like and preparing our children with the qualities they will need,” she says.
  
  A British education, she believes, offers probably the best “future-proofing” for a Chinese child.
  
  And where does the impetus for all this educational pressure come from? Zheng unhesitatingly confirms that it is definitely her and not her husband driving the process.
  
  On the face of it, it would be easy to write Zheng and her hothousing tactics off as another education-obsessed Asian matriarch — the implacable, mildly terrifying exemplar of Chinese parenthood introduced to the world in Amy Chua’s bestseller, The Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mom. But to dismiss what she is doing with her children as a whim of the super-rich or the cruel imposition of an obsessive would be to miss the more fundamental message about what is happening in China. Zheng is certainly wealthy, and the educational experience of her children is still rare.
  
  But her choices are merely a more extreme symptom of a nation undergoing seismic social change on a scale that means there are no comparable experiences anywhere in the world. China’s new money is feeling its way just as nervously and ignorantly as it might anywhere else and is — unsurprisingly — susceptible to the idea that more (and the more expensive version) of anything is better.
  
  Among China’s swelling middle classes — a stratum of society with a population the size of America that may double by the end of the decade — education for their children is the overwhelming investment priority. They are, supposedly, the great consumers the Chinese and global economy has been waiting for, but by far their strongest impulse has been to spend on anything that sets their own offspring apart from the other 20 million Chinese children who share the same school year.
  
  Already, the reputation of certain good schools in China is creating a bubble market in parental ambitions and vast under-the-table expenditure. Schools with connections to good universities have unofficial price lists of “sponsorship fees” that may help prospective parents get their children in. The system closely resembles bribery. Some schools will simply name a price in the order of £80,000, say parents, others will ask for donations of facilities — such as an entire air-conditioning system.
  
  Overlaid on all that angst is a growing belief among their ranks that the rigid Chinese education system is not nurturing or emphasising the sort of qualities that will ultimately be valuable.
  
  “Parents are just as concerned as they used to be, but the thinking has changed a lot in the last two years,’’ Zheng says. “The idea used to be that the answer was to be really strict. Now, more Chinese parents have awoken to different theories, less choices and a type of education that can adapt and react to each child’s characteristics.”
  
  It is into this cocktail of ambition and doubt that programmes of the sort being endured by Zuming and Maiwen have emerged. In their earnest search for the best for their children, parents such as Zheng are particularly attracted to the idea that developed countries have evolved a more scientific approach to education of the very young. Lions, the Chinese company that sells the schemes, is also careful to associate itself with old seats of learning in the UK.
  
  All this features strongly in the pitch of the Cambridge Malting House China Customised Early Childhood Education programme — the one that has set the Zheng children up with their private tutors and demanding regimen. Presenting its product as “A one-stop solution incorporating professional training home education and tool improvement to comprehensively optimise the early development of babes between 0-36 months,” the glossy, outsized brochure offers potential converts a seductive mixture of scientific charts, cutaway images of a human brain, subtle warnings about the shortcomings of ordinary parenting approaches and emotive language about children being “brilliant trees”. One page features an account of the stark calculus of the Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve.
  
  “Adults cannot foresee what challenges our children will confront in the future. Therefore, the best approach we can do is to help our children to build diverse and balanced capabilities to support and develop their interests,” begins the brochure.
  
  People like Zheng, and the 200 other parents in Guangzhou who have signed their children into the programme since June this year, are convinced. Organising trained tutors for babies, she now wholeheartedly believes, is simply more scientific than leaving critical formative years in the hands of parents. Lions itself believes that the £30,000 annual cost of the tutoring will rapidly evaporate as a deterrent. The company is confident that it will have more than 15,000 tutors working with Chinese children from birth by 2015.
  
  Underlying the appeal of the programme, says Danny Tian, the chief executive of Lions Education, is the parents’ raw competitiveness.
  
  “The people that come through this door are all high-end, successful people who know that their children are going to be different from the rest of the pack. They come in and they tell us that all they want is for their children to be happy, but they don’t actually mean that. They want their children to have an edge. The words they say are very different from their true thoughts. Some talk about happiness but as a long-term goal — they want their children to be happy eventually, but have no idea how to guarantee that,” he says.
  
  “Only a few people are frank enough to talk about competitiveness when their children are so young. But they all believe their children are born to be dragons,” he adds.Tian, whose career includes a period in retail before setting-up a service dispatching high-end maid-housekeepers to the wealthy, talks to me on the 33rd floor of Guangzhou’s newest and most prestigious office tower. His experience with the maids has clearly been useful to the set-up of the tutoring programme —– in both cases, he hires university graduates. For the tutors, his company provides three to six months of training before they are ready to teach.
  
  The meeting room, which is used to discuss the tutoring programme with prospective parents, is filled with heavily ornate wooden furniture, and chandeliers — a concoction seemingly designed to provide a dollop of olde England with all those cutting-edge theories of 21st century pedagogy.
  
  The corridor leading to the room is lined with carefully themed pictures that include the quadrangle at Eton College, sepia 1950s photographs of rowers from some unnamed but expensive-looking public school, Winston Churchill and Christine Gilbert, the former head of Ofsted who assisted in the four-year, £2.5 million development of the course.
  
  The British imprimatur is an overt part of the set-up. Lions Education shares its offices in Guangzhou with Gabbitas Education, the scholastic agency set up in the late 19th century —– a background that is not allowed to escape unnoticed. The partnership introduces clients of the tutoring programme to the idea that, to really bring out the best in their children, they could consider sending them to a British public school, with Gabbitas acting as the seasoned matchmaker between child and institution.
  
  Gabbitas has established three offices in China since 2009, charging Chinese parents as much as £6,500 for a VIP service that includes testing children before placing them in schools. The quality guarantee of the tutoring programme, says Ian Hunt, its managing director, is critical. The combination of wealth and aspiration has made some Chinese parents easy targets of scams. In August, parents in Shanghai were offered a £10,000 course offering to give children superpowers, such as remembering a whole page of text in a second and knowing the answers to an exam paper by touching it. More than 200 were enrolled before the parents realised they had been conned.

California Online Initiative

• This California legislative initiative to make public universities accept online-only work in introductory courses is a very modest step, but I think a hugely important one. The key issue with any kind of potentially disruptive technology is how does it get any kind of foot in the door where people can explore and build upon its potential.
  
  Outside the realm of formal education, the Internet has obviously emerged as a key learning tool. If you're an adult person who's done with his or her formal education but has some question of fact or some skill he wants to master, the natural first place to turn is the Internet. And, generally speaking, whether you want to know the difference between economic profit and accounting profit or how to dry-age beef at home the Web will tell you what you need to know for free. But in the formal sector, right now online coursework is very much associated with the cesspool of low-quality for-profit education that is giving it a kind of anti-halo effect even as everyone loves Wikipedia.
  
  California offers a more promising path forward. The problem is that students face bottlenecks in their coursework. To take more advanced classes, you need to take introductory classes. But there are only so many slots in introductory classes to go around, so some students face trouble progressing. If you open the system up to online-only alternatives, you get a few promising developments. First, there's a clear way to tell if the online-only alternatives suck. The University of California system enrolls good students and the idea is to move on to "regular" University of California classes. Second and related, there are real brand-names here. University of California and California State are names people know and degrees worth getting. Third, and in some ways most important, these are not the kind of courses that college professors are super-excited about teaching. Some technophobic dyspeptics will react in a paranoid way, but given objective resource constraints, many faculty members will be open to this kind of use of technology.
  
  Nobody really thinks of very large introductory lecture courses as being the finest that American higher education has to offer. New technology that can supplant them could save some money but also holds out the promise of letting the people involved in the university system focus on what they think of as their best and most important work. Until now, the way this bifurcation has worked is by having online education simply compete with the lowest-quality traditional institutions. But we don't really need more cost-effective ways to deliver low-quality education in America, we need better ways to deliver higher-quality education. If California can actually integrate technology to displace some of the low-end functions of high-end institutions, then we'll really be getting somewhere.

Wider Learning

• Technology can turn our entire lives into learning experiences via “social-structed learning,” an aggregation of microlearning experiences drawn from a rich ecology of content and driven not by grades but by social and intrinsic rewards, suggests Marina Gorbis, Executive Director at the Institute for the Future, in Fast Company.
  
  “Today’s obsession with MOOCs is a reminder of the old forecasting paradigm: In the early stages of technology introduction we try to fit new technologies into existing social structures in ways that have become familiar to us,” she says.
  
  What if we could access historical, artistic, demographic, environmental, architectural, and other kinds of information embedded in the real world via augmented reality devices?
  
  “This is exactly what a project from USC and UCLA called HyperCities is doing: layering historical information on the actual city terrain. As you walk around with your cell phone, you can point to a site and see what it looked like a century ago, who lived there, what the environment was like.
  
  “The Smithsonian’s free iPhone and iPad app, Leafsnap, responds when you take a photo of a tree leaf by instantly searching a growing library of leaf images amassed by the Smithsonian Institution.
  
  “We are moving away from the model in which learning is organized around stable, usually hierarchical institutions (schools, colleges, universities) . … Replacing that model is a new system in which learning is best conceived of as a flow, where learning resources are not scarce but widely available, opportunities for learning are abundant, and learners increasingly have the ability to autonomously dip into and out of continuous learning flows.”

The Ikea Model

• My favorite cranky technophobe college professor, Erik Loomis, recommends that we read "Jonathan Rees on how MOOCs allow egocentric professors to drive others out of business while producing lower quality education and the corporate profits that drive the whole thing."
  
  That sounds about right. It's worth noting that lower quality is often a better value-proposition and that's exactly why there's a profit opportunity. Ikea, for example, has not risen to power by manufacturing better furniture than other companies. If anything it's worse. Deliberately worse. The profit opportunity is that it turns out that cheap Nordic modern furniture is something a lot of people want. It turned out there was a big market for "somewhat worse but much cheaper" furniture. Lots of people listen to music, but very few people choose to invest in the highest-end products. Things like "it's cheap" and "it's convenient" drive people to listen to a lot of MP3s over earbud headphones.
  
  Right now, higher education in the United States is very expensive. Driving some providers out of business by offering a much cheaper but somewhat lower-quality product seems like a reasonable plan. As I wrote yesterday, I actually have some fairly profound doubts that this will work since I'm not sure "quality teaching" is really what drives the higher education market at all. But it's not a crazy idea any more than Ikea is a crazy idea.

Brain Games Are Bogus

• A decade ago, a young Swedish researcher named Torkel Klingberg made a spectacular discovery. He gave a group of children computer games designed to boost their memory, and, after weeks of play, the kids showed improvements not only in memory but in overall intellectual ability. Spending hours memorizing strings of digits and patterns of circles on a four-by-four grid had made the children smarter. The finding countered decades of psychological research that suggested training in one area (e.g., recalling numbers) could not bring benefits in other, unrelated areas (e.g., reasoning). The Klingberg experiment also hinted that intelligence, which psychologists considered essentially fixed, might be more mutable: that it was less like eye color and more like a muscle.
  
  It seemed like a breakthrough, offering new approaches to education and help for people with A.D.H.D., traumatic brain injuries, and other ailments. In the years since, other, similar experiments yielded positive results, and Klingberg helped found a company, Cogmed, to commercialize the software globally. (Pearson, the British publishing juggernaut, purchased it in 2010.) Brain training has become a multi-million-dollar business, with companies like Lumosity, Jungle Memory, and CogniFit offering their own versions of neuroscience-you-can-use, and providing ambitious parents with new assignments for overworked but otherwise healthy children. The brain-training concept has made Klingberg a star, and he now enjoys a seat on an assembly that helps select the winners of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. The field has become a staple of popular writing. Last year, the New York Times Magazine published a glowing profile of the young guns of brain training called “CAN YOU MAKE YOURSELF SMARTER?”
  
  The answer, however, now appears to be a pretty firm no—at least, not through brain training. A pair of scientists in Europe recently gathered all of the best research—twenty-three investigations of memory training by teams around the world—and employed a standard statistical technique (called meta-analysis) to settle this controversial issue. The conclusion: the games may yield improvements in the narrow task being trained, but this does not transfer to broader skills like the ability to read or do arithmetic, or to other measures of intelligence. Playing the games makes you better at the games, in other words, but not at anything anyone might care about in real life.
  
  Over at the Cogmed Web site, though, it looks like lives are being transformed. A beaming child sits at a desk, pencil in hand, next to a quote extolling the results at a private school in Jacksonville, Florida. Cogmed training is helpful for all ages, from “young children to senior adults,” but is of particular interest to people with “diagnosed attention deficits” or “brain injury,” or those who “feel the deteriorating effects of normal aging” or those who “find they’re not doing as well as they could, academically or professionally.” The training is a method to “effectively change the way the brain functions to perform at its maximum capacity.” Cogmed is operating in more than a thousand schools worldwide, more than a hundred of which are in the U.S. In January, Cogmed launched a major push into American schools, which it charges up to three hundred dollars per child.
  
  Cogmed and the other companies stake their claims on “working memory,” the ability to keep information the focus of conscious attention, despite distractions—mental juggling, in other words. There is powerful, widely accepted evidence that working memory plays an important role in everything from reading ability and problem-solving to reasoning and learning new skills. (It also seems to help with musical sight-reading and proficiency at Texas hold ’em.) And problems with working memory play a role in A.D.H.D., which has become an American fixation. Working memory is also closely related to “executive function,” the brain’s ability to make a plan and stick with it, an active and fruitful area of psychology with broad social implications. Many psychologists consider working memory to be a core component of general intelligence. People who score highly on intelligence tests also tend to perform well on working-memory tests.
  
  The experiments by Klingberg and others suggested that working memory could be markedly increased through training, the same way that sit-ups create stronger abs—and, more importantly, that the training could bring broad benefits, the way weight training can make a person a better all-around athlete. In Klingberg’s first experiment, published in 2002, he recruited students with A.D.H.D. and gave them Raven’s Progressive Matrices, a test of non-verbal reasoning that is used to measure intelligence. He then gave them regular working-memory workouts, increasing the difficulty of the games as they improved by giving them more to remember. At the end of several weeks of training, he reported, he gave the kids the Raven’s again, and they performed significantly better. He then found the same results in young adults without A.D.H.D. The studies were small, but gradually other psychologists entered the field, and, in 2008, the psychologist Susanne Jaeggi reported an even more electric result: working-memory training definitively increased intelligence, with more training bringing larger gains. Her data implied that a person could boost their I.Q. by a full point per hour of training.
  
  Over the last year, however, the idea that working-memory training has broad benefits has crumbled. One group of psychologists, lead by a team at Georgia Tech, set out to replicate the Jaeggi findings, but with more careful controls and seventeen different cognitive-skills tests. Their subjects showed no evidence whatsoever for improvement in intelligence. They also identified a pattern of methodological problems with experiments showing positive results, like poor controls and a reliance on a single measure of cognitive improvement. This failed replication was recently published in one of psychology’s top journals, and another, by a group at Case Western Reserve University, has been published since.
  
  The recent meta-analysis, led by Monica Melby-Lervåg, of the University of Oslo, and also published in a top journal, is even more damning. Some studies are more convincing than others, because they include more subjects and show a larger effect. Melby-Lervag’s paper laboriously accounts for this, incorporating what Jaeggi, Klingberg, and everyone else had reported. The meta-analysis found that the training isn’t doing anyone much good. If anything, the scientific literature tends to overstate effects, because teams that find nothing tend not to publish their papers. (This is known as the “filedrawer” effect.) A null result from meta-analysis, published in a top journal, sends a shudder through the spine of all but the truest of believers. In the meantime, a separate paper by some of the Georgia Tech scientists looked specifically at Cogmed’s training, which has been subjected to more scientific scrutiny than any other program. “The claims made by Cogmed,” they wrote, “are largely unsubstantiated.”
  
  In a conference call, several Cogmed executives told me that they did not accept the conclusions, saying that the various scientists had unfairly overlooked good evidence in support of Cogmed’s regimen. They cited, as one example, Melby-Lervåg’s decision to not consider brain-imaging studies, which they believe offer additional evidence of neurological improvements that take effect after people play their games. “There is a lot of research excluded, almost to the point where it seems like the research is designed to reach a particular conclusion,” said Travis Millman, vice-president and general manager of Cogmed.
  
  Yet to understand whether a student will be more effective in a classroom, it is only logical to rely on direct measures of the student’s capabilities rather than neuroimaging studies showing which parts of their brain are active in a lab. Melby-Lervåg’s criteria—randomized trials with suitable controls and well-designed post-training tests—would strike most psychologists as entirely reasonable. Cogmed’s representatives also told me that they had seen first-hand how much of a difference it could make. Yet anecdotal clinical evidence is notoriously unreliable. (In a variation of the placebo effect, when people participate in training programs, they genuinely believe they are getting better, whether or not that is true.) Cogmed has also published two responses to the scientific criticism on its Web site, both containing similar kinds of sophistry. When I reached Klingberg in Sweden, he told that the Melby-Lervåg paper used a “low scientific standard”—a rather stunning charge, given that the research appeared in one of the field’s best peer-reviewed journals. But then I read him parts of a note I had obtained, sent by Cogmed to school psychologists in the U.S., pitching their program’s benefits. “Working memory plays a key role in learning as it is crucial for reading comprehension, math, test-taking, following instructions, and understanding and retaining new information,” the note read. Klingberg, who is a paid scientific consultant at Cogmed, laughed uncomfortably and admitted it wasn’t fair to imply that Cogmed training would help with all those things. He has made suggestions to Cogmed about making the marketing more accurate, he told me, but, “I am not comfortable with everything that is said.”
  
  Melby-Lervåg first became interested in working-memory training because she works with children who have learning disabilities, and she knew their parents were signing up for Cogmed. Pearson is a respected name that is strongly associated with education. “Since they work with children with learning disabilities, they have a responsibility to market programs that are evidence-based,” she said. “It’s unethical.”
  
  The responsibility is so heavy because the needs are so great. Many people who have suffered brain trauma are haunted by a feeling of diminishment and a frustration that they can’t do more to help themselves. There are millions of children with learning disabilities who feel lost and ashamed. And then there are all the seniors who struggle with mental dissipation. These are the customers.
  
  And, really, what’s the harm? Working-memory training doesn’t do any damage, one could argue. But that’s a dangerous and naïve view, argues Zach Hambrick, who was involved in the Georgia Tech study and is an associate professor of psychology at Michigan State University. “If you are doing brain training for ten hours a week, that is ten hours a week you are not doing something else, like exercising,” Hambrick said. “It also gives people false hope, especially older adults for whom this is a big concern. What if they do this and they don’t see any benefits? What do you think? You think, ‘There must be something wrong with me,’ or ‘I am a lost cause.’ ”

A video game that teaches how to program in Java

• CodeSpells, an immersive, first-person player video game designed to teach students in elementary to high school how to program in the popular Java language, has been developed by University of California, San Diego computer scientists.
  
  The researchers tested the game on a group of 40 girls, ages 10 to 12, who had never been exposed to programming before. In just one hour of play, the girls had mastered some of Java’s basic components and were able to use the language to create new ways of playing with the game.
  
  “CodeSpells is the only video game that completely immerses programming into the game play,” said William Griswold, a computer scientist at the Jacobs School of Engineering at UC San Diego.
  
  The UC San Diego computer scientists plan to release the game for free and make it available to any educational institution that requests it. Researchers are currently conducting further case studies in San Diego elementary schools.
  
  Teaching computer science below the college level is difficult, mainly because it is hard to find qualified instructors for students in elementary to high school, Griswold said. So he and his graduate students set out to find a way to reach these students outside the classroom. They designed the game to keep children engaged while they are coping with the difficulties of programming, which could otherwise be frustrating and discouraging.
  
  Teaching children how to program must be a priority in a society where technology is becoming more and more important, said Sarah Esper, one of the lead graduate students on the development of CodeSpells. Programming also teaches logical thinking, said Stephen Foster, another lead student.
  
  “We’re hoping that they will get as addicted to learning programming as they get addicted to video games,” Foster said.
  
  How CodeSpells works
  
  CodeSpells’ story line is simple: the player is a wizard arriving in a land populated by gnomes. The gnomes used to have magic, but lost it at some point. The wizard must help them. She (or he) writes spells in Java. Players have seven spells available to them, including levitating objects within the game, flying and making fire.
  
  Players can also earn badges by undertaking simple quests, which help them master the game’s spells. One quest entails crossing a river. Another entails rescuing a gnome from the roof of his cottage, where he got stuck. Yet another entails starting a large bonfire. By the time players complete the game’s first level, they have learned the main components of the Java programming language, such as parameters, for if statements, for loops and while loops, among other skills.
  
  Computer science learning theory
  
  CodeSpells was influenced by research that Esper and Foster conducted on how successful programmers learn their trade. They surveyed 30 computer scientists and identified five characteristics that are key to learn programming outside a classroom setting: activities must be structured by the person who is trying to learn; learning must be creative and exploratory; programming is empowering; learners have difficulty stopping once they start; and learners spend countless hours on the activity.
  
  Researchers summarized these findings in their SIGCSE 2013 paper, humorously titled “On the Nature of Fires and How to Spark Them When You’re Not There.”

English in French universities

• Gallic traditionalists fear that the French language will be consigned to the scrapheap because the Government is seeking to ease a ban on the use of English in higher education.
  
  “This is a veritable linguistic assassination,” said Courriel, a French language defence association, which predicts that the nation’s university students will have to sit through tutorials and lectures in English.
  
  The row took the shine off International Francophonie Day this week, which was meant to underline the importance of French to the world.
  
  Geneviève Fioraso, the Minister for Higher Education, said that the development of courses in English was necessary. “If we don’t authorise English, we won’t draw students from emerging nations like India or South Korea,” she said. And universities that refused English would find themselves with “five people sitting around a table discussing Proust”. She added that her critics were motivated by “resistance to change”.
  
  At present French must be used in classrooms from nursery school to university. The only exception involves lessons given by a guest or associate teacher from another country.
  
  The Conference of French University Chancellors denounced the ban as a “powerful brake” on their ability to compete with British and US counterparts in the global market for tertiary education. In practice, however, it is widely flouted in France, with the use of English already common in degree courses for law, economics, science and business.
  
  The upshot is a permanent battle between university chancellors and government officials, who regularly refuse to validate courses in English.
  
  Jean-Loup Salzmann, the chairman of the Conference of French University Chancellors, said: “In any French medical laboratory, more than half the people speak only English. The evaluation of our research is in English, our European projects are in English, and when professors from abroad are welcomed to our universities, we speak to them in English.”
  
  Mrs Fioraso said that she wanted to end the “hypocrisy” by authorising English-language teaching on courses involving a partnership with a foreign institution or a European programme. “This is a positive signal in the direction of foreign Anglophone students,” she said.
  
  Le Figaro newspaper said that her Bill, which is scheduled to be considered by the Socialist Cabinet this month, would have far-reaching consequences, yielding “entirely-in-English courses on a big scale”.
  
  In an attempt to head off the row, Mrs Fioraso suggested that France needed to attract foreign students to promote its own culture. She said: “For Koreans to get into Proust, we have to go through English.”
  
  She hopes that foreigners will account for 15 per cent of France’s 2,382,000 students by 2017, compared with 12 per now.
  
  Defenders of French were appalled. “Our students will soon be forced to study in a foreign language in France itself,” Courriel said. It predicted that French lecturers would be replaced by Indians, Americans and Britons asserting their foreign values.
  
  It called on the Government to scrap its Bill and resist the “Anglo-Saxon counter-model of the general privatisation of human activities, in particular culture, health and education”.

The Future

• Technology can turn our entire lives into learning experiences via “socialstructed learning,” an aggregation of microlearning experiences drawn from a rich ecology of content and driven not by grades but by social and intrinsic rewards, suggests Marina Gorbis, Executive Director at the Institute for the Future, in Fast Company.
  
  “Today’s obsession with MOOCs is a reminder of the old forecasting paradigm: In the early stages of technology introduction we try to fit new technologies into existing social structures in ways that have become familiar to us,” she says.
  
  What if we could access historical, artistic, demographic, environmental, architectural, and other kinds of information embedded in the real world via augmented reality devices?
  
  “This is exactly what a project from USC and UCLA called HyperCities is doing: layering historical information on the actual city terrain. As you walk around with your cell phone, you can point to a site and see what it looked like a century ago, who lived there, what the environment was like.
  
  “The Smithsonian’s free iPhone and iPad app, Leafsnap, responds when you take a photo of a tree leaf by instantly searching a growing library of leaf images amassed by the Smithsonian Institution.
  
  “We are moving away from the model in which learning is organized around stable, usually hierarchical institutions (schools, colleges, universities) . … Replacing that model is a new system in which learning is best conceived of as a flow, where learning resources are not scarce but widely available, opportunities for learning are abundant, and learners increasingly have the ability to autonomously dip into and out of continuous learning flows.”

Where is Online Ed Going?

• In the spring of 2011, Sebastian Thrun was having doubts about whether the classroom was really the right place to teach his course on artificial intelligence. Thrun, a computer-science professor at Stanford, had been inspired by Salman Khan, the founder of the online Khan Academy, whose videos and discussion groups have been used by millions to learn about everything from arithmetic to history. And so that summer, Thrun announced he would offer his fall course on Stanford’s website for free. He reorganized it into short segments rather than hour-long lectures, included problem sets and quizzes, and added a virtual office hour via Google Hangout. Enrollment jumped from 200 Stanford undergraduates to 160,000 students around the world (only 30 remained in the classroom). A few months later, he founded an online for-profit company called Udacity; his course, along with many others, is now available to anyone with a fast Internet connection.
  
  Meanwhile, two of Thrun’s Stanford colleagues, Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng, founded another for-profit company, Coursera, that posts courses taught by faculty from leading universities such as Prince- ton, Michigan, Duke, and Penn. Three million students have signed on. Not to be outdone, Harvard and MIT announced last spring their own online partnership, edX, a nonprofit with an initial investment of $60 million. A new phenomenon requires a new name, and so MOOC—massive open online course—has now entered the lexicon. So far, MOOCs have been true to the first “o” in the acronym: Anyone can take these courses for free.
  
  Many people outside academia—including New York Times columnists David Brooks and Thomas L. Friedman—are gushing that MOOCs are the best thing to happen to learning since movable type. Inside academia, however, they have been met with widespread skepticism. As Joseph Harris, a writing professor at Duke, recently remarked in The Chronicle of Higher Education, “I don’t see how a MOOC can be much more than a digitized textbook.”
  
  In fact, MOOCs are the latest in a long series of efforts to use technology to make education more accessible. Sixty years ago, the Ford Foundation funded a group of academics to study what was then a cutting-edge technology: television. In language almost identical to that used today, a report on the project announced that television had the power to drive down costs, enable the collection of data on how students learn, and extend “the reach of the superior teacher to greater num- bers of students.” From 1957 to 1982, the local CBS channel in New York City broadcast a morning program of college lectures called “Sunrise Semester.” But the sun never rose on television as an educational “delivery system.”
  
  In the 1990s, my own university, Columbia, started a venture called Fathom, using the relatively new technology of the Web. The idea was to sell online courses taught by star faculty such as Simon Schama and Brian Greene to throngs of supposedly eager customers. But the paying consumers never showed up in the anticipated numbers, and by the time it was shut down, Fathom had cost Columbia, according to some estimates, at least $20 million. Looking back, the project’s director, Ann Kirschner, concluded that she and her colleagues had arrived too soon—“pre-broadband, pre-videocasting and iPods, and all the rest.”
  
  Of course, we will always be pre-something. Former University of Michigan President James Duderstadt foresees a technology that will be “totally immersive in all our senses”—something like the “feelies” that Aldous Huxley, in Brave New World, imagined would render the “talkies” obsolete. The MIT Media Lab has already developed a vest that gives you a hug when a friend “likes” something you have posted on Facebook. It may not be long before we can log onto a Shakespeare course taught by, say, Stephen Greenblatt and feel the spray of his saliva as he recites “tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.” Such technologies will likely find their biggest market through the pornography industry, but there’s no reason to doubt that academia will adopt and adapt them.
  
  The Luddite in me is inclined to think that the techno-dreamers are headed for another disappointment. But this time around, something does seem different—and it’s not just that the MOOC pioneers have an infectious excitement rarely found in a typical faculty meeting. They also have a striking public-spiritedness. Koller sees a future in which a math prodigy in a developing country might nurture his or her gifts online and then, having been identified by a leading university, enroll in person—on a scholarship, one might imagine, funded by income derived from Coursera. This idea of using online courses as a detection tool is a reprise (on a much larger scale) of the one that spurred the development of standardized tests in the mid-twentieth century, such as the SAT, which was originally envisioned as a means for finding gifted students outside the usual Ivy League “feeder” schools.
  
  Koller speaks with genuine passion about the universal human craving for learning and sees in Internet education a social good that reminds me of Thomas Jefferson’s dream of geniuses being “raked from the rubbish”—by which he meant to affirm the existence of a “natural aristocracy” to be nurtured for the sake of humankind. No one knows whether the MOOCs will achieve any of these things, but many academic leaders are certain that, as Stanford President John Hennessy predicts, higher education is about to be hit by a “tsunami.”
  
  What’s driving all this risk-taking and excitement? Many people are convinced that the MOOCs can rein in the rising costs of colleges and universities. For decades, the price of tuition has outstripped the pace of inflation. Over the past ten years, the average sticker price at private colleges has increased by almost 30 percent (though net tuition has risen less because financial aid has grown even faster). At state universities, the problem has been exacerbated by public disinvestment. For example, less than 6 percent of the annual budget of the University of Virginia is covered by state funds. Last fall, I heard the chief financial officer of an urban public university put the matter succinctly: The difficulty, he said, is not so much the cost of college, but the shift of the financial burden from the state to the student.
  
  There are many reasons why college costs continue to soar: the expense of outfitting high-tech science labs, the premium placed on research that lures faculty out of the classroom (and, in turn, requires hiring more faculty to teach classes), the proliferation of staff for everything from handling government regulation to counseling increasingly stressed students. At some institutions, there are also less defensible reasons, such as wasteful duplication, lavish amenities, and excessive pay and perks for top administrators and faculty.
  
  But the most persuasive account of the relentless rise in cost was made nearly 50 years ago by the economist William Baumol and his student William Bowen, who later became president of Princeton. A few months ago, Bowen delivered two lectures in which he revisited his theory of the “cost disease.”1 “In labor-intensive industries,” he explained, “such as the performing arts and education, there is less opportunity than in other sectors to increase productivity by, for example, substituting capital for labor.” Technological advances have allowed the auto industry, for instance, to produce more cars while using fewer workers. Professors, meanwhile, still do things more or less as they have for centuries: talking to, questioning, and evaluating students (ideally in relatively small groups). As the Ohio University economist Richard Vedder likes to joke, “With the possible exception of prostitution . . . teaching is the only profession that has had no productivity advance in the 2,400 years since Socrates.”
  
  This is a true statement—but it unwittingly undercuts its own point: Most people, I suspect, would agree that there are some activities—teaching and prostitution among them—in which improved productivity and economies of scale are not desirable, at least not from the point of view of the consumer.
  
  True believers think that the new digital technologies will finally enable educators to increase productivity by allowing a smaller number of teachers to produce a larger number of “learning outcomes” (today’s term for educated students) than ever before. But it’s too soon to say whether MOOCs will really help cure the cost disease. Their own financial viability is by no means certain. The for-profits must make money for their investors, and the non- profits must return revenue to the universities that give them start-up funds.
  
  Coursera has begun to try out a number of different strategies. It provides a matchmaking service for employers looking to hire people with certain demonstrable skills—a logical extension of a role that colleges already play. When a company expresses interest in a top-performing student, Coursera e-mails the student, offering an introduction, and receives a finder’s fee from the prospective employer. The college that developed the course also receives a cut. As for Udacity, Thrun says only that it charges companies looking for talent “significantly less than you’d pay for a headhunter, but significantly more than what you’d pay for access to LinkedIn.”
  
  A few months ago, Coursera also announced a licensing arrangement with Antioch University, which agreed to pay a fee in return for incorporating selected Coursera offerings into its curriculum. The idea is for students to supplement their online experience by working with on-campus faculty—a practice known as “hybrid” or “blended” learning. The college can expand its course offerings without hiring new faculty, and Coursera can earn income that will be shared by the institutions and professors who develop the courses. So far, however, student interest has been low.
  
  Other possible sources of revenue include selling expertise to universities that want to set up their own MOOCs or partnering with textbook publishers willing to share revenue in exchange for selling to online students. Some MOOCs are also beginning to charge fees for proctored exams (in person or by webcam) for students seeking a certificate marking their successful completion of a course.
  
  If new technologies can cure, or even slow down, the cost disease before it kills the patient, that would be a great public service. The dark side of this bright dream is the fear that online education could burst what appears to be a higher education bubble. Consumers, the argument goes, are already waking up to the fact that they’re paying too much for too little. If they are priced out of, or flee from, the market, they will find new ways to learn outside the brick-and-mortar institutions that, until now, have held a monopoly on providing credentials that certify what graduates have supposedly learned. If that happens, it would be a classic case of “disruptive innovation”—a term popularized by Harvard Business School Professor Clayton Christensen, who argues that, “in industries from computers to cars to steel those entrants that start at the bottom of their markets, selling simple products to less demanding customers and then improving from that foothold, drive the prior leaders into a disruptive demise.”
  
  We’ve already witnessed the first phase of this process. Early consumers of online courses tended to be students with families or jobs for whom full-time attendance at a residential or even a commuter college was out of the question. As underfunded public colleges struggled to meet the needs of such students, private for-profit “universities” such as Phoenix, Kaplan, DeVry, and Strayer emerged. They offer mainly online courses that serve—some would say exploit—an expanding population of consumers (a word increasingly used as a synonym for students). The first time I heard someone commend for-profit universities was five or six years ago, when a savvy investor said to me, “Look at California—the public system can’t meet the demand, so we will step in.” He was making the safe, and sad, assumption that public reinvestment is unlikely to restore what was once an unrivaled system of public higher education. Last August, nearly half a million students found themselves on waiting lists for oversubscribed courses at California’s community colleges.
  
  Many online students meet the low-income eligibility threshold for federal Pell grants—a ripe market for the for-profit universities. These institutions offer cheaper courses than traditional private colleges, usually in practical or technical subjects such as cosmetology or computer programming. Their business model depends heavily on faculty who receive low compensation and on students with high loan obligations. It’s a system that works well for investors. (In 2009, the CEO of Strayer University collected a cool $42 million, mainly in stock options.) How well it works for students is another question. Last summer, a U.S. Senate committee noted that for-profit universities spend more on advertising and recruiting than on instruction and that, without significant reform, they “will continue to turn out hundreds of thousands of students with debt but no degree.”
  
  So far, the for-profit sector has been regarded with disdain or indifference by established universities. This fits the Christensen theory of “disruptive innovation”: The leap by low-end products into higher- end markets is sudden and surprising because the higher-ups have been lulled into thinking their place in the pecking order is unassailable. What has happened to newspapers and publishing are obvious examples. Suddenly everything changes, and the old is swept away by the new.
  
  Because of the durable value of prestige, it will be a long time before Harvard has to fear for its existence. But one reason to think we’re on the cusp of major change is that online courses are particularly well- suited to the new rhythms of student life. On traditional campuses, many students already regard time offline as a form of solitary confinement. Classrooms have become battlegrounds where professors struggle to distract students from their smartphones and laptops. Office hours are giving way to e-mail. To the millions who have used sites such as the Khan Academy, the idea of hour-long lectures spread out over 15-week semesters is already anachronistic. “Disruptive innovation” is a variant of Joseph Schumpeter’s famous declaration that capitalism works by “creative destruction.” What will be innovated and created in our colleges and universities, and what will be disrupted and destroyed?
  
  One vulnerable structure is the faculty itself, which is already in a fragile state. This is especially true of those who teach subjects such as literature, history, and the arts. The humanities account for a static or declining percentage of all degrees conferred, partly because students often doubt their real-world value. And as humanities departments shrink, some institutions are collaborating to shrink them faster (or close them altogether) in order to avoid duplicative hiring in subjects with low student demand. For example, Columbia, Yale, and Cornell have announced a collaboration whereby certain languages—such as Romanian, Tamil, or Yoruba—will be taught via teleconferencing. This is good for students, since the subjects will still be available. But it’s bad for aspiring faculty—as the number of positions dwindles, research and scholarship in these fields will dry up.
  
  MOOCs also seem likely to spur more demand for celebrity professors in a teaching system that is already highly stratified. Among tenured faculty, there is currently a small cadre of stars and a smaller one of superstars—and the MOOCs are creating megastars. Michael Sandel, for example, who teaches a famous course on justice at Harvard, has become a global figure with millions of followers, notably in Asia, since his lectures became available online through Harvard’s website and at a site called Academic Earth. A few months ago, Harvard announced that Sandel had signed up with edX. Sandel is an exceptional educator, but as master-teachers go global, lesser-known colleagues fear being relegated to a supporting role as glorified teaching assistants.
  
  In some respects, this is the latest chapter in an old story of faculty entrepreneurship. By the mid-twentieth century, the president of the University of California, Clark Kerr, was already describing the Berkeley faculty as “individual entrepreneurs held together by a common grievance over parking.” Today, as star professors increasingly work for themselves, more faculty members at less prestigious institutions face low wages, meager benefits, and—since many lack tenure—minimal job security. But if the new technology threatens some professors with obscurity, others face obsolescence. Language instructors may someday be replaced by multilingual versions of Siri on your iPhone. One of my colleagues speaks of the imminent “evisceration” of graduate study, once young people who might have pursued an academic career are deterred as it becomes harder and harder to find a dignified job after years of training.
  
  These prospects raise many pressing questions—not just speculative ones about the future, but actionable ones about the present. What, if anything, can universities do to formulate new rules governing conflicts of interest? As faculty stars relocate to cyberspace, how can institutions sustain the community of teachers and students that has been the essence of the university for a thousand years? (The pacesetting Thrun, who is a vice president of Google, resigned from his tenured teaching post at Stanford, though he remains a “research professor.”) In this brave new world, how can the teaching profession, already well on its way to “adjunctification,” attract young people with a pastoral impulse to awaken and encourage students one by one?
  
  There are also unanswered questions about how much students actually learn from MOOCs. Coursera recently withdrew one course at Georgia Tech because of student discontent and another, at the University of California, Irvine, because the professor disputed how much students were really learning.
  
  So far, most testimonials to the value of online learning come from motivated students, often adults, who seek to build on what they have already learned in traditional educational settings. These are people with clear goals and confidence in their abilities. Stanford has even established an online high school “for gifted students” from around the world (a residential program brings them together in the summers). Its medical school has introduced “lecture halls without lectures,” whereby students use short videos to master the material on their own, then converge in class for discussion of clinical applications of what they’ve learned.
  
  And yet it’s one thing to expect brilliant teens or medical students to be self-starters. It’s another to teach students who are in need of close guidance. A recent report from the Community College Research Center at Columbia finds that underprepared students taking online courses are, according to one of the authors, “falling farther behind than if they were taking face-to-face courses.” Michael Crow, one of the architects of Fathom and now president of Arizona State University and certainly no traditionalist, warns against a future in which “rich kids get taught by professors and poor kids get taught by computer.”
  
  Back in the mid-twentieth century, the Ford Foundation report on “telecourses” asked the key question about technology and education: “How effective is this instruction?” When I came upon that sentence, it put me in mind of something Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote a long time ago. “Truly speaking,” he said, “it is not instruction, but provocation, that I can receive from another soul.”I first understood this distinction during my own student days, while struggling with the theologian Jonathan Edwards’s predestinarian view of life. Toward the end of the course, my teacher, the scholar of American religion Alan Heimert, looked me in the eye and asked: “What is it that bothers you about Edwards? Is it that he’s so hard on self- deception?” This was more than instruction; it was a true provocation. It came from a teacher who listened closely to his students and tried to grasp who they were and who they were trying to become. He knew the difference between knowledge and information. He understood education in the Socratic sense, as a quest for self-knowledge.
  
  Nearly 40 years later, in my own course on American literature, one of my gifted teaching assistants received an e-mail from a student after a discussion on Emerson:
  
  Hi, I just wanted to let you know that our section meeting tonight had a really profound effect on me. ... [T]he way you spoke and the energy our class had really moved me. ...I walked the whole way home staring at the sky, a probably unsafe decision, but a worthwhile one nonetheless. I actually cannot wait for next week's class just so I can dive even further into this. So I just wanted to send you a quick message thanking you, letting you know that this fifty minutes of class has undeniably affected the rest of my life. ... [S]ome fire was lit within me tonight, and I guess I'm blowing the smoke towards you a little bit.
  
  No matter how anxious today’s students may be about gaining this or that competence in a ferociously competitive world, many still crave the enlargement of heart as well as mind that is the gift of true education. It’s hard for me to believe that this kind of experience can happen without face-to-face teaching and the physical presence of other students.
  
  Yet I’m convinced that those leading us into the digital future truly want to dispense the gift of learning more widely than ever before. Currently, the six-year graduation rate at America’s public four-year colleges is approximately 58 percent. It would be a great benefit to society if online education can improve on that record—although it should be noted that, so far, the completion rate by students who sign up for MOOCs is even worse—barely 10 percent.
  
  In one experiment, Udacity is providing remedial courses to students at San Jose State for a much lower price than in-person courses. A bill is now under discussion in the California legislature that would require public colleges to offer online courses to students whom they can’t accommodate in their classrooms. If the new technology can bring great teaching to students who would otherwise never encounter it, that could lessen inequities between the haves and have-nots, just as digital technologies now give students and scholars worldwide access to previously locked-up books and documents. But so far, there is scant evidence on which to base these hopes.
  
  Quite apart from the MOOCs, there’s an impressive array of new efforts to serve low-income students—including the online public Western Governors University, which charges around $6,000 in tuition and awards reputable degrees in such fields as information technology and business. Southern New Hampshire University—also a nonprofit—has moved aggressively into online learning, which it combines with on-campus programs; and Carnegie Mellon University has launched an “open learning initiative” that offers non-credit free courses, with substantial interactive capabilities, and seems to be working well in science, math, and introductory languages.
  
  The best of the new education pioneers have a truly Emersonian passion for remaking the world, for rejecting the stale conviction that change always means degradation. I sense in them a fervent concurrence with Emerson’s refusal to believe “that the world was finished a long time ago” and with his insistence that, “as the world was plastic and fluid in the hands of God, so it is ever to so much of his attributes as we bring to it.”
  
  In the face of such exuberance, it feels foolish and futile to demur. In one form or another, the online future is already here. But unless we are uncommonly wise about how we use this new power, we will find ourselves saying, as Emerson’s friend Henry David Thoreau said about an earlier technological revolution, “We do not ride the railroad; it rides upon us.”

A QI School?

• W e’ve had academies, we’ve had free schools, so how about a school that’s based on an award-winning quiz show? The man behind BBC2’s long-running QI thinks policy makers can learn a lot from the format of his game show.
  
  “It is getting to be a real problem with the education system in this country,” says John Lloyd, 61, who created the show’s format. “It is fitted to a small number of people who want to do a small number of careers — top lawyers, top civil servants, people who want to work in the banking system.
  
  “But what about all the kids who find school mostly impossible, who are bored, who are uninspired and who are just looking out of the window — the kids who teachers find ungovernable? If you make every session in every subject interesting right from the start, from the first sentence, just think how those kids could be transformed.”
  
  So how would Lloyd’s dream education system work? Stephen Fry for English, Clive Anderson for politics and Jeremy Clarkson for PE?
  
  On QI, most of the questions are extremely obscure, making it unlikely that the correct answer will be given — perhaps to demonstrate that, however many facts you know, there will always be things you don’t. So points are awarded not only for correct answers but also for interesting ones, regardless of whether they are right. It’s about thinking in a creative way. Conversely, points are deducted from a panellist who gives answers that are generally believed to be true but in fact are misconceptions. Points are also often deducted if an obvious joke answer is given, which, when translated to Lloyd’s fantasy classroom, would have the effect of deterring the class comedian.
  
  Lloyd’s own education was rather more traditional. From the fee-paying King’s School in Canterbury he went to study law at Trinity College, Cambridge, before arriving at the BBC and creating, either single-handedly or jointly, The News Quiz, Quote . . . Unquote, The News Huddlines and To the Manor Born.
  
  “I’m one of those people that, in subjects that I was any good at, found work relatively easy — I’m an arts and humanities person — so when it came to those exams I just found them easy. Maths, on the other hand, was just impossible: it terrified me. I still remember my parents sending me away for two weeks to a little old lady on the Isle of Wight. It terrified me — but when I came back I knew my times tables.”
  
  Michael Gove’s recent education shake-up, which resulted in a vote of no confidence by head teachers last weekend, does not quite follow his imaginative ideals — although the more challenging elements of the new curriculum do, at times, resemble QI questions.
  
  Under the education secretary’s proposed new curriculum in history, children will be introduced to the concepts of “civilisation”, “nation” and “democracy” as early as six years old. By the age of 11 they must study “the heptarchy” — the collective name for the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of south, east and central Britain during late antiquity.
  
  Discussions around these could resemble the free-flowing conversations between QI contestants, who spark ideas off each other while form-master Fry occasionally lobs in an unexpected fact to turn preconceptions on their heads.
  
  Allowing children to think outside the tramlines, Lloyd says, gives the opportunity for all students to participate and gain something from the lesson (rather as QI’s class duffer, Alan Davies, often provides the most acute insights). The key, as Lloyd surely knows from his years at the top of producing popular entertainment, is to keep your audience engrossed and engaged.
  
  “There is a very, very small number of people who are good at everything,” he says. “The rest of us are good at something that we like, that we are interested in, and frightened and baffled by the rest of it.
  
  “In our schools, we recognise only two kinds of intelligence — mathematical and verbal — and that rules out all those people who are going to change the world. Architects, famously, are often severely dyslexic, all sorts of musicians never learn music in a formal way — and languages, when taught in the classrooms, some children just can’t grasp them.”
  
  He adds: “Exams are for people like me who are good at exams. But what does that prove? The American novelist Ellen Gilchrist once said, ‘All you have to do to educate a child is leave him alone and teach him to read. The rest is brainwashing.’ ”
  
  Warming to his theme, and his quotations — an entertaining style that must now be second nature after 11 series of QI — he adds: “And Phyllis Diller, the American comedian, said, ‘We spend the first 12 months of our children’s lives teaching them to walk and talk and the next 12 years teaching them to sit down and shut up.’
  
  “And that sums up education in the modern sense in a nutshell: it suits the people who are willing to shut up and sit down — not the Alan Sugars and the Richard Bransons or even the ballet dancers. It suits the conformists.”
  
  Sadly, the reality of a QI school is a long way off — tearing up the curriculum and starting a three-term game show doesn’t really feature on Gove’s educational horizons — but it does sound like a lot of fun.

The Revolution

• Publishing, music, shopping, journalism – all revolutionised by the internet. Next in line? Education. Now US academics are offering world-class tuition – free – to anyone who can log on, anywhere in the world, is this the end of campus life?
  
  Two years ago, I sat in the back seat of a Toyota Prius in a rooftop car park in California and gripped the door handle as the car roared away from the kerb, headed straight towards the roof's edge and then at the last second sped around a corner without slowing down. There was no one in the driver's seat.
  
  It was the prototype of Google's self-driving car and it felt a bit like being Buck Rogers and catapulted into another century. Later, I listened to Sebastian Thrun, a German-born professor of artificial intelligence at Stanford University, explain how he'd built it, how it had already clocked up 200,000 miles driving around California, and how one day he believed it would mean that there would be no traffic accidents.
  
  A few months later, the New York Times revealed that Thrun was the head of Google's top-secret experimental laboratory Google X, and was developing, among other things, Google Glasses – augmented reality spectacles. And then, a few months after that, I came across Thrun again.
  
  The self-driving car, the glasses, Google X, his prestigious university position – they'd all gone. He'd resigned his tenure from Stanford, and was working just a day a week at Google. He had a new project. Though he didn't call it a project. "It's my mission now," he said. "This is the future. I'm absolutely convinced of it."
  
  The future that Thrun believes in, that has excited him more than self-driving cars, or sci-fi-style gadgets, is education. Specifically, massive online education free to all. The music industry, publishing, transportation, retail – they've all experienced the great technological disruption. Now, says Thrun, it's education's turn.
  
  "It's going to change. There is no doubt about it." Specifically, Thrun believes, higher education is going to change. He has launched Udacity, an online university, and wants to provide mass high quality education for the world. For students in developing countries who can't get it any other way, or for students in the first world, who can but may choose not to. Pay thousands of pounds a year for your education? Or get it free online?
  
  University, of course, is about so much more than the teaching. There's the socialising, of course, or, as we call it here in Britain, drinking. There's the living away from home and learning how to boil water stuff. And there's the all-important sex and catching a social disease stuff. But this is the way disruptions tend to work: they disrupt first, and figure out everything else at some unspecified time later.
  
  Thrun's great revelation came just over a year ago at the same TED conference where he unveiled the self-driving car. "I heard Salman Khan talk about the Khan Academy and I was just blown away by it," he says. "And I still am." Salman Khan, a softly spoken 36-year-old former hedge fund analyst, is the founding father of what's being called the classroom revolution, and is feted by everyone from Bill Gates (who called him "the world's favourite teacher") down.
  
  The Khan Academy, which he set up almost accidentally while tutoring his niece and nephew, now has 3,400 short videos or tutorials, most of which Khan made himself, and 10 million students. "I was blown away by it," says Thrun. "And frankly embarrassed that I was teaching 200 students. And he was teaching millions."
  
  Thrun decided to open up his Stanford artificial intelligence class, CS221, to the world. Anybody could join, he announced. They'd do the same coursework as the Stanford students and at the end of it take the same exam.
  
  CS221 is a demanding, difficult subject. On campus, 200 students enrolled, and Thrun thought they might pull in a few thousand on the web. By the time the course began, 160,000 had signed up. "It absolutely blew my mind," says Thrun. There were students from every single country in the world – bar North Korea. What's more, 23,000 students graduated. And all of the 400 who got top marks were students who'd done it online.
  
  It was, says Thrun, his "wonderland" moment. Having taught a class of 160,000 students, he couldn't go back to being satisfied with 200. "I feel like there's a red pill and a blue pill," Thrun said in a speech a few months later. "I've taken the red pill, and I've seen wonderland. We can really change the world with education."
  
  By the time I sign up to Udacity's beginners' course in computer science, how to build a search engine, 200,000 students have already graduated from it. Although when I say "graduate" I mean they were emailed a certificate. It has more than a touch of Gillian McKeith's PhD about it, though it seems employers are taking it seriously: a bunch of companies, including Google, are sponsoring Udacity courses and regularly cream off the top-scoring students and offer them jobs.
  
  I may have to wait a while for that call, though I'm amazed at how easy Udacity videos are to follow (having tips and advice on search-engine building from Sergey Brin, Google's co-founder, doesn't hurt). Like the Khan Academy, it avoids full-length shots of the lecturer and just shows a doodling hand.
  
  According to Brin, if you have basic programming ability – which we'll all have if we complete the course – and a bit of creativity, "you could come up with an idea that might just change the world". But then that's Silicon Valley for you.
  
  What's intriguing is how this will translate into a British context. Because, of course, when it comes to revolutionising educational access, Britain has led the world. We've had the luxury of open access higher education for so long – more than 40 years now – that we're blasé about it. When the Open University was launched in 1969, it was both radical and democratic. It came about because of improvements in technology – television – and it's been at the forefront of educational innovation ever since. It has free content – on OpenLearn and iTunesU. But at its heart, it's no longer radically democratic. From this year, fees are £5,000.
  
  In America, Thrun is not the only one to have taken the pills. A year on from the Stanford experiment, and the world of higher education and the future of universities is completely different. Thrun's wasn't the only class to go online last autumn. Two of his computer science colleagues, Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller, also took part, with equally mind-blowing results. They too have set up a website, Coursera. And while Udacity is developing its own courses, Coursera is forming partnerships with universities to offer existing ones. When I met Koller in July, shortly after the website's launch, four universities had signed up – Stanford, Princeton, Michigan and Pennsylvania.
  
  Just four months later, it has 33 partner universities, 1.8 million students and is having venture capital thrown at it – $16m (£10m) in the first round. And it doesn't stop there. It's pretty remarkable that Coursera and Udacity were spun out of the same university, but also the same department (Thrun and Koller still supervise a PhD student together). And they have the dynamic entrepreneurial change-the-world quality that characterise the greatest and most successful Silicon Valley startups.
  
  "We had a million users faster than Facebook, faster than Instagram," says Koller. "This is a wholesale change in the educational ecosystem."
  
  But they're not alone. Over at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Anant Argarwal, another professor of computer science, who also cites Khan as his inspiration (and who was, in a neat twist, once his student), has launched edX, featuring content from MIT, Harvard, Berkeley and the University of Texas System.
  
  Argarwal is not a man prone to understatement. This, he says, is the revolution. "It's going to reinvent education. It's going to transform universities. It's going to democratise education on a global scale. It's the biggest innovation to happen in education for 200 years." The last major one, he says, was "probably the invention of the pencil". In a decade, he's hoping to reach a billion students across the globe. "We've got 400,000 in four months with no marketing, so I don't think it's unrealistic."
  
  More than 155,000 students took the first course he taught, including a whole class of children in Mongolia. "That was amazing!" says Argarwal. "And we discovered a protégé. One of his students, Batthushig, got a perfect score. He's a high school student. I can't overstate how hard this course was. If I took it today, I wouldn't get a perfect score. We're encouraging him to apply to MIT." This is the year, Argarwal says, that everything has changed. There's no going back. "This is the year of disruption."
  
  A month ago, I signed up for one of the Coursera courses: an introduction to genetics and evolution, taught by Mohamed Noor, a professor at Duke University. Unlike Udacity's, Coursera's courses have a start date and run to a timetable. I quite fancied a University of Pennsylvania course on modern poetry but it had already started. This one was 10 weeks long, would feature "multiple mini-videos roughly 10-15 minutes in length", each of which would contain a number of quizzes, and there would also be three tests and a final exam.
  
  It's just me, Noor, and my 36,000 classmates. We're from everywhere: Kazakhstan, Manila, Donetsk, Iraq. Even Middlesbrough. And while I watch the first videos and enjoy Noor's smiley enthusiasm, I'm not blown away.
  
  They're just videos of lectures, really. There's coursework to do, but I am a journalist. I am impervious to a deadline until the cold sweat of impending catastrophe is upon me. I ignore it. And it's a week or so later when I go back and check out the class forum.
  
  And that's when I have my being-blown-away moment. The traffic is astonishing. There are thousands of people asking – and answering – questions about dominant mutations and recombination. And study groups had spontaneously grown up: a Colombian one, a Brazilian one, a Russian one. There's one on Skype, and some even in real life too. And they're so diligent! If you are a vaguely disillusioned teacher, or know one, send them to Coursera: these are people who just want to learn.
  
  Four weeks in, Noor announces that he's organising a Google hangout: it's where a limited number of people can talk via their webcams. But it's scheduled for 1am GMT on Sunday morning. I go to sleep instead. However I do watch the YouTube video of it the next day and it's fascinating viewing. Despite the time, Richard Herring, a train driver from Sheffield, is there, bright and alert and wanting to tell Noor how much he's enjoying the course.
  
  "Richard!" says Noor. "Nice to meet you! Your posts are amazing. I often find that before I have a chance to go in and answer a question, somebody else has already answered it, and it's often Richard. Thank you."
  
  "I just love science," says Richard. "I was never any good at school, but I've just picked it up along the way. It's a brilliant course. To get something like this without paying anything is marvellous. I'm loving it."
  
  So is Sara Groborz, a graphic designer who was born in Poland but now lives in Britain. And then there's Naresh Ramesh, from Chennai, who's studying for a degree in biotechnology, and Maria, who lives in the US and is using the course to teach her students in a juvenile correction institute. Aline, a high school student in El Salvador, comes on. She took the course, she says, because she goes to a Catholic school where they don't teach evolution. "And you're the best teacher I've ever had!" she tells Noor.
  
  How gratifying must it be to be a teacher on one of these courses? When I catch up by email with Noor the next day, he writes. "I'm absolutely LOVING it!" By phone, he says it's one of the most exciting things he's ever done.
  
  What's more, it means that next semester he's going to be able to "flip the classroom". This is a concept that Khan has popularised and shown to be successful: students do the coursework at home by watching the videos, and then the homework in class, where they can discuss the problems with the instructor.
  
  There are still so many issues to figure out with online education. Not least the fact that you don't get a degree out of it, although a university in the US has just announced that it will issue credit for it. At the moment, most people are doing courses for the sake of simply learning new stuff. "And a certificate, basically a pdf, which says this person may or may not be who they say they are," says Noor.
  
  And while computers are excellent at grading maths questions, they're really much less hot at marking English literature essays. There's a preponderance of scientific and technical subjects, but the number of humanties courses is increasing with what Koller says is "surprisingly successful" peer assessment techniques. "It can't replace a one-to-one feedback from an expert in the field, but with the right guidance, peer assessment and crowd-sourcing really does work."
  
  And in terms of content, the course I'm doing is pretty much the same as the one Noor's students take. At Duke, they have more interaction, and a hands-on lab environment, but they are also charged $40,000 a year for the privilege.
  
  It's a lot of money. And it's this, that makes Udacity's and Coursera's and edX's courses so potentially groundbreaking. At the moment, they're all free. And while none of them can compete with traditional degrees, almost every other industry knows what happens when you give teenagers the choice between paying a lot of money for something or getting it for nothing.
  
  Of course, education isn't quite an industry, but it is a business, or as Matt Grist, an education analyst from the thinktank Demos tells me, "a market", although he immediately apologises for saying this. "I know. It's terrible. That's the way we talk about it these days. I don't really like it, but I do it. But it is a market. And universities are high-powered businesses with massive turnovers. Some of the best institutions in Britain are global players these days."
  
  Grist has been looking at the funding model of British universities, and sees trouble ahead. The massive rise in fees this year is just the start of it. "We've set off down this road now, and if you create competition and a market for universities, I think you're going to have to go further." He foresees the best universities becoming vastly more expensive, and the cheaper, more vocational ones "holding up". "It's the middle-tier, 1960s campus ones that I think are going to struggle."
  
  When I ask Koller why education has suddenly become the new tech miracle baby, she describes it as "the perfect storm. It's like hurricane Sandy, all these things have come together at the same time. There's an enormous global need for high quality education. And yet it's becoming increasingly unaffordable. And at the same time, we have technological advances that make it possible to provide it at very low marginal cost."
  
  And, in Britain, the storm is perhaps even more perfect. This is all happening at precisely the moment that students are having to pay up to £9,000 a year in fees and being forced to take on unprecedented levels of debt.
  
  Students, whether they like it or not, have been turned into consumers. Education in Britain has, until now, been a very pure abstraction, a concept untainted by ideas of the market or value. But that, inevitably, is now changing. University applications by UK-born students this year were down almost 8%. "Though the number who turned up was much lower than that," Peter Lampl, the founder of the Sutton Trust, tells me. "They were 15% down."
  
  The trust champions social mobility and nothing accelerates that more than university. "That's why we're so keen on it," says Lampl. "We're monitoring the situation. We don't know what the true impact of the fees will be yet. Or what the impact of coming out of university with £50,000 worth of debt will have on the rest of your life. "Will it delay you buying a house? Or starting a family? People compare it to the States, but in America one third of graduates have no debt, and two-thirds have an average of $25,000. This is on a completely different scale."
  
  And it's amid this uncertainty and this market pressure that these massive open online courses – or Moocs as they're known in the jargon – may well come to play a role. There are so many intangible benefits to going to university. "I learned as much if not more from my fellow students than I did from the lectures," says Lampl. But they're the things – making life-long friends, joining a society, learning how to operate a washing machine – that are free. It's the education bit that's the expensive part. But what Udacity and the rest are showing is that it doesn't necessarily have to be."
  
  The first British university to join the fray is Edinburgh. It's done a deal with Coursera and from January, will offer six courses, for which 100,000 students have already signed up. Or, to put this in context, four times as many undergraduates as are currently at the university.
  
  It's an experiment, says Jeff Hayward, the vice-principal, a way of trying out new types of teaching "I'll be happy if we break even." At the moment Coursera doesn't charge students to receive a certificate of completion, but at some point it's likely to, and when it does, Edinburgh will get a cut.
  
  But then Edinburgh already has an online model. More than 2,000 students studying for a masters at the university aren't anywhere near it; they're online. "And within a few years, we're ramping that up to 10,000," says Hayward.
  
  For undergraduates, on the other hand, study is not really the point of university, or at least not the whole point. I know a student at Edinburgh called Hannah. "Do you have any lectures tomorrow?" I text her. "Only philosophy at 9am," she texts back. "So obviously I'm not going to that."
  
  She's an example of someone who would be quite happy to pay half the fees, and do some of the lectures online. "God yes. Some of the lecturers are so crap, anyway. We had a tutorial group the other day, and he just sat there and read the paper and told us to get on with it."
  
  Max Crema, the vice-president of the student union, tells me that he's already used online lectures from MIT to supplement his course. "Though that may be because I'm a nerd," he concedes. "The problem with lectures is that they are about 300 years out of date. They date back to the time when universities only had one book. That's why you still have academic positions called readers."
  
  I trot off to one of them, an actual lecture in an actual lecture theatre, the old anatomy theatre, a steeply raked auditorium that's been in use since the 19th century when a dissecting table used to hold centre stage, whereas today there's just Mayank Dutia, professor of systems neurophysiology, talking about the inner ear.
  
  He's one of the first academics signed up to co-deliver one of the Coursera courses come January, although he defends the real-life version too: "Universities are special places. You can't do what we do online. There's something very special in being taught by a world leader in the field. Or having a conversation with someone who's worked on a subject their whole lives. There's no substitute for this."
  
  There isn't. But what the new websites are doing is raising questions about what a university is and what it's for. And how to pay for it. "Higher education is changing," says Hayward. "How do we fund mass global education? There are agonies all over the world about this question."
  
  There are. And there's no doubting that this is something of a turning point. But it may have an impact closer to home too. Argarwal sees a future in which universities may offer "blended" models: a mixture of real-life and online teaching.
  
  Coursera has already struck its first licensing deal. Antioch College, a small liberal arts institution in Ohio, has signed an agreement under which it will take content from Duke University and the University of Pennsylvania. And a startup called the Minerva Project is attempting to set up an online Ivy League university, and is going to encourage its students to live together in "dorm clusters" so that they'll benefit from the social aspects of university life. Seeing how the students on Coursera and Udacity organise themselves, it's not impossible to see how in the future, students could cluster together and take their courses online together. For free.
  
  There's so much at stake. Not least the economies of dozens of smallish British cities, the "second-tier" universities that Matt Grist of Demos foresees could struggle in the brave new free education market world.
  
  At Edinburgh, fees are having an effect – applications are down – but "most students seem to see it as mañana money," says Jeff Hayward. "It's still hypothetical at the moment."
  
  But this is the first year of £9,000 fees. An English student at Edinburgh (it's free for Scottish students), where courses are four years, is looking at £36,000 of debt just for tuition. And maybe another £30,000 of living expenses on top of that.
  
  These websites are barely months old. They're still figuring out the basics. Universities aren't going anywhere just yet. But who knows what they'll look like in 10 years' time? A decade ago, I thought newspapers would be here for ever. That nothing could replace a book. And that KITT, David Hasselhoff's self-driving car in Knight Rider was nothing more than a work of fantasy.
  
  CASE STUDY Genetics for railwaymen
  
  RICHARD HERRING, 45  Train driver, Sheffield
  
  "I was on Richard Dawkins's website and I read about the course - introduction to genetics and evolution. I looked it up and saw it was being offered by a really good university, Duke, and I thought, what's the catch? And there isn't one. It's marvellous. I can't believe it's available for free. I'm absolutely loving it.
  
  "The only qualification I've got is a bronze certificate in swimming. I left school with no qualifications, nothing. But I got interested in philosophy and then science and I just love learning about things. I've always got a book in my hand. What's great about the course is that you can pause it, and rewind, and rewatch it until you get the hang of it. I used to be a steelworker where you had to learn a lot of new things, and I find I have to keep at it, and then it eventually clicks.
  
  "I actually paid for a home tutor a few years ago to teach me calculus and I did send off for a prospectus from the Open University, but it was too expensive. For me, it's not about getting a qualification, it's for the sake of learning. I'm really enjoying the forum. The way that Professor Noor interacts with it and that there are students from all over the world, some of them with a whole load of letters after their name. I just love the environment. I don't have that at work – it's a very northern, working class sort of place, so I'm just not pushed in that direction.
  
  "I've already signed up to a whole load of other courses: I've enrolled on a philosophy one, and I'm going to brush up on my algebra, and there's a cell biology one which I think will be an interesting extension to this."

Personalised Learning

• Educators have known for 30 years that students perform better when given one-on-one tutoring and mastery learning—working on a subject until it is mastered, not just until a test is scheduled. Success also requires motivation, whether from an inner drive or from parents, mentors or peers.
  
  Will the rise of massive open online courses (MOOCs) quash these success factors? Not at all. In fact, digital tools offer our best path to cost-effective, personalized learning.
  
  I know because I have taught both ways. For years Sebastian Thrun and I have given artificial-intelligence courses at Stanford University and other schools; we lectured, assigned homework and gave everyone the same exam at the same time. Each semester just 5 to 10 percent of students regularly engaged in deep discussions in class or office hours; the rest were more passive. We felt there had to be a better way.
  
  So, in the fall of 2011, we tried something new. In addition to our traditional classroom, we created a free online course open to anyone. On our first try, we attracted a city's worth of participants—about 100,000 engaged with the course, and 23,000 finished.
  
  Inspired by Nobel laureate Herbert Simon's comment that “learning results from what the student does and thinks and only from what the student does and thinks,” we created a course centered on the students doing things and getting frequent feedback. Our “lectures” were short (two- to six-minute) videos designed to prime the attendees for doing the next exercise. Some problems required the application of mathematical techniques described in the videos. Others were open-ended questions that gave students a chance to think on their own and then to hash out ideas in online discussion forums.
  
  Our scheme to help make learning happen actively, rather than passively, created many benefits akin to tutoring—and helped to increase motivation. First, as shown in a 2013 study by Karl K. Szpunar, Novall Y. Khan and Daniel L. Schacter in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, frequent interactions keep attention from wandering. Second, as William B. Wood and Kimberly D. Tanner describe in a 2012 Life Sciences Education paper, learning is enhanced when students work to construct their own explanations, rather than passively listening to the teacher's. That is why a properly designed automated intelligent tutoring system can foster learning outcomes as well as human instructors can, as Kurt van Lehn found in a 2011 meta-analysis in Educational Psychologist.
  
  A final key advantage was the rapid improvement of the course itself. We analyzed the junctures where our thousands of students succeeded or failed and found where our course needed fine-tuning. Better still, we could capture this information on an hour-by-hour basis. For our class, human teachers analyzed the data, but an artificial-intelligence system could perform this function and then make recommendations for what a pupil could try next to improve—as online shopping sites today make automated recommendations for what book or movie you might enjoy.
  
  Online learning is a tool, just as the textbook is a tool. The way the teacher and the student use the tool is what really counts.

Crowdsourcing Assessments

• One of the most time-consuming aspects of teaching is grading homework assignments. So here’s an interesting crowdsourcing tool from Luca de Alfaro and Michael Shavlovsky at the University of California Santa Cruz that switches the burden from the teacher to the students themselves.
  
  The new tool is called CrowdGrader and it is available at http://www.crowdgrader.org/.
  
  The basic idea is straightforward. De Alfaro and Shavlovsky’s website allows students to submit their homework and then redistributes it to their peers for assessment. Each student receives five pieces of anonymous work to grade.
  
  It’s easy to imagine that the quality of student feedback would be poor. But de Alfaro and Shavlovsky have a useful trick to encourage high-quality assessment– each student’s grade depends in part on the quality of the feedback they give. In this test they received 25 per cent of their mark on that basis. That provides plenty of incentive for the students to be fair and consistent.
  
  One of the important features of the tool is that it uses an iterative algorithm to calculate the consensus grade for each piece of homework while at the same time evaluating the quality of the assessment that each student gives by comparing it to the assessment of his or her peers.
  
  De Alfaro and Shavlovsky have tested CrowdGrader in the evaluation of coding assignments for various computer science classes they have taught. And they have compared the results with a control assessed by teaching assistants.
  
  The results are generally positive. De Alfaro and Shavlovsky point out that the crowdsourced feedback from several students is far more detailed than anything a student receives from a single instructor.
  
  “When instructors or teaching assistants are faced with grading a large number of assignments, the feedback they provide on each individual assignment is usually limited,” they say. “With CrowdGrader, students had access to multiple reviews of their homework submissions.”
  
  What’s more, the students benefited from seeing the way that their peers tackled same problem.
  
  There are disadvantages as well. Assessments marked by a teaching assistant tend to be more consistent with the same attention given to aspects of the work. And for the student, a big disadvantage is the extra time they have to spend on CrowdGrader.
  
  However, de Alfaro and Shavlovsky say that the two different grading options are of similar quality. “With teaching assistants, the risk is that they do not pay attention in their grading to the aspects where most effort is put (where the flaws are); with crowdsourced grades, the risk is in the inherent variability of the process,” they say.
  
  That looks like a promising way to make better use of an instructor or teaching assistant’s time while improving the learning experience for the student. Of course, a big factor is the user interface and the training each student receives in making assessments.
  
  But as crowdsourcing comes of age as both a scientific and problem-solving tool, there are a growing number of examples of how to do this well, such as the extraordinary crowdsourcing science done at the Zooniverse.org.
  
  Given the big changes that are occurring in higher education around the world with online teaching services such as Udacity and the Khan Academy flourishing, it’s not hard to imagine that innovative ideas like this will find a large audience quickly.
     

Do Learning Styles Make A Difference?

• Ken Gibson was an advanced reader in elementary school and easily retained much of what he read. But when the teacher would stand him up in front of the class to read a report out loud, he floundered. His classmates, he noticed, also had their inconsistencies. Some relished oral presentations but took forever to read a passage on their own; others had a hard time following lectures. Gibson now explains these discrepancies as “learning styles” that differ from one student to the next. He founded a company, LearningRx, on the premise that these styles make a difference in how students learn.
  
  The idea that learning styles vary among students has taken off in recent years. Many teachers, parents and students are adamant that they learn best visually or by hearing a lesson or by reading, and so forth. And some educators have advocated teaching methods that take advantage of differences in the way students learn. But some psychologists take issue with the idea that learning style makes any significant difference in the classroom.
  
  There is no shortage of ideas in the professional literature. David Kolb of Case Western Reserve University posits that personality divides learners into categories based on how actively or observationally they learn and whether they thrive on abstract concepts or concrete ones. Another conjecture holds that sequential learners understand information best when it is presented one step at a time whereas holistic learners benefit more from seeing the big picture. Psychologists have published at least 71 different hypotheseson learning styles.
  
  Frank Coffield, professor of education at the University of London, set out to find commonalities among the many disparate ideas about learning style using a sample comprising 13 models. The findings, published in 2004, found that only three tests for learning styles met their criteria for both validity and reliability, meaning that the tests both measured what they intended to measure and yielded consistent results. Among the many competing ideas, Coffield and his colleagues found no sign pointing to an overarching model of learning styles.
  
  In 2002 Gibson, after a brief career as a pediatric optometrist, started LearningRx, a nontraditional tutoring organization, based on the idea that different people rely on particular cognitive skills that are strongest. For instance, visual learners understand lessons best when they are presented via images or a slide show; auditory learners benefit more from lectures; kinesthetic learners prefer something concrete, such as building a diorama. “We have a natural tendency to use the skills that are strongest,” Gibson says. “That becomes our learning style.”
  
  LearningRx trainers use cognitive skill assessments similar to IQ tests to identify a student’s areas of cognitive strengths and weaknesses—some people might be strong at memorizing written words or weak at doing mathematical computations in their heads. Then they administer “brain training” exercises designed to improve students' weakest skills. Such exercises might involve a trainer asking a student to quickly answer a series of math problems in his head.
  
  Daniel Willingham, a professor of cognitive psychology at the University of Virginia and outspoken skeptic of learning styles, argues that Gibson and other cognitive psychologists are mistaken to equate cognitive strengths with learning styles. The two, Willingham says, are different: Whereas cognitive ability clearly affects the ability to learn, an individual’s style doesn’t. “You can have two basketball players, for example, with a different style. One is very conservative whereas the other is a real risk-taker and likes to take crazy shots and so forth, but they might be equivalent in ability.”
  
  As Willingham points out, the idea that ability affects performance in the classroom is not particularly surprising. The more interesting question is whether learning styles, as opposed to abilities, make a difference in the classroom. Would educators be more effective if they identified their students’ individual styles and catered their lessons to them?
  
  The premise should be testable, Willingham says. “The prediction is really straightforward: If you appeal to a person’s style versus going against his preferred style, that should make a difference for learning outcomes,” he says.
  
  Harold Pashler of the University of California, San Diego, and his colleagues searched the research literature for exactly this kind of empirical evidence. They couldn't find any. One study they reviewed compared participants’ scores on the Verbalizer–Visualizer Questionnaire, a fifteen-item survey of true-or-false questions evaluating whether someone prefers auditory or optical information, with their scores on memory tests after presenting words via either pictures or verbal reading. On average, participants performed better on the free-recall test when they were shown images, regardless of their preferences.
  
  Some studies claimed to have demonstrated the effectiveness of teaching to learning styles, although they had small sample sizes, selectively reported data or were methodologically flawed. Those that were methodologically sound found no relationship between learning styles and performance on assessments. Willingham and Pashler believe that learning styles is a myth perpetuated merely by sloppy research and confirmation bias.
  
  Despite the lack of empirical evidence for learning styles, Gibson continues to think of ability and preference as being one and the same. Trainers at LearningRx ask their clients to describe their weaknesses, then measure their cognitive abilities using the Woodcock–Johnson Test. “Just by someone telling us what’s easy and hard for them, we can pretty well know where the deficiencies are,” he says. “Eighty-five to 90 percent of the time the symptoms and the test results are right on.”
  
  When teachers wonder how to present a lesson to kids with a range of abilities, they may not find the answer in established learning style approaches. Instead, Willingham suggests keeping it simple. “It’s the material, not the differences among the students, that ought to be the determinant of how the teacher is going to present a lesson," he says. For example, if the goal is to teach students the geography of South America, the most effective way to do so across the board would be by looking at a map instead of verbally describing the shape and relative location of each country. “If there’s one terrific way that captures a concept for almost everybody, then you’re done.”
     

Robots To Teach Autistic Kids

• Social robots are simpler to interact with than humans, can repeat games with infinite patience and record the data for further study. That’s changing the way autistic children learn new skills, say therapists.
  
  One of the emerging applications of social robotics is in providing therapy for children with autism. Social robots are ideally suited to this task because they are simpler than humans to interact with, their actions are perfectly repeatable and they can be modified in various ways to meet the requirements of different children.
  
  So therapists have begun to test these devices when working with autistic children. And today, John-John Cabibihan at the National University of Singapore and a couple of pals review this work, the numerous different types of robots that therapists are using and the techniques they have developed to engage and influence autistic children. The result is a useful introduction to an area of social robotics that has significant promise.
  
  Autism is a developmental disorder that encompasses a wide spectrum of impairments in social skills, communication and imagination. It is a life-long disorder but there is growing evidence that early intervention can make a significant difference to children’s later quality of life.
  
  Social robots are well suited to this kind of intervention. To start with, they are useful for diagnosing autism, which usually, autism cannot be diagnosed until a child is at least three years old. But there is growing evidence that a diagnosis can be made much earlier by studying eye contact in high risk babies (those with close relatives who are autistic, for instance).
  
  Social robots, with cameras for eyes, can monitor eye contact accurately and over long periods of time to gather evidence for a diagnosis one way or the other.
  
  Another application is in eliciting certain types of behaviour. Social robots can play a central role in exercises that help children improve their social, sensory and cognitive skills as well as their motor control. Therapists have programmed the robots to perform tasks that help the child practice eye contact, turn taking, imitation and so on. “Such activities include teaching a child to initiate greetings, to wait for its turn to throw the ball, to follow the robots gaze to an object of interest, and to copy the robots movements as it dances,” say Cabibihan and co.
  
  In the process, the robot becomes a friendly playmate and a mediator between the therapist and the child, difficult roles for humans to play consistently.
  
  Cabibihan and co also review the wide range of robots that therapists have pressed into service. These range from hyper-realistic humanoids such as FACE (Facial Automation for Conveying Emotions) to entirely non-human robots such as Roball. It’s an impressive list.
  
  The clear message from Cabibihan and co is that social robotics is revolutionising the way experts diagnose, study and help autistic children.
  
  There are certainly challenges ahead of course. For example, these guys point to the need to better characterise the change in a child’s behaviour towards real people as a result of social robotic therapy. “This is very important since the very purpose of therapy is to facilitate the child’s social interaction with other people, not just with the robots,” say Cabibihan and co.
  
  And there is clearly much to be learned in how best to use social robots for children with different needs.
  
  Nevertheless, the data gathered from this type of work has the potential to change the way we think about autism and, most important of all, to improve the outcomes for children with autism.
     

PISA

• It is a city whose waterfront is modelled on Liverpool and whose internationalist trading ethos owes much to its British colonial past. But this week it will be Shanghai teaching the West a thing or two about education. On Tuesday, Andreas Schleicher, special adviser on education policy at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, will unveil the latest results from his programme for international student assessment (Pisa).
  
  Undertaken by students in 66 countries, the Pisa survey every three years measures the ability of 15-year-old pupils in reading, mathematics and science. It is the closest thing we have to an international school league table. And it looks set to be another wake-up call for British schools policy. There are valid debates about how this information is collected and analysed, but much more significant is the challenge it sets down to confront low achievement.
  
  Not least because the continued success of Shanghai (along with Hong Kong and Singapore) represents a powerful critique of Michael Gove’s schools policy. All his frenetic attention-seeking changes of the past three years — structural reforms, curriculum rewrites, multiplying assessment criteria — have not delivered the step change in standards we need. What Shanghai shows is that it is teacher quality that is key.
  
  China has come a long way since the Cultural Revolution branded teachers as dangerous intellectuals to be sent for re-education in the paddy fields. Today teaching is rightly regarded as a high-value profession. In Shanghai all teachers have a teaching qualification and undergo 240 hours of professional development within the first five years of their career. There are demonstration lessons with other teachers to improve pedagogy and teachers are supported by parents. In Shanghai “home-room teachers” visit each of their pupils at home at least once a year. The best teachers are then shared across schools, with a high level of interaction between urban and rural districts, bringing the dynamism of the city to often introverted village classrooms.
  
  Contrast this with Gove’s attack on the status of teaching in England. This government is happy to see unqualified teachers in our classrooms, to remove the role of higher education in teacher training and to denounce the profession as “enemies of promise”. In Shanghai teachers work towards MA level; in England the South Leeds Academy can advertise for “an unqualified maths teacher” with four GCSEs. How is that going to help us win “the global race”?
  
  Another striking element of Shanghai’s system is how much emphasis is placed on education as the pathway towards social improvement. Birth or background is simply not seen as a barrier to success, with no excuses made for low expectations. The Chinese put it crudely: “Diligence can compensate for stupidity.” By contrast, as the education guru Sir Michael Barber argues: “The opposite beliefs — birth is destiny and either you are intelligent or not — create huge psychological barriers to universal success and are widely held in Atlantic societies.”
  
  They are certainly held by Boris Johnson, the mayor of London, who in a speech last week was happy to dismiss 16% of “our species” for their low IQ. His is an ugly view of genetic determinism shared by Gove’s education team. Rather than pushing schools to achieve more, we have a government that thinks pupil attainment is best dictated by DNA.
  
  There will be lots of other lessons to come from Pisa’s analysis: the importance of a considered and inclusive process of curriculum reform, the role of school autonomy in challenging underperformance, the need for high-quality pre-school education and how peer-to-peer relationships between schools can deliver the best outcomes for pupils.
  
  Equally, there are broader cultural factors in China that would be lost in translation here. A filial ambition to work hard for one’s parents was matched by a one-child policy that gave home-grown “tiger mothers” a terrifying zeal. There is also a growing awareness of the developmental costs of hot-housing — with Shanghai taking action to curb the 80% of pupils who are estimated to have three or four hours of private tuition every night.
  
  Yet perhaps the most remarkable aspect is how unprepared the Chinese are to rest on their laurels. Not content with topping the Pisa tables in 2009, Shanghai has embarked upon a wholesale reform programme that seeks to improve pupils’ learning experience with a broader-based curriculum, while embedding pedagogy that emphasises capability development, not knowledge accumulation. Its goal now is to end the flight of Chinese higher education students to Britain and America. This week’s Pisa results will show we have a tough task ahead in raising our standards and closing the attainment gap. Yet the story of Chinese success represents another episode in a history of missed chances.
  
  In post-war Germany, Britain created a world-class system of apprenticeships and technical education but singularly failed to adopt it back home. Similarly, along the Yangtze River the so-called “Shanghailanders” helped to build an international city that has come to value education much more openly than us. As David Cameron flies to China this weekend he should take with him a planeful of school governors, classroom assistants and teachers. For the Pisa lesson from Shanghai is clear: school improvement begins and ends with teacher quality.
     

Maths

• A mathematician reckons he has solved one of life’s most intractable problems: why do so many school children dislike maths?
  
  All should become apparent, he believes, in a few months time in one of Europe’s smallest countries.
  
  Estonia, known for its medieval capital, Baltic dwarf herring, rye grain vodka and Lembit Opik, is to be his testbed for an experiment that could revolutionise how maths is taught in schools.
  
  Conrad Wolfram, a British entrepreneur, is re-writing part of Estonia’s maths curriculum to reflect his theory that maths teaching is divorced from the way it is used in the real world.
  
  Most of the hard bits of maths — the calculations, the bits school children dislike most — have been made redundant by computers, he argues. Maths lessons, he says, should therefore replicate the practical maths used in problem solving. Pupils should use computers in class, and in exams, to tackle more difficult, and more interesting, tasks.
  
  Estonian teenagers , under his direction, will soon be asked in maths lessons to answer questions such as: will it rain tomorrow? They will have access to weather data for Tallinn and use computer programmes to give a forecast, rather than a right-or-wrong answer.
  
  “The question I have been asked is why is maths so scary? Most people are much more scared of maths than they are of history. The reason is, it is so far from their experience,” Mr Wolfram said. “We are presenting maths as this abstract thing and we start with the abstraction: here is a quadratic equation. Why the hell would you want to solve a quadratic equation anyway – what is the point of the abstraction?”
  
  In his view 80 per cent of maths taught by the end of secondary school is wasted practising “rote algorithms” that should be done by computer.
  
  “I don’t think people should not learn how to add up 3 plus 5 in their head, because I think that’s practically useful. I use that,” he said.But he added: “Coding is the modern way you write down maths.”
  
  His Estonia curriculum will start with probability and statistics, covering risk analysis, data, hypothesis testing and significance. It will be tested from February in 10 per cent of Estonia’s middle and upper schools and extended if it works.
  
  So why Estonia and not England? Mr Wolfram rolls his eyes in exasperation at the decision by Liz Truss, the Schools Minister, to ban calculators from maths tests at the end of primary school.
  
  Calculation has been transformed in the past 50 years by computers, he said, allowing people to tackle much more conceptually difficult maths. So why introduce coding in English primary schools but ban calculators?
  
  Mr Wolfram runs the global arm of a family business, Wolfram Research, that sells maths software. Does he not have a vested interest?
  
  “Everyone who talks about maths has a vested interest,” he replied. “If you have been a professor of maths for 20 years you have got a vested interested. If you are a maths teacher who has learnt maths the traditional way, you have got a vested interest.
  
  “One of the worries I have about maths curricula around the world, which I think has gone off track, is that in some places a small number of pure mathematicians end up setting the curriculum and they are a very small fraction of the users for which we are training people.”
     

Problem Boys

Morning assembly is starting at one of Britain’s most unusual boarding schools for boys. Pupils and staff crowd into the panelled entrance hall, where the principal, Richard Boyle, gives a few brief notices and then hands a box of matches to Junayd, a slight, solemn, 10-year-old. Junayd lights a candle at the front of the hall. “Education is light,” he mutters and steps back into the throng clutching the burnt-out match.

“Education is light,” echoes Boyle in a booming Wearside accent. He reminds the boys that this is the “year of personal responsibility” at the school and sends them off to their classes.

The candle ritual is repeated twice a day at Muntham House, a school for 56 boys in West Sussex. The honour of lighting the candle is given to a boy who has behaved particularly well during the preceding few hours. The boys keep the matches and when they have ten are rewarded with a book token or a trip. Junayd was picked this morning “because he settled better than everyone else last night”, Boyle says. “We are trying to keep him positive.”

Junayd, like all his peers, proved unteachable in mainstream schools. Muntham House, based in an 1860s country house set in 23 acres, is a special school for boys aged 8 to 18 who are classified as having severe behavioural problems. The school is one of about 20 non-maintained special schools in England and Wales for pupils with BESD (behavioural, emotional and social difficulties). Fees are paid by 21 local authorities in the South East that refer pupils to the school when they run out of other options.

The boys disperse to their lessons. Some to English and maths, others to design and technology workshops, some into the woods to do conservation work. Boyle says that during my day at the school I may find it so tranquil that it won’t seem like a special school. “Or there’ll be a full-scale riot. It could be anything in between.”

Many of the boys are on the autistic spectrum or have had ADHD diagnosed. Boyle is “not a fan of the alphabet soup. I’m of the old school”. He uses words like “maladjustment”. He took the tests to see whether he was on the autistic spectrum and found that he was. He regards himself as hyperactive.

The background of the boys “runs the gamut from fantastic parents who have tried everything to drug addict parents”. Some are the victims of horrendous abuse. “They have a lot of background crap and they get marginalised. People say ‘this is a bad guy’. They become isolated, violent, disruptive. The boy automatically thinks: ‘Why bother? What’s the point?’ It becomes a habit. We are the end of the road for a lot of kids.”

I sit in on a maths class of five boys, including Junayd. As well as the teacher, there is a teaching assistant and two university students. Every boy has lots of attention and work is being done. When they have finished they are allowed to play a boardgame. I play chess with Harvey, a quiet, thoughtful boy who has only been at the school a few weeks. He smiles shyly as he beats me.

The school’s central strategy is to find something that each boy is passionate about. Junayd came to Muntham House after short-term exclusions for “difficult behaviour” from previous schools. He is regarded as very bright but has Asperger syndrome. The staff encourage his love of superhero comic books. He is especially fond of Spider-Man. Junayd lives with his grandparents and took some time to make friends at the school. He is often withdrawn and expresses the unjustified view that other people won’t like him.

“Spider-Man is a lonely high school student who lives with his aunt and uncle. He comes to realise that he needs to be part of the community and control his anger if he is to be good, a lesson Junayd is starting to learn,” says Marc Williamson, who followed Junayd for months for a documentary he has made about Muntham House.

In the afternoon, the class goes to the library in Horsham. Junayd pores over the comic books. I try to interest him in a Manga book. He looks unimpressed and turns his laser-like focus to the Marvel volumes. I ask why he likes Spider-Man more than the others. “He’s the best,” he says, and turns to evaluate me as if he has just realised that he has met a prize idiot. Who would win a fight between Spider-Man and Batman? “Spider-Man,” he replies, without missing a beat. “He’s got super-strength.” In the park on the way back he scales the web-like conical climbing frame and hangs upside down.

“Every child has self-esteem issues, even if they are the most flamboyant child,” says Karen Allen, practice leader in the behavioural management team. “They have trouble regulating emotions, low self-esteem and self-confidence.”

Allen inhabits an inner sanctum in the school where boys can be brought to cool down or share private troubles. One room contains bean bags and a small library of picture books. Many of the boys have not previously enjoyed the opportunity to bond with an adult over a book. “They love picture books. There are blocks of development they haven’t had. If we can put them back in, we can help them to move forward,” Allen says.

She has built a particularly strong relationship with Ryan, a hyperactive boy who struggles to focus and looks and behaves younger than his 15 years. He was ejected from seven schools before he came to Muntham House. One day a therapist brought a horse to the school and everything changed for him. “Ryan couldn’t see any point in sitting in class but he was just drawn to the horse and was convinced that was what he wanted to do,” Allen says. Working with horses became part of Ryan’s therapy. “It’s amazing the conversations you can have with a child when you are on the other side of a horse grooming it. You can’t believe what they talk about.”

He has an offer of a placement at the stables of the racehorse trainer Gary Moore if he behaves himself and works hard on his work-experience placement at another stables. He is not in school today, but in the documentary we see him come alive with Moore, uninhibited and peppering him with questions. We also see him beset with doubt about his chances of landing the job: “I don’t think I will get it. There are loads of people better than me.”

The vast majority of pupils at Muntham House go on to further education. One recent pupil has a first-class honours degree in English and media studies from the University of Kent. Dave Payne, who smashed up four windows in a maths classroom in a moment of fury — “It was wonderful to watch,” says Boyle — went to college and came back to work as a part of the estate’s team. “Now, if anyone does any damage he is the one who fixes it.”

Boyle, 55, was a barman in Sunderland (“where I got my training”) before he became a teacher 30 years ago. He has been principal at Muntham House since 1999 and has the big charismatic personality to match the challenges posed by the boys in his care.

Many of the boys have suffered from a lack of male role models: “Often there are no male messages about how to react personally.” Some arrive with misogynistic attitudes. Boyle and several other teachers are imposing and blokeish. His messages are simple. To a boy with ADHD, for example: “We say: ‘You have a problem, you need to fix it and we will help you to fix it.’ They have got to accept they have a problem.”

The first task is to convince unsettled children that the school is a safe place run by people who care about them. The staff use the word “family” a lot when they talk about the school.

Teachers need enormous reserves of patience as they seek to build relationships with often disturbed and hostile boys. “If you can build a relationship with a kid who has spat at you and told you to f*** off and called your mother every name under the sun, that is fantastic,” Boyle says.

A key Boyle rule, endlessly repeated, is: “Talk to an adult. Don’t pull out if you’ve got a problem.”

Praise is key. We live in an age of periodic spasms of middle-class angst over whether we praise children too much. Perhaps the most heartbreaking thing I hear all day is an observation from Boyle: “Some of the boys have never heard an adult say ‘that’s really good’.”

Consistency is paramount. “We tell them what we will do and we do it,” Boyle says. “The best way to manage kids is to tell them to stop [if they are misbehaving]. There is a consequence if they misbehave.” This might be withdrawal of a trip or a detention.

As we tour the school a boy is on his hands and knees cleaning a wall. Boyle explains that he had scuffed it kicking a football. He gave the boy a bucket and a sponge. If that doesn’t work he’ll be given a paint brush. Someone tells me the story of a white boy who used a racist word. Boyle called him into his office with a group of older, larger boys, including black boys and asked if he would care to repeat the word.

All staff are trained in restraint techniques and on average there is one incident a day in which a boy has to be subdued in this way. “If they are going to lamp somebody you’ve got to do something about it,” says Boyle matter-of-factly. “We are not wandering about with angels’ wings. If some kid says ‘f*** you’ and spits at you, you are not going to say ‘peace out man, that’s wonderful’.”

Some of the boys look pretty tough. “Two women can take a bloke easily. In 30 years I’ve come across only three kids that were handy. Kids these days can’t fight properly,” Boyle says. He has other techniques for de-escalating situations. He likes to whistle or sing to pupils, or bemuse them by starting a chat about politics or history. About one boy a year leaves the school because even Muntham House can’t help them. “If they don’t buy in there is nothing you can do,” Boyle says. “If all they want to do is take your head off, you have to look for a more severe environment.” Typically this would be somewhere with a ratio of two staff to every pupil.

The school day ends with another assembly. Harvey, my vanquisher at chess, is one of those who has scored the maximum of 42 points for his work and behaviour today, and lights the candle. There’s a scuffle between two other boys and two male teachers swiftly extract the chief culprit with arm tweaking and lifting. A few minutes later, after a ticking off, he is allowed back in to pick up a gymnastics certificate.

Boys who have been “a pain in the backside” are told to stay behind for detentions or discussions.

Another boy, Ben, is applauded for gaining a National Vocational Qualification in land-based studies. Afterwards Boyle says he is particularly pleased because Ben “used to spend a lot of time under here”. He points to his desk. Sitting under Boyle’s desk is a popular pastime. “It’s a safe place. They’ll sit and read, or I’ll read to them. When I get bored of them I switch Maria Callas on. That’s brilliant for getting rid of them.”

Sixth formers, who go to local colleges and come back in the evenings to their own flats on campus, begin to roll in. I sit with Sandra West, a higher-tier learning assistant specialising in literacy, and Cole, a 16-year-old who came to the school at 14 having somehow managed to get through mainstream school without anyone successfully addressing his inability to read or write. He says he lacked confidence in his ability so got himself thrown out of classes, and then schools. “I knew I wouldn’t be able to do it so I messed around. I don’t think they wanted me.”

West helped him with his literacy and he found his interest in life: fixing cars and motorbikes. He is studying for a diploma in vehicle systems at a local college and doing work experience at a garage. In a recent exam he scored 95 per cent but still needs a scribe to write down his answers. “There are a lot of Coles out there, all different,” West says. “You have got to pull that individual apart and see how he works.”

She knows what she’s talking about. Her own son, James, who has ADHD and Asperger syndrome, was at Muntham House. He prospered at the school, went on to college and trained as a sports coach. One of his jobs is at a local school. James knows it well: he went there as a pupil before being excluded.

Taking Kids Out of School During Termtime

• A GROUP of families is to mount a legal challenge against Michael Gove’s crackdown on parents taking children on holiday during term time.
  
  Backed by a petition signed by more than 200,000 parents, the group is seeking a judicial review of the rules, which it claims are a breach of the human right to a family life. The parents are being advised by the Liberal Democrat MP John Hemming, who has successfully campaigned to open up the family courts.
  
  The move comes as official figures show more than 24,000 children skip school every day to go on family breaks.
  
  The campaign, which is called Parents Want A Say and begins today, is co-ordinated by Karen Wilkinson, a mother of three from Bath in Somerset, who argues it is not just parents looking for cheap holidays who are being refused permission to take children out of school.
  
  “Requests to take children out of school for weddings, to visit elderly grandparents who live abroad or even in some cases, when doctors have sanctioned the request because it’s in the child’s interest, are all being turned down,” she said.
  
  Among those prepared to be a test case in the legal action is Daniel Bales, 10, from Sheffield, South Yorkshire, whose parents are determined to go on a booked holiday with him in Spain next month even though his head teacher has refused to sanction the break.
  
  His mother, Sharon, said: “Daniel has Asperger’s and gets very anxious around noise and heat. We wanted to go in June, before Spanish children break up for their holidays and when the pool would be open for Daniel to swim.
  
  “It’s very hard to manage all his anxieties and I thought really hard about when would be best to go. We don’t want to be made to feel like criminals when we are just trying to do the best for our son.”
  
  The family supplied a letter from Daniel’s psychiatrist supporting the application. In a letter, the school’s head teacher acknowledged the decision to refuse the request was “harsh”.
  
  Gove’s changes last September ended a policy that allowed schools to grant up to 10 days’ leave a year for family holidays in “special circumstances”. Head teachers can now give pupils leave only in “exceptional circumstances”.
  
  Parents who do not have the school’s permission for their child’s absence face a maximum fine of £60 per pupil per parent, which rises to £120 if not paid within seven days. Those who refuse to pay face court action, a fine of up to £2,500 and a possible jail term of up to three months.
  
  This weekend a YouGov poll for The Sunday Times showed 50% of people — and 63% of parents of school-age children — believe schools should allow parents to take children on holiday during term time.
  
  Half said they had removed their children for holidays, though most said they had the school’s permission. Nearly one in seven said they had taken their children on holiday without official permission.
  
  Hemming said that under article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, interference with private family life could be justified only in certain circumstances: “There is a question here as to whether Michael Gove’s judgment about when all children should always take holidays is better than a family’s judgment. Schools are bound by the convention.”
  
  The group’s petition demanding the rules be scrapped has been signed by 207,000 people.
  
  Schools, however, are taking an increasingly tough line because poor attendance records are marked down by inspectors. A survey by schools advisers found a quarter of primary schools had imposed fines on parents for unauthorised absences.
  
  Yesterday it emerged that a 10-year-old girl in Tamworth, Staffordshire, was refused time off school to attend her grandfather’s funeral because it did not amount to exceptional circumstances.
  
  The education department said: “Poor attendance at school can have a hugely damaging effect, and children who attend school regularly are nearly four times more likely to achieve five or more good GCSEs than those who are regularly absent.”
  
  Poor attendance is indeed linked to low achievement, but I don't think taking your kids on holidays for a week or so a year in term time constitute poor attendance. Truanting is what causes low achievement, and children not attending school for no good reason is what causes low achievement, not children going on family holidays. This is a ridiculous policy, and as the fine is less than the difference between term time prices and school hols time prices, many parents will choose to break the rule and pay the fine.
     

Visualizing The Abstract

• Acting out in school is often a prelude to parents receiving a call from the principal. But, there are ways of acting out that tremendously increase learning — namely acting out as a way of grounding, or making sense of, abstract information.
  
  There is a growing body of research showing the value of this sort of acting out. One example is the Moved by Reading intervention for teaching reading comprehension. Using the intervention, children act out the meaning of sentences by moving images on a computer screen. If the child reads, “The farmer drove the tractor to the barn,” then she would move pictures of the farmer to the tractor, and both of them to the barn. This can double reading comprehension.
  
  Why is this important? Reading is basic for much of Western-style education. Not only do we read for pleasure, but we read to learn in science, mathematics, history, and so on. Unfortunately, many American children fail to read with good comprehension. For example, in 2011 only 67% of American children read at or above the basic level on the fourth-grade National Assessment of Educational Progress. The situation is even more dire for children learning English as a second language; only 31% of these children were at or above the basic level. We may be a nation of immigrants, but our educational system is failing many of the students who will be core members of society in the near future. Acting out can contribute to improving the outcome.
  
  Educationally beneficial acting out is based on the theory of embodied cognition. We often think of cognition as something cerebral, that is, as occurring in the brain and having little to do with the rest of the body. The separation of mind and body, however, is a myth. Cognition helps us to survive by guiding our behavior, and to do that, cognition must be attuned to the body. Imagine a mole popping out of a hole and seeing a snake. If the mole tried to fly away (disregarding its bodily capabilities), it would be dead.
  
  Dennis Proffitt and his students have shown that human cognition, in this case, perception, also takes into account bodily capabilities. For example, people judge a hill as steeper when they are wearing a heavy backpack or when they are ill or tired: The greater the effort (e.g., to climb a hill or walk an extent) the greater the judged slant or distance. In other words, the perceptual system scales (or measures) distance not in terms of feet or meters, but in terms of bodily effort. Scaling distance by bodily effort even plays a role in some culturally-based perceptions.
  
  But what does this have to do with school? The theory of embodied cognition also tells us that the abstractions that are important for language, mathematics, physics, and so on, are understood by grounding or mapping the abstract material onto our bodily experiences. For example, when you read the sentence, “The farmer drove the tractor to the barn,” you understand that sentence by using your experiences with farmers, driving, and barns to simulate the action described in the sentence. Remarkably, understanding such a sentence literally calls upon brain areas that control the arms (to simulate steering), vision (what tractors look like when moving), and more.
  
  When children are learning to read, they spend an enormous amount of time and effort just learning how to pronounce the words from the letters, a process called decoding. (Decoding is especially hard in English because many letters have many different pronunciations.) In fact, some children come to believe that reading is just decoding. When these children read, it is for them a boring exercise in pronunciation: Because they do not map the words in their experiences (e.g., of farmers and tractors), they never fully understand what they are reading.
  
  When a child engaged in Moved by Reading moves the image of the farmer to the tractor, she isn’t just playing. Instead, the child learns to map the meaning of nouns (like “farmer”) to the pictures, and perhaps more importantly, the child learns to map the syntax of the sentence (the who does what to whom) to her bodily actions (such as moving the farmer and the tractor). Thus, acting out teaches the child how to engage much of her body and brain in the process of reading comprehension.
  
  Furthermore, after children have learned to physically move the pictures, they can be taught to imagine moving the pictures. That is, the children can start to do the mapping of words to experiences on their own (without the computer) and achieve similar levels of comprehension.
  
  We have even shown that teaching children how to act out while reading helps the children to solve mathematical story problems. When faced with a story problem, many students ignore the story and look for key terms such as “more than” and try add the numbers. Often that leads them to nonsensical solutions. However, once the children are able to understand the story by acting out (either physically or in their imagination), they can sensibly do the right math.
  
  Acting out isn’t just for young children; it also helps in understanding STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) topics. For example, a deep understanding of the equation for centripetal force (F=m*v2/r) requires a mental simulation using experiences of force, mass, velocity, and radius of a circle. Of course, if you are missing the appropriate bodily experiences, or you are unable to map the abstract terms on to those experiences, then you won’t understand the equation for centripetal force, just like a child who has no idea what a tractor is will not fully understand the sentence about the farmer.
  
  Importantly, acting out can help to provide those bodily experiences and mappings. In one experiment, college students learned about centripetal force by acting out. For example, a student would be asked to swing around his or her head a weight attached to a string. When the length of the string (r) is increased, the student can feel that the force required to keep the weight going in a circle decreases (which is why r is a divisor in the formula for centripetal force). This bodily experience helps the student to overcome the misconception that increasing the length of string should increase the force.
  
  If you don’t believe that increasing r decreases force, imagine that you are on roller skates zipping around a circular track. To stop, you need to grab either a short rope or a long rope attached to a pole in the center of the circle. Which rope will generate a greater pull on your arm as you swing around the pole? The short rope: It will feel like your arm is being pulled from its socket. With the long rope, however, you will take a more leisurely-feeling journey around the pole. (And, if you used your imagination to understood the last few sentences, you will see how grounding abstract terms such as force and radius in concrete bodily experiences, such as roller skating, can generate new understanding.)
  
  Appropriate types of acting out have also been shown to help children in learning mathematics. For example, when faced with a problem such as “6+ 4 + 3 = ___ + 4,” many children interpret the equals sign to mean, “add up all the numbers,” and they put 17 in the blank space. What is the best way to teach children the “equalizer” strategy (i.e., make one side equal to the other side)? The researchers taught some children to say, “to solve this problem, I need to make one side equal to the other side.” Other children were taught to use the left hand to sweep under the left-hand side of the equation and the right hand to sweep under the right-hand side of the equation, that is, equalizing in gesture. A third group was taught both the verbal and the gestural equalizer strategies. On a long-term test of strategy use, the children taught to use a gesture (alone or in combination with the verbal statement) retained the strategy better than did the children taught only the verbal statement. There is even work showing that acting out can help adults to learn the mathematics of complex numbers (which include a term for the square root of -1).
  
  All of the work on acting out suggests that classrooms should include more physical activity designed to map abstract information onto bodily experiences. This suggestion dovetails nicely with some of the most exciting recent work in neuroscience. Scientists used to believe that the number of neurons in the brain could decrease (e.g., through trauma or alcohol), but never increase. We are now pretty certain that (at least in laboratory animals) new neurons are born, perhaps throughout the life span. Here are two amazing facts about neurogenesis. First, it is increased by physical activity such as running. Second, it occurs in the hippocampus, which is a neural structure strongly associated with memory in humans. Thus, if the results with laboratory animals can be extended to humans, it may well be the case that a healthy body literally produces a healthy mind. Furthermore, educational theorists who emphasize the importance of recess, physical education, and physical activity while learning - acting out - may have one of the most exciting discoveries in neuroscience on their side.
     

Start School Day Later

• Parents, students and teachers often argue, with little evidence, about whether U.S. high schools begin too early in the morning. In the past three years, however, scientific studies have piled up, and they all lead to the same conclusion: a later start time improves learning. And the later the start, the better.
  
  Biological research shows that circadian rhythms shift during the teen years, pushing boys and girls to stay up later at night and sleep later into the morning. The phase shift, driven by a change in melatonin in the brain, begins around age 13, gets stronger by ages 15 and 16, and peaks at ages 17, 18 or 19.
  
  Does that affect learning? It does, according to Kyla Wahlstrom, director of the Center for Applied Research and Educational Improvement at the University of Minnesota. She published a large study in February that tracked more than 9,000 students in eight public high schools in Minnesota, Colorado and Wyoming. After one semester, when school began at 8:35 a.m. or later, grades earned in math, English, science and social studies typically rose a quarter step—for example, up halfway from B to B+.
  
  Two journal articles that Wahlstrom has reviewed but have not yet been published reach similar conclusions. So did a controlled experiment completed by the U.S. Air Force Academy, which required different sets of cadets to begin at different times during their freshman year. A 2012 study of North Carolina school districts that varied school times because of transportation problems showed that later start times correlated with higher scores in math and reading. Still other studies indicate that delaying start times raises attendance, lowers depression rates and reduces car crashes among teens, all because they are getting more of the extra sleep they need.
  
  And the later the delay, the greater the payoff. In various studies, school districts that shifted from 7:30 to 8:00 a.m. saw more benefits than those that shifted from 7:15 to 7:45 a.m. Studies in Brazil, Italy and Israel showed similar improvements in grades. The key is allowing teens to get at least eight hours of sleep, preferably nine. In Europe, it is rare for high school to start before 9:00 a.m.
  
  Studies also show that common arguments against later start times ring hollow. In hundreds of districts that have made the change, students do not have a harder time fitting in after-school activities such as sports or in keeping part-time jobs. “Once these school districts change, they don't want to go back,” Wahlstrom says.
  
  Even “the bus issue” can work out for everyone. Many districts bus kids to high school first, then rerun the routes for the elementary schools. Flipping the order would bring high schoolers to class later and benefit their little sisters and brothers; other studies show that young children are more awake and more ready to learn earlier in the morning.
     

Exercise

• When confronted with an overly active child, many exasperated teachers and parents respond the same way: “Sit still!” It might be more effective, though, to encourage the child to run. Recent research suggests that even small amounts of exercise enable children to improve their focus and academic performance.
  
  By now it’s well known that diagnoses of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder are increasingly widespread among American children: The label has been applied to about 11 percent of those between the ages of 4 and 17, according to the latest federal statistics. Interestingly, past studies have shown a strong correlation between greater aerobic fitness and attentiveness. But these studies did not answer the question of which comes first, the fitness or the attentional control.
  
  Addressing that mystery was a goal of a study published last year in The Journal of Pediatrics. Researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign recruited 40 8-to-10-year-old boys and girls, half of whom had A.D.H.D. They all took a series of computerized academic and attentional tests. Later, on one occasion they sat and read quietly for 20 minutes; on another, they walked briskly or jogged for 20 minutes on treadmills. After each task, the children wore caps containing electrodes that recorded electrical activity in the brain as they repeated the original tests.
  
  The results should make administrators question the wisdom of cutting P.E. classes. While there were few measurable differences in any of the children’s scores after quiet reading, they all showed marked improvements in their math and reading comprehension scores after the exercise. More striking, the children with A.D.H.D. significantly increased their scores on a complicated test, one in which they had to focus on a single cartoon fish on-screen while other cartoon fish flashed on-screen to distract them. Brain-wave readings showed that after exercise, the children with A.D.H.D. were better able to regulate their behavior, which helped them pay attention. They responded more nimbly to mistakes like incorrect keystrokes. In short, the children with A.D.H.D. were better students academically after exercise. So were the students without A.D.H.D.
  
  “In terms of a nonpharmacological means of dealing with attentional-control problems in children, exercise looks as if it could be quite beneficial,” says Charles Hillman, the professor of kinesiology at the University of Illinois who oversaw the study. “Especially since it seems to also improve the academic performance of children who don’t have attentional-control problems.”
  
  What’s more, adds Matthew Pontifex, now an assistant professor at Michigan State University and the study’s lead author, “You don’t need treadmills.” Just get restless children to march or hop or in some fashion be physically active for a few minutes. Coax their peers to join in.
     

Terence Tao

• Q: There are a lot of topics in olympiad math that a regular school curriculum will never cover. A high school curriculum is lucky to end with calculus. As a professor do you think topics like number theory, combinatorics, and complex algebra/geometry should be taught in higher-level high school classes or just reserved for the students independently for these olympiads?
  
  A: The standard high school curriculum traditionally has been focused towards physics and engineering. So calculus, differential equations, and linear algebra have always been the most emphasized, and for good reason—these are very important. There is now a trend over the rise of computer science and also the life sciences, which have become more mathematical. Schools are slowly transitioning to emphasize things like combinatorics, probability, and statistics. These things are getting more important. Number theory less so because it has fewer applications͢—cryptography is the only really big practical application of the subject. So mainstream math education is focused on different topics. Most students who take math classes aren’t going to be mathematicians. They’re going to be engineers, statisticians—in many ways that’s the more important mission of math education. So it’s sort of complementary.
  
  Math education has changed over the years. In the 19th century, they taught spherical trigonometry because one of the biggest applications of mathematics was navigating the ocean. This is no longer so relevant. So it’s great that we have these competitions and that we keep some classical mathematics like Euclidean geometry and elementary number theory. In mathematical research, it’s good to know these things. You will learn them eventually, especially if you take a class in it. At some point you can just learn it yourself and go and read a book on it. It’s really easy now with the Internet, it’s amazing now. People ask me how I know so many areas of mathematics. Mostly you just know a little bit and then you look up the rest. It’s so much easier now than when I was a graduate student. I mean you need a certain amount of base mathematics so that you can learn everything else quickly. But once you have the foundation, it’s fairly quick. So it’s great that we have the competitions. I think they complement the main math education, but I don’t think they need to replace it.
  
  Q: What would you tell an aspiring or current mathematics major about the kind of jobs available besides teaching?
  
  A: Most people with Bachelor’s of Math don’t go into academics so much. You would get a PhD for that. There’s many things you can do with a math degree: actuarial science, finance, computer graphics, and anything quantitative really. You can work in a lab. If you aren’t afraid of equations or abstract thinking, it’s easy to pick up any kind of STEM subject. You can go into electrical engineering and there’s always scary equations like Maxwell’s Equations and so forth. But if you have the basic math training you can pick this up. You can move very easily into Stats—I mean Stats is huge. You can do insurance and all kinds of medical things. It’s a very flexible major. Most people with math degrees are not called mathematicians, they might be analysts. If you want to be an engineer, obviously your best route is to take engineering classes. If you don’t have mathematical background, the classes you take will help you train to analyze existing systems and build things that haven’t been built before. If you want to design something really new, at some point you’ll have to model what you’re doing, which might be different from previous models, and you have to do some mathematics somewhere. Q: Do you find more fulfillment in teaching or researching?
  
  A: They are complementary. You only really learn something when you can teach it to someone else. If you have to do something like abstract geometry, you have to be able to do basic geometry really quickly. After you’ve taught calculus a few times you can look at differential equations and say “oh, it should look like this”, which would have taken like half an hour as a student but now takes a few minutes. You need that speed in order to tackle the harder problems, so it is complementary.
  
  Q: What do you enjoy most about math?
  
  A: When you finally figure out something that’s bothered you. If there’s something that looks like you should be able to answer and you can’t answer it immediately, it just sort of bugs you. And when you figure out the trick that resolves it, then a light bulb goes off. So that’s very satisfying, when you finally get what’s going on, as well as when you explain it to someone else and you see the light bulb go on in their head.
  
  Q: What is your favorite number or mathematical constant?
  
  A: The funny thing about mathematics is that you don’t work with regular numbers so much. I never see a 37, I see ‘n’ –a lot of what I do involves a big number n that goes to infinity. Never any specific number.
  
  Q: Do you have any other interests besides math?
  
  A: I used to have more. When you work and you have family, it’s tough. When I was younger I used to watch a lot anime and play computer games and so forth, but I have no time for these things anymore.
  
  Q: Are you interested in seeing your two kids become mathematicians? Are you going to push them at all in that direction? A: Whatever they have the passion for. My son is 11 and he has some talent for math, but he doesn’t really have a passion for it. What he really likes is acting, theatre and video editing actually—which is maybe what he’ll become, I don’t know.
  
  Q: What about prime numbers interests you so much?
  
  A: Number theory is one of the things you can actually appreciate. I saw these through high school and competitions, so I knew about all these numbers and conjecture theories very early, at 8 or 9. I’ve always wanted to make progress in this area. It’s not the most applied area of mathematics. If you prove the twin-prime conjecture today, it won’t have that much effect in technology tomorrow. Well, it depends what is proved and how. In many ways, it’s the methods of proof that are more important. [Conjectures] are just sort of benchmarks to keep score.
  
  Q: Is there a result that you consider the most beautiful?
  
  A: I don’t think much in those terms. The funny thing is anything you prove yourself, you think “oh, that was a lot easier than I thought.” You know, once you actually see it, you realize it wasn’t that hard after all.
  
  Q: How did you learn to teach and what is your teaching philosophy?
  
  A: Sink or swim basically. When I was a graduate student, I didn’t teach, I was a grader. I assisted one or two classes. When I first came to UCLA that was my first class. I had a mentor teaching another session for the class—they do that for the first class. He showed me what kinds of homework, midterms, and syllabi he used. When you start out, you’re given a syllabus and a textbook and basically told to use the textbook—it’s not actually that difficult.
  
  There were a couple things I had to learn. I remember the first exam I gave out I put a lot of effort into designing very cute questions where the answer to the first question would be useful in the second question, and so forth. I didn’t realize this would be a nightmare to grade. When each question has a single answer, you’re either right or wrong. You don’t want questions where someone makes a mistake in the first step but everything else is correct, so you have to check. So it took me a while to figure out what are good questions and that sort of thing. You should make clear at the beginning what your policies are for homework. If you’re vague you always get kids that say, “I didn’t realize this midterm was worth this much. Can you reconsider it?”
  
  Q: What can teachers do to make kids like math—not just computational math but the ideas of math like problem solving and exploration?
  
  A: It depends on the teacher’s style. Some teachers are really entertaining. You know, they tell jokes. Not everyone can do that. Some can make really elaborate presentations and experiments. Some are good at finding really relevant videos and things on the Internet. Sometimes making a class more enjoyable or entertaining is not the same as making it more educational. I remember once when I taught calculus, one of the sections was quadric surfaces, like ellipsoids, paraboloids and so forth. So there’s this thing called a hyperbolic paraboloid, and I wanted to demonstrate this. It turns out that a Pringle has the shape of a hyperbolic paraboloid. So I brought in a pack of Pringles to class and said, “this is a hyperbolic paraboloid, this is what it looks like. I ate the Pringle as I was writing equations on the board. Well many years later, I ran into someone on the street who said, “Oh, I know you. I took one of your classes. I forget what it was, but there was a Pringle.” So I thought, “you didn’t remember any of the math, but you remember the Pringle.” So it didn’t really work.
  
  Q: What do you hope to accomplish through your research? Do you have any specific goals?
  
  A: No really short-term objectives. There's always questions which I’d love to solve (Riemann Hypothesis, Navier Stokes, whatever). But usually these things are so out of reach. We understand the tools that we have pretty well. We know that without an extra or original idea you can’t really answer them. We don’t focus directly on these long-shot goals. A lot of the focus is incremental. A lot of mathematicians liken mathematical research to climbing a cliff. You’re at a certain point on the cliff, and your first goal is to get one foot higher, and you just keep doing that. Every time you solve a problem, naturally other problems appear. What was extremely difficult now just looks moderately difficult. You use all of your notes and get a sense of what is a promising direction—basically anytime there’s a phenomenon which looks interesting and you can’t explain it, but looks like you should be able to analyze it. That’s what you want to study.
  
  Q: What do you feel are the 2 or 3 most important open problems are in mathematics?
  
  A: Depends whether you weight them by how easy they are to solve. I mean if you solved P=NP, it could have huge applications, but it’s so difficult to narrow down. It’s hard to measure the importance.
  
  Q: Which of the millennium problems do you think we are furthest from solving? In 2007 you mentioned in a talk at UCLA that you expect a solution to P vs. NP to come last, with the Riemann hypothesis just before it. Do you hold that same view today?
  
  A: I would say so. These I think are decades before we can solve them for sure.
  
  Q: What about Navier-Stokes?
  
  A: So there I think we have a chance. That one I think we are closest to proving or disproving. One direction [within the problem] might be solvable. A lot of conjectures are like this. Take the Goldbach conjecture: every even number is the sum of two primes. If it’s false, it could be disproven because if it turns out that some humongous number is not the sum of two primes after you check all the possibilities, then you’ve disproven the Goldbach conjecture. But no one believes that. In principle it could be easy to disprove. But probably not. So maybe there’s chance with Navier-Stokes, but it’s a longshot.
  
  Q: You have three IMO appearances, and you won one of each medal, so you have Olympiad experience. Do you notice anything different between how math contests are now compared to how they were in the late 80s when you participated in them?
  
  A: I’m not involved in them anymore, but they look much more professional. It was really an amateur thing. I mean people would train for maybe 2 weeks. Now there are some countries who have been training for years and are very systematic where you study 50 years’ worth of problems. It’s become much more like a professional sport. It’s like youth baseball; it starts off amateur and eventually some of the professionals take over, which makes it different. In some ways it’s less fun, in some ways it’s better. One nice thing though is that many other competitions have sprung up. When I was a kid it was basically just the Olympiads and things that fit into the Olympiads. Now there’s these other activities too if you don’t want to be so competitive. There’s other things like Math Circles and other online websites where you can discuss problems in friendly ways. So it’s more diverse.
  
  Q: At IMO, why do you think that China, Russia, Japan, and the Koreas always seem to win the unofficial team competition and win the most medals as a team, often with perfect scores? Do you think this says anything about English-speaking cultures like Australia, the US, and the UK and their emphasis on math education?
  
  A: I think it's a cultural emphasis. Asian countries often place a larger premium on international recognition on any sphere. In America, this is less important as America is a global leader in so many areas, it doesn’t matter as much to them. In many of these countries, they’re actually trying to make them less competitive. There are many students who have over-trained. They go and get three gold medals, but they sacrifice their regular education, spending years doing nothing but working on these problems. They finish the Olympiad and they’re burnt out. They’re not properly trained, even to do a math degree or they’ll be sick of maths by then if that’s what they’ve been doing. There’s a balance. You can get a little obsessed with the medal tallies. After a while it’s sort of pointless to optimize. It’s sort of like the SATs. Getting a 600 or something is pretty good. When you obsess about getting that perfect score, you start skipping on your social activities and do nothing but squeeze those last few points, when it doesn’t really matter in the long run. There’s a great observation called Goodhart’s Law that basically says any metric becomes useless once you start using it for control purposes. So the SAT, for example, is a good general test of academic aptitude. But since it’s used so much for admission to college, kids are trained and coached. They spend lots of time and effort, specifically to improve their SAT score at the expense of a well-rounded education, to the point where [the SAT] may not be such a good guide to general academic excellence, even though it used to be before students started optimizing.
  
  Q: Do you feel like just anyone with enough hard work and dedication can reach the level of mathematics that you have, or do you think it requires a certain mental disposition that you're born with in order to do the type of maths done at the IMO or in graduate studies?
  
  A: It depends on what your goal is. If your goal is to be good, as opposed to obsessed with getting a perfect score or being at the absolute top, or just doing decently. If you have the enthusiasm, you also have to spend a lot of time. I think one of the things you have to do is you have to play with the subject. When I was a kid, I just loved doing math on my own, I would try to solve equations—it was a hobby. I would try to find the sum of the first n-cubes by myself. It’s not a very serious level of mathematics, but it’s only by tinkering with a subject that you really get good at it. Same as anything, like building things. You need a certain baseline intelligence and be able to think and write, but I think it is mostly actually your enthusiasm and your time put in given the opportunity.
  
  Q: What has been your opinion on the Polymath projects that you've been involved in, and do you think similar kinds of semi-massively collaborative mathematics has a future?
  
  A: I think we’ll see more of them. For a long time they’re going to be a niche. There are certain types of problems that they are very well suited for: problems which are very modular, that can be split up into different pieces that a set of people can work on. You need a good leader who can organize everything. There needs to be some clear measure of progress by members of your group. It has to be accessible enough and interesting enough to get people involved. There’s a critical mass, though. There are some projects where only about 3 people get involved and it gets converted into normal, traditional collaboration. There are projects where you expect the answer to come from a lot of little ideas rather than a few really big ideas. But I don’t think we’ll ever solve the Riemann hypothesis by this sort of crowdsourcing thing, like “let’s get 1000 people together, throw ideas around and see what sticks.” That’s not how these problems are going to be solved.
  
  Q: What is your opinion on strong AI?
  
  A: The funny thing about AI is that it’s a moving target. In the seventies, someone might ask “what are the goals of AI?” And you might say, “Oh, we want a computer who can beat a chess master, or who can understand actual language speech, or who can search a whole database very quickly.” We do all that now, like face recognition. All these things that we thought were AI, we can do them. But once you do them, you don’t think of them as AI. It has this connotation of some mysterious magical component to it, but when you actually solve one of these problems, you don’t solve it using magic, you solve it using clever mathematics. It’s no longer magical. It becomes science, and then you don’t think of it as AI anymore. It’s amazing how you can speak into your phone and ask for the nearest Thai restaurant, and it will find it. This would have been called AI, but we don’t think about it like that anymore. So I think, almost by definition, we will never have AI because we’ll never achieve the goals of AI or cease to be caught up with it.

Chinese Test Cheats

• A series of October national qualification tests for would-be pharmacists in China were so spectacularly riddled with cheating that over 3,000 candidates were caught and disqualified in just two cities.
  
  As the different wheezes were exposed, and the devious examinees outed in their thousands in Xi’an and Kunming, invigilators were left stunned at the effort and ingenuity being applied to deception.
  
  The shakedown of the cheats revealed candidates armed with a James Bond-style arsenal of concealed gadgetry and elaborate communicators that kept them in touch with answer-givers hidden in the streets outside the exam room.
  
  The cheating methods deployed by those yearning to be pharmacists draw on those used by over 10 million high-school students who sit the notoriously competitive annual “Gaokao” university entrance exams. Every year generates a new photo-gallery of seized cheating equipment, including radio receivers hidden in water-bottles, pen lids and even coins. This year’s favoured ploy, for which cheaters paid a fixed market rate, involved the use of small squadrons of fake candidates who would enter the test centre, quickly memorise the questions and then leave. The answers to those questions were then broadcast from outside the buildings into the earpieces of examinees.
  
  The licensing authorities who conduct the national qualification tests for pharmacists are used to a certain level of dishonesty, but nothing prepared them for the magnitude and sophistication of this year’s campaign. In the city of Xi’an, some 2,440 candidates were caught cheating across the city’s seven test centres, with scams evidently organised on an industrial scale. In one hall, hundreds were nabbed wearing identical miniature earpieces tuned to the same frequency. In Kunming, where 1,027 cheats were caught between October 18 and 19, some 956 electronic receivers and 35 transmitters were found.
  
  One device that made its debut appearance this year in Hebei province included a tiny digital screen controlled by two buttons - one to turn the page and the other for demanding answers from teams lurking in cars near the testing venues. The incentives for cheating, say the authorities, are both strong and increasing. Passing the hotly-competitive test is an effective guarantee of a rock-solid job in an uncertain labour market and an economy where growth rates have fallen to a five-year low.
  
  The massive expansion of China’s cities, and the rising demands of those that live in them has created a systemic shortage of the qualified pharmacists required by law to work anywhere where drugs are sold. State media provided the example of Shaanxi province, where there are 8,500 pharmacies across the province, but only 4,000 pharmacists licensed to staff them.
  
  Unfortunately for those hoping to exploit that shortfall, China remains strict about awarding licenses. The test demands that candidates score passes in seven punishing, 150-minute exams, and all must be taken within two years.

Pushy Parenting

• A headmaster friend once gave me a piece of what I thought was astute advice. Try not to send your child to a pushy school where they will be in the bottom half of the class, he said. Obviously someone has to be bottom but there should be a health warning on it. I have sometimes repeated this wisdom at my own school gate. The response has been mixed. “You wouldn’t really turn down a place at a top school, would you?” said one mother, seemingly oblivious to the point I was awkwardly trying to make. Others have nodded, but with a bit of a shrug. Perhaps because — I have since discovered — research shows that the majority of us believe our own children are “above average”.
  
  That logical impossibility is, of course, one of the fond delusions of parenthood. We think our little darlings are terribly bright. We also tend to think they will be somehow immune to the growing wave of anxiety and misery that is expressing itself in eating disorders, depression and self-harm. But, sadly, they won’t. The road from childhood to adulthood, always rocky, has been made torturous by Instagram, porn, skunk, AS-levels and the dread of a globalised, jobless future. Mental health problems are on the rise across all social classes.
  
  What has surprised me, talking to child psychiatrists and psychologists, is how worried they are about privileged children. One US study found that children from rich families were twice as likely to suffer depression and anxiety. Some professionals who work with disadvantaged teens, who often cannot get treatment from overstretched services, are frustrated that so many educated parents are apparently so ignorant about the emotional ballast their children need.
  
  One psychiatrist, whose practice is overwhelmed by troubled children from top schools, believes that the “new achievement focus”, amassing A*s and looking good, is more toxic for children than divorce. Too much of that pressure, he says, is coming from parents who wrongly imagine that by giving our offspring a comfortable home, love and nice holidays, we have protected them from the scourge of our own secret fears that they will lose out in the global race.
  
  Clearly, mental health issues are complex with many contributing factors. A sudden descent into suicide is not going to be explained by pressure to get good GCSEs. Acute depression can be endogenous — unrelated to actual life events — and low expectations and poor schooling can also blight lives. But we should not ignore the damage being done by the educational arms race.
  
  Another psychiatrist I met last week has clients who have asked her not to pass on details of a child’s condition to the child’s (private) school. The parents fear disclosure might spoil the child’s chances of an Oxbridge place. But if the therapist can’t tell the teachers, the child’s chances of making a good recovery will surely diminish. Whose needs are these parents putting first?
  
  Equally, many schools fear they will be labelled if they own up to the scale of eating disorders or self-harm. The heads of a few private schools, notably Wellington College and KCS Wimbledon, have spoken out powerfully about these issues. They, and a number of academy schools, have developed innovative programmes to teach resilience and discuss mental health.
  
  These pioneers are too few. Elsewhere, a conspiracy of silence is feeding these problems by keeping them hidden. The best work in the field shows that youngsters need to talk openly about their problems, to acknowledge that being vulnerable is human, to spot the danger signs — loss of appetite or sleep, constant low mood, isolation — in themselves and their friends.
  
  Mental health is one of the last taboos. That is why mental health services have been so disgracefully underfunded and overlooked. The NHS is flush with targets for cancer, heart disease and other conditions that elicit sympathy and treatment yet there was no waiting time target for any mental health condition until a year ago. The only way to end the stigma — and make sure every child gets the help they need — is to bring these issues fully into the light. As a parent, I have to admit this is hard. Experts worry about the “perfect child”, the one who is under huge pressure to conform, who wins trophy after trophy but who can unravel in the freedom of university, unsure of who they really are. They also worry about the “imperfect child”, who thinks they are not beautiful enough or clever enough and can end up self-harming or with bulimia, especially if they fall in with a copycat group of peers. Almost every child I know might end up in one of these categories, it seems to me.
  
  One teacher who works on mental health tells me both types of children can be undermined by parents who pay for tutors, ask for papers to be re-marked or get their children a special needs “label” to win extra exam time. I personally found that harsh, having a dyslexic child myself, but once I calmed down I could see what this teacher meant. Which is that our attempts to shore our children up academically may leave them wondering if our love is really unconditional.
  
  “We feel entitled to continually bombard our children with suggestions about what they should be doing better,” writes Tanith Carey in Taming the Tiger Parent. I definitely recognise myself in that sentence. I know that my missiles of criticism are aimed with far more precision than my bursts of applause. The psychologist Madeline Levine describes parents who are “everywhere and nowhere”: helicoptering over homework but too exhausted by their own careers to limit screen time or tune into what their children really feel.
  
  We parents can’t take all the blame but we could do something about the educational arms race where there is no time to step off the track, to seek help or to recover, without the risk of being left behind. If a girl misses a term because of an eating disorder, she may not get the grades she seeks. If she does not get those grades, her school will slip down league tables that reflect only academic performance, not happiness.
  
  This surely has to change. As adults we can get through difficult episodes without fatally harming our careers, if we have a sympathetic employer. How much more true should this be for children? Any youngster who hits a wall should be able to seek help, stay down a year or move without it staining their CV. The pressure, otherwise, is unbearable.
  
  I have heard some schools say the timetable is too full to teach mindfulness or resilience and that parents prefer more academic subjects. Yet these techniques have been shown to improve exam results so aspirational parents should be their greatest champion. If middle-class parents would make the same fuss about mental health as is made about maths, this could bring benefits for the whole system — a system that, as The Sunday Times documents today, is failing youngsters from every background at every level.
  
  We still know far too little about mental health, but we can start by breaking the silence.

English Public Schoolboys

• ‘Outsourcing almost the entire raising of your child never fails to blow my mind’
  
  One of the most pointless sentences on this planet is: “I’m just a normal person, really.”
  
  Because everyone thinks they’re normal. Everyone. Weird people rarely know they’re weird – because they invariably hang out with other weird people.
  
  By and large, there’s just one group of people who don’t say, “I’m normal”: very fierce drag queens. They own their freaky. They’re proud of it. They have total perspective about their glorious cultural niche-ness.
  
  Given this, and the increasing likelihood of the Tories winning the election, I think it is becoming a matter of urgent necessity for one particular group of people to stop pretending they’re normal, and start owning their freakiness, too, in the manner of RuPaul: public schoolboys. Public schoolboys are far odder than a 6ft welder in a diamanté catsuit.
  
  For a working-class peasant like me, everything about posh boys’ lives makes me boggle. Let’s go in with the biggie: boarding schools. Boarding schools are beyond weird. They are from Mars. You’re sending your children away to be looked after by an organisation. A company to which you pay hundreds of thousands of pounds, but which is staffed with people you’ll have barely spent 20 minutes with – and, indeed, most of them you will never have met. That sounds like some serious L Ron Hubbard s***, right there.
  
  The idea of outsourcing almost the entire raising of your child never fails to blow my mind. Only the posh could get away with it. Imagine, for one minute, a flip-reversed scenario – where the working classes were sending their kids away, across the country, to be raised in a load of caravans by a bunch of people they barely knew – social services would be all over it like a pigeon on a chip. They would have closed it down by the end of the month, accompanied by shots on the news of tearful children being escorted away.
  
  All those febrile, pivotal, delicate years where your child’s mind and soul are being shaped by … staff. It seems far more dysfunctional than what happens on your average, mildly demonised council estate.
  
  As a kid off a mildly demonised council estate, I feel sorry for those rich kids. Boarding schools are just posh care homes, really. Care homes with cricket and croissants.
  
  And the awful societal disadvantages of boarding schools become clear when you run through all the issues the posh, white, public-school political parties are traditionally “blind” on: women, community, childcare, housing, immigration, multiculturalism.
  
  They’re all things that disappear from your life when you leave a world of sisters, parents, babies, homes and new neighbours, and enter into a silver Hogwarts bubble made up only of boys, all like you.
  
  Boys, all like you, in an atmosphere where you’re not loved for who you are, in the quiet content of your family, but who try to gain that same content by winning things – prizes, exam results, sports matches.
  
  And now, suddenly, so many policies start to look less like exercises in administration and reason, and more like emotionally damaged people echoing their emotional damages.
  
  I don’t claim to be a psychologist – not since I ran that “Free Psychiatry Here!” booth at the local fair, and got shut down by the police – but I can’t help but see a causal link between young boys who were sent away from everyone they loved and needed, because they had to go to a school “that will be the making of you”, and those boys – now fully grown, in government – coming up with policies that cheerfully presume people must just bite the bullet and relocate across the country to find employment, or housing, leaving behind everyone they love and need.
  
  Of course they don’t understand communities – they have no home town. They were raised by an institution. This is why it was so amusing when David Cameron (Eton) thought he’d invented “the Big Society”, when he actually pitched the idea of people helping each other out, and being involved in each other’s lives.
  
  Everyone who didn’t go to boarding school was like, “That’s what we’re already doing, dude. We’ve been doing that for centuries. Hang around here next half-term instead of going skiing – you’ll be amazed.”
  
  And a cap on immigration is perfectly understandable when your life was predicated on attending a school for which your name was put down at birth. There’s a limited guest list, you see … You can’t just expand Eton.
  
  Do you remember, a few months ago, there was a hoo-ha about the idea of a “gay school” where most of the pupils would be LGBT? “That would be weird,” opponents said. “Don’t you think it would be weird for pupils to go to a school where nearly everyone was gay, or transgender, or running around in drag?”
  
  No weirder than being the average public schoolboy. Not in the slightest.

Kids and Teachable Agents

• What do a precocious computer elf, a math-loving avatar, and a robot with terrible handwriting have in common? They’re all digitals spins on the educational theory of learning-by-teaching.
  
  Decades of studies have shown that students learn a subject better when asked to help another learner. Traditionally, this meant taking the time to pair off students into peer-tutoring arrangements. Now, education researchers at about a dozen universities around the world are trying to supercharge the idea with technology. They’re creating virtual learners that need a human student to teach them everything from history to earth science.
  
  Unlike real students, these “teachable agents” don’t get embarrassed or frustrated when they don’t know something. They respond reliably to good teaching without making random or silly mistakes, and their impact on learning can be precisely tracked and measured. Within a decade, teachable agents could be a classroom mainstay, researchers estimate. For now, most remain creatures of the lab, encountering real classrooms only in pilot studies.
  
  While learning-by-teaching can be automated, the benefits are not automatic. Making a really effective digital learner isn’t simple.
  
  “There’s not really just one reason why learning-by-teaching works so well,” said Daniel Schwartz, an education professor at Stanford who leads a lab developing teachable agents. “It’s a happy confluence of forces that help students learn. There’s a lot going on.”
  
  For instance, having students teach pushes them to think about a topic’s underlying concepts and connections in order to gauge what another student knows and to build on that understanding. To boost this meta-cognitive effect, Schwartz and a team at Vanderbilt, led by electrical engineering and computer science professor Gautam Biswas, made a teachable agent for science lessons that would display every step of its thought process on screen as it learned. They called it Betty’s Brain.
  
  To teach Betty about ecosystems, for example, a student builds a map of ecosystem knowledge in her “brain” by linking words—such as various plants, animals, and nutrients - with lines indicating specific kinds of relationships (this eats that, or this causes that, etc.). Gradually, Betty’s brain becomes filled with an on-screen diagram of systems such as food webs, water flows, and nutrient cycles. And when Betty is quizzed by another avatar named Mr. Davis, the words and the links between them are highlighted in a sequence as she considers her answers.
  
  “With Betty, you get to see how she figures things out, based on what you’ve taught her,” said Schwartz. “It teaches students how to reason through chains of ideas.”
  
  When Betty messes up, you can see precisely which connections led her down the wrong path. To help debug a faulty brain, the student can click into Mr. Davis’ online library of scientific information—the sort of background support, or what educators call scaffolding, that teachable agents need to be effective. In pilot studies, students in science classes that used Betty’s Brain during a semester not only learned the curriculum better than students who didn’t; they were also better able to use scientific reasoning in a separate assessment.
  
  Another way to spur meta-cognition and deeper learning might be to make an agent that occasionally disagrees with its teacher, even when it’s wrong. That’s the idea behind Time Elf, an ambitious sprite who is trying to supplant the retiring “Guardians of History” in a game made by the Educational Technology Group at Sweden’s Lund University. From time to time, Time Elf will challenge the student’s grasp of history, like this: “I think you have the date wrong. Are you sure?”
  
  Time Elf is still in the early stages of development. In an initial study published last year, students teaching the elf were too willing to change their answers if he objected, even when their original answer was correct. In the next iteration, the researcher will make sure the students understand that the elf doesn’t know anything until they teach it to him, and they’ll alter the elf’s language so he doesn’t seem so sure of himself.
  
  The study did confirm that students found the challenging elf more fun and engaging to teach than a completely acquiescent elf, according to Agneta Gulz, a Lund University professor of cognitive science.
  
  “That’s an input we had from students. They wanted the agent to have more personality,” she said. “We are trying to build more realism into that interaction.”
  
  The level of engagement is important, because another reason students learn by teaching is the so-called protégé effect. Namely, acting as a teacher makes students feel responsible for their tutee’s learning, leading them to be more persistent in covering the material than they would be alone.
  
  With digital protégés, “if students care more about the agent, then they’ll be more engaged, and so they’ll learn more,” said Noboru Matsuda, a scientist who studies human-computer interaction at Carnegie Mellon University. Matsuda helped create a teachable agent called SimStudent that learns algebra. Students name their SimStudents and customize their look, hair, and wardrobe before preparing them for increasingly difficult algebra quizzes.
  
  Pilot studies with middle school math students show that caring about SimStudents’ success improves student learning, but only up to a point. Recently, Matsuda and his team tried to up the ante on engagement by encouraging kids to challenge each other’s SimStudents in “game shows” where winners and losers would move up or down in the SimStudent rankings. It didn’t work.
  
  “Kids love to win,” said Matsuda. But rather than trying to win by tutoring their SimStudent more attentively, the students simply challenged weaker opponents to gain points. “They found a strategy that focused on the game show and not on the teaching,” said Matsuda.
  
  The flipside of success, of course, is failure. And the third way teachable agents can help students is by making academic struggles a little less personal, which makes students more willing to keep trying when the learning gets tough. One case in point is a little humanoid robot called the CoWriter, jointly developed by Portugal’s Instituto Superior Técnico and the Computer-Human Interaction in Learning and Instruction lab in Switzerland’s École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne.
  
  Studies show that young kids who initially struggle with handwriting get easily discouraged, leading them to avoid much-needed practice. So the CoWriter’s creators made a robot with horrible handwriting (its letters are badly deformed in specific ways according to a shape-shifting algorithm) that asks a young student for help. The student writes practice letters and shows them to the CoWriter, who gamely tries to copy them. Gradually, via machine learning, the robot is able to improve its letters based on the student examples.
  
  “One hope of this project is that by making the child into the teacher, students who felt they weren’t capable of writing can recover their self-confidence,” said Séverin Lemaignan, a postdoctoral researcher with CHILI. “Triggering a change in mindset may be enough to turn them into much better writers.”

Classroom Discipline

• For millions of schoolchildren and their parents the most important appointment made by the new government may prove to be that of the teacher and former nightclub manager who now also serves as classroom behaviour “czar”.
  
  Tom Bennett’s role is to suggest ways to cut down on the low-level disruption that costs some pupils as much as 38 days’ learning a year. In a worst-case scenario that can equate to an entire academic year between the start of secondary school and GCSEs, lost to giggling, flicked bits of paper and Snapchat in the back row. Mr Bennett has called such misbehaviour the “elephant in the classroom” but it is worse than that. It is a betrayal of every child who wants to thrive at school but finds his or her teachers distracted by a recalcitrant minority.
  
  Mr Bennett is focused on the classroom. His employer, the education secretary Nicky Morgan, faces the additional but intimately related problem of a shortage of strong head teachers committed to enforcing clear rules on behaviour throughout school life. Such leaders cannot be conjured from thin air. They need to have learnt through their own experience the central importance of the right sort of classroom discipline. To some teachers this lesson may be counterintuitive. As Anthony Seldon, the outgoing master of Wellington College and one of the country’s most successful heads, has noted, it is an “inescapable irony” that “liberal and liberating learning only occurs when there is structure and order”. Without head teachers who understand this, the efforts of their junior staff to preserve order at the chalkface are often wasted.
  
  In his last annual report Sir Michael Wilshaw, the chief inspector of schools, said that the quality of leadership at 3,500 schools was simply not good enough. As we report today, there is still a severe shortage of head teachers who properly fulfil their role as authority figures for children whose lives otherwise lack clear guidance on what constitutes acceptable behaviour. That has to change.
  
  Earlier this month pupils at a Bradford school looked on in horror as one of their number, a 14year-old, stabbed a supply teacher in the stomach. The attack was a tragedy on two levels. It brought lethal violence into a classroom while relegating mere nuisance behaviour to the inside pages. Yet it is nuisance behaviour that is systemic and demands action on a national level.
  
  Last week Mr Bennett published a list of ten tips for maintaining classroom discipline. The first was perhaps the most alarming. It reminded teachers to set out clearly, on first meeting their pupils, what basic standards of behaviour were expected of them — because “many will assume that there are no rules until you tell them there are”. In a similar vein the rest of the list takes little for granted, urging teachers to split up troublemakers, remember pupils’ names and remember to “be the teacher, not their chum”.
  
  Mr Bennett is not the only educationalist to fear that the erosion of classroom discipline stems from a crisis of confidence among teachers two generations in the making. In this view the orthodoxies that teachers should demand respect and wield authority were among many thrown out in the 1960s and 1970s. If so, they need to be recovered and endorsed by parents and governors as well as senior staff. There is a limit to what schools can accomplish with teenagers brought up to believe that rules, discipline and punishment are intrinsically wrong.
  
  In the end, though, the lynchpin of every school’s effort to foster a calm and orderly learning environment is its head. To yield results, Mr Bennett’s advice depends critically on frontline staff being supported by visible and vigorous head teachers, unyielding in their insistence on good behaviour. Britain’s children deserve nothing less.

Chinese vs English Teaching

• In China, children are three years ahead of their British peers in maths by their mid-teens. The OECD Pisa rankings in 2012 placed Shanghai 15-year-olds first in maths, reading and science; Britain’s respective rankings were 26, 23 and 20. Why?
  
  Bohunt school in Liphook, Hampshire, has earned Ofsted superlatives. Bravely, it agreed to take part in an experiment filmed for a three-part series on BBC2. A team of Chinese teachers would spend a month teaching 50 year nine pupils. Their results would be compared with those from other 13 and 14 year olds taught by regular staff.
  
  The first programme in the series Are Our Kids Tough Enough? Chinese School, broadcast last week, starkly revealed a collision of cultures over discipline and teaching methods.
  
  Chinese education is based on discipline, the authority of the teacher and ruthless competition. All these factors have been significantly undermined or are totally absent in many British schools.
  
  The Chinese teach big classes in which pupils are expected to note down what the teachers are saying, learn it and move on. This is light years away from the British “childcentred approach” in which the pupil dictates the pace. Bohunt’s “Chinese class” struggled to keep up when their teachers set the pace. But half of them weren’t even listening. There was constant low-level disorder with pupils talking, throwing paper planes and some open insubordination.
  
  The head teacher, Neil Strowger, blamed the Chinese teaching style for causing normally well-behaved children to “disengage”. This, though, prompts the question as to why these British children not only switched off but reacted to the Chinese teachers with such swaggering rudeness and disrespect (even taking into account a degree of acting up for the cameras).
  
  An education system reflects the society it serves. China is an authoritarian, conformist, submissive society. Its education system will therefore obviously jar with us. But rather than dismiss it, we should acknowledge that the British system has been through its own kind of cultural revolution — which has knocked the stuffing out of it.
  
  For the past half century, the education orthodoxy has held that what is innate in every child is more valuable than anything the teacher can provide.
  
  Transmitting knowledge — the very essence of teaching — was thus damned as fettering a child’s creativity. Out went not just whole-class teaching from the front but any pedagogical rules. Rote learning was considered a form of child abuse. Structured reading schemes based on phonics (the only safe way to teach a child to read) were vilified by numerous educationists as “barking at print”.
  
  Teachers refashioned their role as backseat “facilitators”. Instead of guiding pupils into fresh understanding, education now centred around what was “relevant” to children, thus trapping them inside their own limitations. With “self-esteem” now detached from achievement, out went competition so as to avoid hurting children’s feelings. Two decades ago, I derided this as the “all must have prizes” approach under which no child was allowed to fail.
  
  Maybe Mr Strowger, who says he is driven by the need to avoid the culture of anti-learning from which he himself suffered at school, has tried to resist much of this. But his criticism of Chinese “didactic teaching methods” struck a false note. His unconscious tautology reflected the way “didactic” became a dirty word in education circles, associated with Dickens’s Mr Gradgrind and mindless, repetitive learning without understanding. But the best traditional British teaching used didacticism to foster curiosity, questioning and independent thought. Perhaps Mr Strowger might have been given pause by pupils on the TV programme who said after a science lesson from a Chinese teacher that they now understood some concepts for the first time.
  
  The UK’s education revolution, however, was part of a much broader moral shift. All outside authority became viewed as an attack on individual autonomy and freedom. Telling children what to do was seen as a kind of generational colonialism.This paralysed parents and teachers, for whom discipline accordingly mutated into a process of negotiation and appeasement of kids who were now calling the shots. The result is the education-inhibiting disorderliness that is now a standard feature of so many classrooms.
  
  Yang Jun, a science teacher in the Bohunt experiment, said: “In China we don’t need classroom management skills because everyone is disciplined by nature, by families, by society. Whereas here that is the most challenging part of teaching.”
  
  You don’t have to accept the Chinese system to acknowledge that these teachers certainly have a point.

The Khan Lab School

• For decades now, technologists have been attempting to reinvent the school system. But at least so far, most of these efforts have run afoul of the rigid bureaucracies, parental anxieties, and political minefields that define much of the US education debate. InBloom, a system for collecting and tracking student data, shuttered in the face of parental protests; Mark Zuckerberg’s $100 million investment in Newark’s public school system evaporated without leaving much of a trace; and the Los Angeles Unified School District’s ambitious plan to give every student an iPad broke down amid finger-pointing. In a country where even textbook purchases, to say nothing of tougher math standards, can spark national screamfests, the idea that the US would sanely and thoughtfully reengineer its approach to education seems naive at best. Then again, it’s hard to fault parents and educators for their conservatism. Innovation is an inherently risky endeavor. The tech industry fetishizes failure—the millions of eggs that must be broken on the way to making a unicorn omelet. That may be fine for business models or user interfaces, but not so great when those eggs are your kids.
  
  So now, instead of massive top-down attempts to cram innovation into the public school system, some tech-minded parents and entrepreneurs are building their own alternatives. Home schooling has become a trend in the tech community; it’s “off the charts” at Google, Khan says. When it came time to educate his own children, Elon Musk hired a local teacher and built a 20-person school without grades or age-based cohorts. Zuckerberg and the VC firm Andreessen Horowitz participated in a $100 million funding round for AltSchool, a software-driven private school franchise founded by a Google alum. Facebook has partnered with a network of charter schools to build pedagogical software, one of a wave of new California schools using technology to make classroom education more flexible and individualized. “The Bay Area is the destination for educators who want to see early signs of what these new school models could look like,” says Brian Greenberg, CEO of the Silicon Schools Fund, a nonprofit that has backed the Lab School and other new schools.
  
  “We haven’t demonstrated all the elements of Sal’s dream. The school gives us that opportunity.”
  
  This may come across as the educational equivalent of on-demand laundry delivery—privilege couched in the language of disruption. And there’s certainly nothing new about well-off kids receiving expensive, bespoke education while the rest of the country wrestles with the unforgiving economics of public schooling. Khan acknowledges that for now, most of the students at his school come from relatively wealthy tech-industry families, but he says that his annual tuition of $22,000 is much less than many private schools, especially considering that the school offers year-round classes and optional extended days. (He eventually aims to bring the tuition down to the amount public schools spend annually to educate each student. It’s also worth mentioning here that the Lab School is in the process of obtaining not-for-profit status, like Khan Academy.)
  
  More to the point, his goal isn’t just to build one fancy school but to develop and test a new model of learning that can be exported to other schools around the country and the world. His team is diligently recording and tracking every student’s progress and sharing the findings with their parents and the staff, an open source approach to educational innovation. In this view, the Lab School kids are guinea pigs, the eggs in the omelet, willingly subjecting themselves to new ideas that have never been tried before, then adapting and adjusting and trying again.
  
  “This is a lab for establishing new theories that could affect the rest of the planet,” Khan says. “The whole point is to catalyze change.”
  
  The students of Khan Lab School are back from lunch, standing in a circle, trading public accolades. “I have a shout-out for Mary, because when no one would take me to the bathroom, Mary did,” one student announces. “It showed conscientiousness and social intelligence.” Another student adds, “I have a shout-out for Mishal for being a really good sport about going inside and about not eating with everyone else. It showed social intelligence, self-regulation, self-awareness, and conscientiousness.” After each compliment, the entire student body waves their fingers and chants “faaaantastic!”
  
  It’s the kind of Kumbaya moment that could easily occur in squishy-minded, confidence-boosting schoolrooms across the country, with one difference: Orly Friedman, the school’s director, asks the students to add every remark to a Google form that tracks who delivered the praise, who received it, and which specific traits they called out. Over time, she says, she will have a detailed analysis of her students’ character development.
  
  This is a pretty good snapshot of the Lab School’s overall approach to education—a touchy-feely surface that masks a rigorous fealty to tracking data about every dimension of a student’s scholastic and social progress. Every week, students set their own academic goals—the level of math they hope to master, the amount of time they plan to dedicate to reading, and so on. Over the course of the week, they use Khan Academy and other self-directed educational software to try to accomplish those goals. Their headway is charted so that teachers can identify where they are struggling and offer assistance. The afternoons are usually given over to broad, real-world projects—during my visit, one group of students was charged with redesigning the classroom’s library, a task that led them to draw maps, study taxonomy, and research barcode-scanning apps. The class also picks an overall theme to explore over the course of eight weeks. Last term’s theme, “endangered species,” culminated in a carnival in which the students designed games based on their favorite threatened animals. Unlike many progressive schools, the Lab School is a firm believer in standardized testing—students are evaluated three times a year, the better to measure their progress and make sure the school is living up to expectations. “It’s not acceptable for even one student in this school to not grow as expected,” Khan says, “and hopefully all of them are growing two to three times as expected.”
  
  Khan has fantasized about starting a school like this ever since he was an undergrad. Indeed, even before Khan Academy became an international phenomenon—it now reaches 31 million students a month in some 190 countries in 36-plus languages—he began exploring meatspace brand extensions. In 2009, before he left his hedge fund job to devote himself full time to Khan Academy, he used his vacation time to run a summer camp for middle-school-aged kids, in which the campers mentored one another and worked together on big projects like building robots. In 2010, he began a pilot program with the Los Altos, California, school district. Instead of delivering lectures, five teachers had their students use Khan Academy to learn math at their own pace, then tracked their progress on a special dashboard.
  
  Over the years, Khan had occasionally pursued the idea of starting a school, but any time he spoke to anyone about it, he came away discouraged. Real estate in Mountain View was prohibitively expensive, and the liability insurance alone presented a massive headache—to say nothing of all the usual bureaucratic hurdles from local government. But in the summer of 2013, Khan began to consider education options for his then 4-year-old son. That same year, Khan ran his first summer camp for younger kids, and at the end of it one of the parents begged him to start a school. “It was like, OK, if we’re ever going to start a school and we want our own kids to be in it, it’s now or never,” he says. “Everyone will tell you that starting a school’s a crazy thing, don’t even try. And we were like, well, let’s at least try.”
  
  Khan initially figured he would start a homeschooling cooperative with about 10 families, but when he brought the idea up to the Khan Academy board, several members encouraged him to think bigger. “The vision of Khan Academy isn’t the website, it’s the book, it’s The One World Schoolhouse,” says Dan Benton, a board member who was among the school’s loudest proponents. “We haven’t demonstrated all the other elements of Sal’s dream, and I think the school gives us that opportunity.”
  
  Khan’s startup mentality meant building the school extremely fast—and courting disaster at every step. They signed up 30 kids for the initial cohort, mostly from families who worked at Khan Academy or knew someone who did, but warned them to have backup plans in case the whole thing fell apart. They didn’t have a space built to code for the school until August, weeks before they were due to open. (Google eventually leased them a couple of floors in a company-owned office park.) They had to push back the start date by two weeks. Meanwhile, Khan was remodeling his house, and his wife had just given birth to their third child. “Honestly, I like to multitask, but there were nights when I did not sleep,” Khan says. “I would get up and wander the streets. ‘What am I doing?’”
  
  But it all ended up coming together. “I probably used some of my capital,” Khan says. The city of Mountain View granted permission for them to open a school in a space zoned for offices. He hired a couple of other teachers who already used Khan Academy, were fans of The One World Schoolhouse, and were eager to explore a new approach to education. On September 15, the school opened for its first day of class with 30 students.
  
  One of the tenets of the Lab School is that kids should play an active role in designing their own education. This means that a lot of the school day is spent discussing the school itself. While I was there, kids put in hours designing new storage space to stow their backpacks, devising a new meal system, and figuring out how to incorporate the new classmates that would be arriving in the fall, when the school doubles in size to 60 and welcomes more middle-school-aged students. They often sounded more like tech entrepreneurs than elementary students, talking about things like “rapid prototyping” and “design thinking.” On more than one occasion, I heard them begging to spend more time on math and reading.
  
  The beginning of the summer term was also a chance to take a sober look at the year to date. Over the year, Friedman had sat with students and recorded how much time they were spending on various activities. After looking at the data, the Lab School team realized that students weren’t focusing enough on social studies. They also felt that they needed to do a better job grouping students by levels of independence, not just academic level, so Friedman had devised a new set of criteria to measure things like time management, self-knowledge, and focus. They were also revisiting the reading software their students were using and were about to start a trial in which different groups of students were put on three different programs to see which one was most effective.
  
  By this point, the kids were probably used to being experimented on. The Lab School has thrown its doors open to outsiders, letting them test out their new ideas or products on a captive group of students. While I was there, a couple of UX designers from Khan Academy came down to see how some of the kids responded to a reorganization of the homepage. The stools and tables were donated by a furniture company, which in exchange gets to observe how the students interact with them. Mallory Dwinal, who is starting a new school in the Bay Area, has tested out some sample lessons on the students. “It’s an engineering mentality,” Khan says. “You start with a solid baseline, but then you’re always willing to observe, measure, and iterate, and through those improvements you come up with something amazing. It worked for the car industry, computers, software. Can we do that with the school?”
  
  The point here isn’t just to build a better school but to refine a model that other educators can build on—to change education across the country and the world. That’s why Khan is setting up the Center for Learning Innovation, a network to enable similar-minded schools to share their projects and findings. But ultimately, most of Khan’s supporters say, the best way to promote this new style of learning is to create a great school with amazing results that parents, teachers, and administrators will naturally want to emulate. “Convincing schools to make a change like this is difficult,” Benton says. “The only way to do it is to prove it.”
  
  Indeed, not everything is working, and the school can fall prey to some of the devastating setbacks that befall any fast-moving startup. In July, shortly after my visit, an award-winning teacher Khan had recruited from Virginia submitted his resignation—a surprise to Khan and the rest of the team. “This really is a laboratory, and like Thomas Edison or anyone else, we’re going to have some failures,” says Christopher Chiang, a recent hire who was already slated to build out the Lab’s middle school program. “I joined Sal not because he has all the answers, and not because I have all the answers, but because somebody needs to try this and learn what the mistakes are.”
  
  But most of the parents I spoke with—many of them with ties to the tech industry—were happy with the move-fast-and-break-things approach to education. In fact, they said they were most drawn to the idea that everything wouldn’t be perfect, that their kids would be able to experience the school as it’s being born and refined and tweaked. “My daughter is not naturally experimental or risk-taking,” says Sangeeta De Datta. “They’re throwing everything against the wall here, and that fosters her ability to go out and explore other things.”
  
  I suggested to Khan’s team that, by those criteria, the school might become less attractive over time, as the team gets a better sense of what’s working and loses some of its spirit of startup experimentation. But they insisted that the process would never conclude. The experimentalism isn’t just a means to an end—an attempt to discover the perfect school. The experimentalism is the end. “They’ve done a great job of building a culture that says, ‘We’re here to innovate, and if something isn’t working, it’s your job to say so,’” Dwinal says. “It turns a liability of innovation into an incredible gift for students. They’re teaching them how to work in the 21st century workplace.” In other words, sometimes you don’t break eggs to make a perfect omelet. Sometimes, the whole point is just breaking the eggs.

The Trouble With Boys

• As the mother of a boy and a girl, Helen Trussler has seen a stark contrast in their fortunes at school. While her 18-year-old daughter Beth has thrived, she feels that her once-confident son Harry, 12, has been crushed by a system that is biased against boys.
  
  “He comes home from school in tears, tells me he’s stupid, dumb and should be in special needs,” said Trussler, 44, a home help from Guildford, Surrey. Harry attends the same state school as Beth, who has similar intelligence — and a serious lung condition. Yet she achieved five Bs and three Cs at GCSE, while his academic prospects appear bleak. Trussler, whose husband Neil, 43, is a carpenter, claims Harry is treated as a second-class pupil by his female teachers. “I was told he had ADHD, or belonged on the autistic spectrum,” she said. “I was quite scared. Educational psychologists assessed him, but there was nothing wrong. “The problem was all his teachers were women. They just did not know how to deal with boys. Harry says they routinely put boys down while encouraging girls. He’s always in detention. I know he’s given up . . . what sort of young man is he going to be?”
  
  The sobering answer may lie in the story of Harvey Smith, 18, from Bideford, north Devon. Harvey, who felt similarly alienated, left school in 2013 with just one grade C GCSE. “I definitely think my school favoured girls,” he said. “Most of the teachers were female, which made a big difference. In sociology, my teachers told me that girls get better grades. “I felt like I’d been written off. It was sexist . . . They were much harder on boys. The time-out room was always full of boys. There was no point even trying.” The accounts of Harry and Harvey reflect new figures that show the gulf between the genders is widening as boys fall behind at every stage of education.
  
  Last week, Mary Curnock Cook, the chief executive of Ucas, which manages applications for higher education courses, revealed that women outnumbered men in almost two-thirds of degree subjects. The gap has almost doubled since 2007: 66,840 more women than men are now on degree courses.According to Curnock Cook, girls are more than 20% more likely to obtain Cs or better in five GCSEs, including English and maths. White, workingclass boys such as Harvey and Harry are at the bottom of the pile.
  
  A recent report by the Equality and Human Rights Commission found that just 28% of white boys who were eligible for free school meals achieved five GCSEs at grades A to C, against 43% of black boys from families in the same income bracket. The commission said: “Poor white boys suffer higher rates of exclusion from school and achieve the lowest academic results, making them less likely to enter higher education and therefore more likely to end up in lower-paid, insecure jobs.”
  
  Thirty years ago, I would have been one of those boys. The son of a Nottingham coal miner, I could not write my name until I was five. My father could not help — he failed his 11-plus and left school barely able to write himself. When he was 17, he went down the pit, where he stayed for 47 years. Around the age of 10, as my parents’ marriage disintegrated, I became angry at the world and often used my fists where words failed me. Yet patient, boy-friendly teaching — and the odd clip around the ear both at home and from teachers who had been military men — taught me boundaries.
  
  At the O-level stage, inspirational male teachers channelled my energies into the sciences, where I became a straight-A student. Not even motorbikes, beer and girls could keep me away from textbooks. When I was 17, my father said to me: “Get yourself to uni, make something of your life that I never did. You can do it.” He gave me faith in myself and for that I will always be grateful. I passed the entrance exam for Oxford, but my working-class insecurities would never have allowed me to go there. Eventually, after gaining three As and a C at A-level in 1988, I became the first boy in my family to make it to university and escaped to Manchester. It changed the course of a life that seemed preordained to be spent underground, digging coal. When I look at Harvey or Harry, and the education system they are in today, I am haunted by the thought that I almost certainly would not make it now. I would have been labelled a yobbo and stuck in the dunce’s room. Now that I have a son — Sonny, 6 — I ask myself: what does the future hold for boys like him?
  
  Theories to explain why poor white boys do so badly include coursework that favours girls (boys perform better in exams); a benefits dependency culture that paints working-class men as layabouts; absent fathers; poor diet; gang membership; and an extracurricular dependency on pornography and video games.
  
  But an increasing number of experts believe much of the problem is created by the political climate that drives teachers’ thinking. Curnock Cook is quick to echo concerns held by mothers such as Trussler and her son: that the teaching profession is becoming over-dominated by women. “Does lower achievement for boys have anything to do with the 80% female-dominated state schools’ workforce, which includes 85% female teachers in primary schools and 62% per cent in secondary?” she asked. “Would boys respond and learn better with more male teachers and role models?”
  
  Christina Hoff Sommers, author of The War Against Boys and a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, goes further, arguing that British schools have become hostile environments for boys. “If girls are struggling with calculus or physics, helping them becomes a national priority. But what about millions of boys struggling with basic literacy, who then become disengaged from school and doomed to find no place in a knowledge-based economy?”
  
  Philip Davies, Conservative MP for Shipley, West Yorkshire, believes the “modern obsession” with advancing girls is excluding and damaging boys. “We are in danger of condemning a whole generation of white workingclass boys on the altar of political correctness, which is a national tragedy,” said Davies, who led a Commons debate to mark International Men’s Day.
  
  A study by Bonny Hartley, a research fellow in psychology at Plymouth University, concluded that from a young age, children were taught to believe boys are “naughty” and “unscholastic”. Simply put, the more we tell boys they will fail, the more they believe it — and into the vortex they go.
  
  What is to be done about the emergence of an educational underclass of white, working-class boys, not only in Britain but in other western countries including the US? American boys are outperformed by girls in elementary, middle and high school and at college, where women make up 57% of students. As a first step in this country, experts are calling for a recruitment drive to attract more men to teaching. A quarter of primary schools in England are staffed entirely by women.
  
  Glen Poole, director of Helping Men, an organisation that provides training to empower males, said: “We need more men in schools and it doesn’t matter whether that’s dads volunteering, more male teachers, male students from the local university acting as mentors or male role models giving talks. “We need to give boys the message that education is a man’s world too, not just a girls’ club.”
  
  Research by Nottingham Trent and Bedfordshire universities has found working in primary schools is seen as “a woman’s job”. Some men even fear they could be falsely labelled as paedophiles for working with young children.
  
  Davies favours the reintroduction of grammar schools to attract bright children from poor backgrounds. “I’m also a big fan of single-sex schools — and even single-sex classes within schools,” he said. “I’ve seen myself how boys’ results improve in science when they’re not showing off to girls.”
  
  Natasha Devon, the government’s mental health champion for schools, thinks boys who in previous generations would have burnt off energy through sport should be taught more on their terms. “Boys learn better through activity, not by sitting and learning,” said Devon, who has worked with 45,000 teenagers in more than 250 British schools and colleges.
  
  “The average state school child does just one hour of PE per week and many of the teenage boys are a ball of pent-up energy and frustration. This is hardly conducive to absorbing information.” What about the parents, though? Lee Elliot Major, chief executive of the Sutton Trust, a charity that aims to improve social mobility through education, believes part of the responsibility must lie with them. “We desperately need to get parents involved at schools,” he said. “Even with grades, many boys from poorer homes will not go on to A-levels, or even if they get them they will not go to the most prestigious universities. These boys think, ‘Am I worthy?’ There are hundreds of thousands of kids like that. Working-class boys fare well when they’re with middle-class kids, so our best schools also need to ensure fairer admissions — through ballots or banding — so they serve all children in their local community. “If we carry on like this, by 2030 our universities will be full of mostly women, and the only men left will be middle-class.”
  
  Another way of tapping boys’ potential could be to turn them on to entrepreneurship while in school and skip university, the path taken by Greg Reeves, 23, from Great Missenden, Buckinghamshire. “I always wanted to be an entrepreneur,” said Reeves. “I was bored with textbooks and switched off, so when the Young Enterprise charity came into my sixth form, I jumped at the chance. I had two strong, older male mentors, and they made me believe in myself for the first time. “I left school and started small businesses, buying and selling sweets and inner tubes. Then I started Thump Clothing, which sells organic adventure-wear online. Qualifications are fantastic, but you can make a great life without them.”
  
  Even so, low achievement in schools is associated with broader problems for boys and men, who are more likely to suffer as a result of long-term unemployment, homelessness and violence, as well as dying younger than women. High on the list of concerns is suicide, now the biggest cause of death in men under 45 in Britain. In America, men account for almost 80% of all suicides.
  
  To make strong men, we need to build happy, educated boys, according to Martin Seager of the Male Psychology Network, a think tank. “There are three rules of masculinity: one, be a fighter and a winner; two, be a provider and a protector; and three, retain mastery and control,” he said.

Teaching Robots

• The first “teaching machine” was invented nearly a century ago by Sydney Pressey, a psychologist at Ohio University, out of spare typewriter parts. The device was simple, presenting the user with a multiple-choice question and a set of answers. In “teach mode,” the machine would advance to the next question only once the user chose the correct answer. Pressey declared that his invention marked the beginning of “the industrial revolution in education”—but despite his grand claims, the teaching machine failed to gain much attention, and soon faded into obscurity.
  
  It stayed there until the 1950s, when the famed behaviorist B.F. Skinner introduced a teaching machine of his own (Skinner blamed “cultural inertia” for Pressey’s previous lack of success). His new device taught by showing students questions one at a time, with the idea that the user would be rewarded for each right answer.
  
  This time, there was no “cultural inertia.” Teaching machines flooded the market, and backlash soon followed. Kurt Vonnegut called the machines “playthings” and argued that they couldn’t prepare a kid for “one-millionth of what is going to hit him in the teeth, ready or not.” Fortune ran a story headlined “Can People Be Taught Like Pigeons?” By the end of the ‘60s, teaching machines had once again fallen out of favor. The concept briefly resurfaced again in the ‘80s, but the lack of quality educational software—and the public’s perception of mechanized teachers as something vaguely Orwellian—meant they once again failed to gain much traction.
  
  Scientists in Germany, Turkey, the Netherlands, and the U.K. are currently working on language-teaching machines more complex than anything Pressley or Skinner dreamed up. These devices will help students learn basic vocabulary and simple stories, using microphones to listen, cameras to watch, and artificial neural networks that will analyze all the information that’s collected. The machines are part of L2TOR (pronounced “El Tutor”), a program funded by the European Union to develop artificially intelligent teachers for preschool-aged children.
  
  But the machines won’t only teach and collect data on their students’ language skills—they’ll also monitor things like joy, sadness, boredom, and confusion. Human teachers can see and hear their students and make sense of all nonverbal cues they get from the class; these machines are being designed to do the same.
  
  “The problem with previous generations of teaching machines was their complete lack of social intelligence,” says Stefan Kopp, an artificial-intelligence researcher at Bielefeld University in Germany and one of the scientists working on L2TOR. “Yet it’s possible to design emphatic machines. Our robots will notice tears, smiles, frowns, yawns … and dynamically adjust to how a child feels.” Past research has shown that “affect-sensitive” teaching systems, as they’re known, may be more effective at imparting knowledge than machines that don’t take emotions and experience into account.
  
  The L2TOR researchers who launched their project earlier this month, still have a few years before they can measure their technology against human educators, but similar projects have offered some hints about potential challenges. FACET, a commercially available image-processing software that analyzes 19 different facial-muscle movements, works with nearly 80 percent accuracy. Earlier this year, a research team at the University of Notre Dame used it to identify children’s boredom, confusion, and delight as they played educational games, using videos taken with laptop cameras in real classrooms. In more than one-third of instances, FACET recognized nothing at all. Kids wriggled, covered their faces with their hands, talked with their friends—all sorts of things, except for sitting still in front of the cameras.
  
  And successfully interpreting students’ emotions is just one challenge; knowing how to react to that information is another. What should a robot do with a 5-year-old who is frustrated, or bored, or has just thrown a paper airplane right into its robotic face?
  
  To figure out how to imbue their machines with human-like reaction skills, Kopp and his colleagues plan to spend some time in kindergarten classrooms, observing the teachers at work. “We need to learn more about their methods, learn from their experience, and then program our robots to act like them,” Kopp says. “We want the machines to be as friendly to kids as possible, yet I think a robot should react to bad behavior.” The challenge is figuring out how these machines can exert authority in a way that teaches the kids how to behave, in addition to the lessons of the day.
  
  Another thing that remains to be seen: whether the kids can learn to relate to the machines the way they would ordinary teachers. “People, especially children, tend to ascribe human qualities to objects—teddy bears and so on. We also know that part of the brain responsible for our interpersonal skills becomes active in the presence of social robots. Yet, adults who took part in these experiments knew that they were dealing with machines, with objects,” Kopp says. “But nobody has ever tried such a thing with 5-year-olds. We can’t tell if these kids will treat robot tutors like toys or like living, caring persons.”

Maths Videos

• This week Colin Hegarty, a 34-year-old maths teacher, was shortlisted for a $1 million international teaching prize. The most astonishing thing about him is neither the money he stands to win nor the £45,000 pay cut from his job in the City that he took to — in his words — “live the dream” and become a teacher.
  
  The most astonishing thing about Mr Hegarty is that he is British. Not Singaporean or Estonian or South Korean or Finnish, or any of the other nationalities that rank in the global top ten for maths and science education.
  
  In Britain, a country in which maths and numeracy levels are among the worst in the developed world and where, Mr Hegarty says, “it has become socially acceptable to be bad at maths”, it is a glimmer of hope in the sea of abysmal stories about maths education.
  
  Mr Hegarty works at Preston Manor, an academy school in Wembley, northwest London. By Tuesday evening his name was trending on Twitter. News of him reaching the finals of the Varkey Foundation award, a Nobel-style prize for teaching, had hit the internet. He is one of ten finalists, and the only British one. But Mr Hegarty had become a YouTube sensation long before this week. Two years ago one of his A-level students had been forced into absenteeism because his father was terminally ill. The boy was worried that he would fail his exams. Mr Hegarty’s response was to stay up until three in the morning making a ten-minute video on algebraic fractions for him to learn from at home.
  
  Soon Mr Hegarty was making more maths videos, setting up his own YouTube channel and using them to teach his entire class. Students would watch the videos in their own time and then use the classroom to put what they had learnt into practice. “The whole class would come in every day, all their notes done, and we’d do maths straight away. I’d start the lesson saying, ‘Anything in that video I made a mistake on or you didn’t get? Alright. Go for it’.” His students went on to attain the best maths exam results in the school’s history. The videos went viral. “They’re not as viral as a picture of a cat,” he says, “but they’ve had six million views. Which is reasonable for a maths education-type thing.” The tutorials are now used by 5,000 children a day in more than 200 countries.
  
  Mr Hegarty’s success in the classroom seems to undermine the assumption in Britain that we can’t do maths. “We can’t be bad at maths,” he says, “because we’re a very innovative nation and we’re extremely good at technology and finance. The problem is that we’re telling ourselves the story that we’re bad at maths.”
  
  He remembers walking past a L’Oréal advertising hoarding last year. Helen Mirren was on it, with the slogan: “Age is just a number. And maths was never my thing.” It irritated him. “I think we allow statements like, ‘I could never do maths’, ‘maths isn’t for me’. I don’t think other nations allow language like that. In Britain we would never say, ‘Oh, I’m useless at reading’. If you made a joke about not being able to read, people around the table would drop into silence and say, ‘You can’t read? What?!’”
  
  An Oxford graduate and the first in his family to go to university, Mr Hegarty worked at the accountancy firm Deloitte for six years. It was lucrative, he didn’t hate it, but he didn’t love it either. He joined a corporate responsibility programme and found himself, one afternoon, reading and playing Scrabble with a child at a school in east London.
  
  “It’s a bit cheesy but I tell my students, remember in [Paulo Coelho’s] The Alchemist, he talks about listening and observing around you and waiting for the opportunity to come around. I felt that moment for me that first day I walked in the classroom in Bethnal Green.” Retraining as a teacher meant a £45,000 pay cut. Throughout the training he would get nothing. “My parents did say, ‘Are you sure? This is a bit crazy.’ But they could tell I was hellbent on it.” His wife — then girlfriend — a teacher herself, encouraged him to do what made him happy.
  
  It’s half-term and Mr Hegarty’s classroom is empty of students but full of inspiration. Above the whiteboard is a banner: “Sometimes what we call failure is really just that struggle called learning.” Opposite is a clock showing the square roots of one through to twelve. “I’m, I’d say, a bit obsessed with maths and teaching,” Mr Hegarty says, smiling. “I love what I do and I love reading about how to be better and trying to be better and giving something a try.” He likes working in the public sector and takes pride in helping those whose background might put them at an academic disadvantage.
  
  He talks a bit more about the image problem surrounding maths. “A lot of people undersell maths as counting your change,” he says. “Maths is . . . if an alien landed, the way we would communicate is with maths. Aliens obviously wouldn’t know English but I think they would know maths.”
  
  He’s a truth-seeker with an entrepreneurial streak. Last year he came runner-up in the Pitch To Rich competition run by one of his heroes, Sir Richard Branson.
  
  With a colleague, Brian Arnold, and a former student, Dan Keeble, who now works full time for him as a coder, Mr Hegarty has spent the past year developing Hegarty-Maths, which is an entire teaching system. “It’s everything a child needs to understand school maths in ten-minute, carefully and passionately explained online tutorials, with assessments and homework that can be tracked or set by children’s teachers. I know it sounds small and tiny” — it doesn’t — “but we’ve converted three rooms in my house and we have 20 students who I used to teach who come to my house after school every day. It was trialled in 70 schools and, last month, four million questions were answered on the site with 50,000 hours of learning. Some kids’ maths has been transformed in weeks.”
  
  Another problem with the way maths is taught: people don’t understand what it is for. “I think there are three reasons why it’s important. It’s to understand the world around you, whether it’s understanding statistical claims or mortgages, APR and all of that. “Secondly, it’s about choice in your life. A lot of kids think the only thing you can do with a maths qualification is become a maths teacher. But maths is access to a lot of well-paid and lucrative careers. Maths is the mother of all sciences. It’s invention, it’s economics, it’s medicine, it’s the language of everything in the universe. Dropping out of maths too soon narrows down your opportunities.”
  
  He is pleased that coding is starting to be taught in primary schools. “Maths is the building blocks of logic, a prerequisite to coding. This big push to make the UK the tech hub of the world, the Northern Powerhouse — I think that’s something that we could be good at. As things change in the world, being good at tech and coding is going to be crucial.”
  
  Maths is like a house of cards, he explains. “If you don’t have the foundations, you’re in big, big trouble.” Adults who never got to grips with maths at school, he says, carry a burden the whole of their lives: practical, in that their basic arithmetic skills have never been developed, but also emotional; having given up on maths, we grow up thinking we’re incompetent.
  
  Which brings him on to his third point: “I think maths is an important life lesson because it is where kids first experience that there are some things in life that you just can’t do. I think that the real key to maths is embracing that moment of failure in a different way.
  
  “If you read about successful people, they talk about two things: work ethic and how they deal with failure. And a lot of them look at failure as an opportunity to learn something. So if, instead of giving up and saying, ‘The reason I got it wrong is because of me, because I can’t do maths’, you say, ‘Well, I failed but it’s fine. How can I stop that from happening again?’ you stop the vicious cycle. You’re never bad at maths until the moment you’ve stopped trying.”
  
  There’s a lot of talk in education about transplanting Asian teaching methods to Britain. The Department for Education has more than 70 maths teachers from Shanghai teaching in English schools as part of an exchange programme and wants to expand the scheme across the country.
  
  Mr Hegarty is sceptical: “I always start off any class saying, ‘Why should we learn? What does it mean ‘to learn’? It doesn’t mean ‘I tried’. It means ‘I worked damned hard and proper tried and made a sacrifice’. You can’t just take what Shanghai is doing and bring it over here. You’ve got to ask yourself what’s happening in their culture that’s different to ours?” He answers his own question: “In China teaching is held in the same esteem as being a doctor. In the UK only 5 per cent of people think a teacher has the same status as being a doctor.”
  
  His theory has plenty of facts that seem to back it up: the 50,000 teachers who left the profession in 2014, the 9 per cent drop in people applying for teacher training, the country’s increasing shortage of teachers. One quarter of all children are taught maths by teachers who do not have a degree in the subject.
  
  “The biggest impact on student attainment is the quality of the teaching,” Mr Hegarty says. “So you’ve got to get that right. If teaching is important, then learning and improving yourself becomes important.” And if maths teachers can get shortlisted for $1 million prizes, it is almost certain that school maths is useful for a lot of things besides counting the loose change in a pocket.

Onlin Tutors Prospering

• They say that knowledge gives you power — but now it seems that sharing it can also give you a hefty income. A new army of online tutors are making up to £200,000 a month by imparting their wisdom on everything from dog grooming to rapping.
  
  These gurus are tapping into a digital learning revolution that took off in the US in 2011, when Stanford University started offering free Massive Open Online Courses, known as MOOCs. The number of students signing up for at least one MOOC more than doubled last year, from 17 million to 35 million worldwide.
  
  New subscribers to the Open University’s FutureLearn, its free online tuition platform, have increased from 800,000 in 2014 to about 3.4 million. The Oscar-winning actor Kevin Spacey started the online education service MasterClass last year with courses also offered by Serena Williams, Christina Aguilera and Annie Leibovitz. Udemy, one of the UK’s biggest digital classrooms, says that its eight most successful teachers have earned £4 million — an average of £475,000 each. Many of the site’s top earners have given up their day jobs and one is travelling the United States with the proceeds from her courses.
  
  The site’s most popular British tutor, Rob Percival, made more than £1.66 million since launching his first course in web development in June 2014. The 35-year-old Cambridge graduate (pictured with his family) has created 13 courses, allowing him to quit his job as a maths teacher to make £200,000000 in a month. He says: “I’m fairly lucky because I have an unusual skill set — I’m a web developer, a teacher and an entrepreneur, and not many people tick all those boxes. But those skills are central to teaching this course. It’s not just about dull programming — I’m selling a whole lifestyle, an opportunity to make money on your computer in your own time in your own way.”
  
  Mr Percival taught himself computer programming so didn’t have any formal qualifications, but the people who teach technical skills generally have impressive qualifications and/or experience. Udemy reviews all courses to make sure that they meet its quality standards. More than 1,000 tutors in the UK are working through the site, with nearly half of all students enrolling to learn about programming, building apps and web design. Dennis Yang, the chief executive of Udemy, says: “People are moving online to equip themselves for today’s careers because traditional education and training can no longer keep up.”
  
  Other popular courses include speed reading, photography, yoga and “increasing your influence”. Mr Percival says, “Once you’ve identified a skill you can share, you need to see if there are courses in your specialist area that are selling well but aren’t very good. You probably aren’t going to get far in areas where there are very few or no courses being taught and, likewise, it’s tough to break into an area where there are lots of well-rated, top-selling tutors.” It can be time-consuming, but it can also really pay off. “It took me three months to write the first course and I can now do it in under two months, which is as quick as it gets,” Mr Percival says.“You need to think carefully about the course structure, how you’ll teach it, provide projects for students to undertake, keep it up to date and remain enthusiastic all the way along. People can underestimate how long it takes.”
  
  Plain webpages of facts and figures will not cut it; successful tutors use things such as video tutorials, interactive quizzes and comment boards.
  
  Another site, eLearningMarketplace, has increased sales by 70 per cent over the past year. Tutors specialise in professional development and vocations but also offer courses in photography, emotional intelligence and even hypnosis. There is also teaching English online. TEFL (Teaching English as a Foreign Language) has estimated that qualified tutors can earn between £8 and £20 by offering lessons online. TEFL offers an introductory 40 hour course to teaching English online, costing £89. On Udemy, you can set your own rates within seven pricing tiers, ranging from £202 to £50. If you do all your own promotion you keep all the earnings, while Udemymy takes a 50 per cent cut of revenue on courses sold through its site. You also have to pay a 3 per cent administrative fee. On eLearning MarketplaceMarket you are charged 30 per cent in commission and VAT on the sale of courses priced up to £200, and 25 per cent on courses between £201 and £500.
  
  It may be tempting to cut out the middlemen but Mr Percival says, “Udemy gives you your income post VAT, which you would otherwise have to work out and deduct from sales and submit to the taxman if you’re selling courses internationally.”
  
  Tutors can take adavantage of a new £1,000 personal tax-free allowance introduced in the March budget. Revenue & Customs has, however, been increasingly strict on part-time traders, sending letters to individuals suspected of evasion and requesting customers’ details from sites such as eBay, Etsy, Amazon and Gumtree.
  
  Conor Brindley, a partner and tax expert at Irwin Mitchell, says: “HMRC has sophisticated trawling systems and there are certain professions that they target more than others, such as doctors and lawyers. However, only people earning serious money need to worry about declaring the income. If you earn over £1,000 per annum, you need to register as self-employed and fill out a self-assessment form, because it is likely to have crossed over from ‘hobby’ to ‘business’ in the taxman’s eyes.”

Smart Fools

• At last weekend’s annual meeting of the Association for Psychological Science (APS) in Boston, Cornell University psychologist Robert Sternberg sounded an alarm about the influence of standardized tests on American society. Sternberg, who has studied intelligence and intelligence testing for decades, is well known for his “triarchic theory of intelligence,” which identifies three kinds of smarts: the analytic type reflected in IQ scores; practical intelligence, which is more relevant for real-life problem solving; and creativity. Sternberg offered his views in a lecture associated with receiving a William James Fellow Award from the APS for his lifetime contributions to psychology. He explained his concerns to Scientific American.
  
  [An edited transcript of the interview follows.]
  
  In your talk, you said that IQ tests and college entrance exams like the SAT and ACT are essentially selecting and rewarding “smart fools”—people who have a certain kind of intelligence but not the kind that can help our society make progress against our biggest challenges. What are these tests getting wrong?
  
  Tests like the SAT, ACT, the GRE—what I call the alphabet tests—are reasonably good measures of academic kinds of knowledge, plus general intelligence and related skills. They are highly correlated with IQ tests and they predict a lot of things in life: academic performance to some extent, salary, level of job you will reach to a minor extent—but they are very limited. What I suggested in my talk today is that they may actually be hurting us. Our overemphasis on narrow academic skills—the kinds that get you high grades in school—can be a bad thing for several reasons. You end up with people who are good at taking tests and fiddling with phones and computers, and those are good skills but they are not tantamount to the skills we need to make the world a better place.
  
  What evidence do you see of this harm?
  
  IQ rose 30 points in the 20th century around the world, and in the U.S. that increase is continuing. That’s huge; that’s two standard deviations, which is like the difference between an average IQ of 100 and a gifted IQ of 130. We should be happy about this but the question I ask is: If you look at the problems we have in the world today—climate change, income disparities in this country that probably rival or exceed those of the gilded age, pollution, violence, a political situation that many of us never could have imaged—one wonders, what about all those IQ points? Why aren’t they helping?
  
  What I argue is that intelligence that’s not modulated and moderated by creativity, common sense and wisdom is not such a positive thing to have. What it leads to is people who are very good at advancing themselves, often at other people’s expense. We may not just be selecting the wrong people, we may be developing an incomplete set of skills—and we need to look at things that will make the world a better place.
  
  Do we know how to cultivate wisdom?
  
  Yes we do. A whole bunch of my colleagues and I study wisdom. Wisdom is about using your abilities and knowledge not just for your own selfish ends and for people like you. It’s about using them to help achieve a common good by balancing your own interests with other people’s and with high-order interests through the infusion of positive ethical values.
  
  You know, it’s easy to think of smart people but it’s really hard to think of wise people. I think a reason is that we don’t try to develop wisdom in our schools. And we don’t test for it, so there’s no incentive for schools to pay attention.
  
  Can we test for wisdom and can we teach it?
  
  You learn wisdom through role-modeling. You can start learning that when you are six or seven. But if you start learning what our schools are teaching, which is how to prepare for the next statewide mastery tests, it crowds out of the curriculum the things that used to be essential. If you look at the old McGuffey Readers, they were as much about teaching good values and good ethics and good citizenship as about teaching reading. It’s not so much about teaching what to do but how to reason ethically; to go through an ethical problem and ask: How do I arrive at the right solution?
  
  I don’t always think about putting ethics and reasoning together. What do you mean by that?
  
  Basically, ethical reasoning involves eight steps: seeing that there’s a problem to deal with (say, you see your roommate cheat on an assignment); identifying it as an ethical problem; seeing it as a large enough problem to be worth your attention (it’s not like he’s just one mile over the speed limit); seeing it as personally relevant; thinking about what ethical rules apply; thinking about how to apply them; thinking what are the consequences of acting ethically—because people who act ethically usually don’t get rewarded; and, finally, acting. What I’ve argued is ethical reasoning is really hard. Most people don’t make it through all eight steps.
  
  If ethical reasoning is inherently hard, is there really less of it and less wisdom now than in the past?
  
  We have a guy [representative-elect Greg Gianforte of Montana] who allegedly assaulted a reporter and just got elected to the U.S. House of Representatives—and that’s after a 30-point average increase in IQ. We had violence in campaign rallies. Not only do we not encourage creativity, common sense and wisdom, I think a lot of us don’t even value them anymore. They’re so distant from what’s being taught in schools. Even in a lot of religious institutions we’ve seen a lot of ethical and legal problems arise. So if you’re not learning these skills in school or through religion or your parents, where are you going to learn them? We get people who view the world as being about people like themselves. We get this kind of tribalism.
  
  So where do you see the possibility of pushing back?
  
  If we start testing for these broader kinds of skills, schools will start to teach to them, because they teach to the test. My colleagues and I developed assessments for creativity, common sense and wisdom. We did this with the Rainbow Project, which was sort of experimental when I was at Yale. And then at Tufts, when I was dean of arts and sciences, we started Kaleidoscope, which has been used with tens of thousands of kids for admission to Tufts. They are still using it. But it’s very hard to get institutions to change. It’s not a quick fix. Once you have a system in place, the people who benefit from it rise to the top and then they work very hard to keep it.
  
  Looking at the broader types of admission tests you helped implement—like Kaleidoscope at Tufts, the Rainbow Project at Yale, or Panorama at Oklahoma State, is there any evidence that kids selected for having these broader skills are in any way different from those who just score high on the SAT?
  
  The newly selected kids were different. I think the folks in admissions would say so, at least when we started. We admitted kids who would not have gotten in under the old system—maybe they didn’t quite have the test scores or grades. When I talk about this, I give examples, such as those who wrote really creative essays.
  
  Has there been any longitudinal follow-up of these kids?
  
  We followed them through the first year of college. With Rainbow we doubled prediction [accuracy] for academic performance, and with Kaleidoscope we could predict the quality of extracurricular performance, which the SAT doesn’t do.
  
  Do you think the emphasis on narrow measures like the SAT or GRE is hurting the STEM fields in particular?
  
  I think it is. I think it’s hurting everything. We get scientists who are very good forward incrementers—they are good at doing the next step but they are not the people who change the field. They are not redirectors or reinitiators, who start a field over. And those are the people we need.
  
  Are you hopeful about change?
  
  If one could convince even a few universities and schools to try to follow a different direction, others might follow. If you start encouraging a creative attitude, to defy the crowd and to defy the zeitgeist, and if you teach people to think for themselves and how what they do affects others, I think it’s a no-lose proposition. And these things can be taught and they can be tested.
  
  

Real Life Math

• Math’s important. It’s elegant. It’s a magical way to deal with abstract concepts on your way to finding out the provable truth. There's not enough math in the world.
  
  Math isn’t the same as arithmetic. Basic arithmetic is necessary, but everything beyond that is simply easily-graded compliance disguised as busy-work.
  
  A high school principal told me that there’s a high correlation between students who fail to complete algebra and those that drop out of school before graduation. It’s not surprising if you think about it—factoring polynomials is a totally useless activity that only demonstrates that you’re good at school.
  
  What would happen if we introduced variables and intuitive algebra and then immediately switched gears to probabilities (gambling and decision making) and statistics (sports, predictions and understanding the world as it is and it might be.)
  
  What would a year of hands-on truth-finding do for a class of freshman? What mathematical and vocational doors would it open?
  
  Every day we spend teaching hand factoring of binomials to non-math majors is another day we raise mathematically illiterate kids. What are we waiting for?

Seth Godin on Ed Skills

• For the longest time, school has been organized around subjects. Fifth graders go to math class and then English class and then geography.
  
  Mostly, those classes don’t teach what they say they teach. Sure, there are some facts, but mostly it’s the methods of instruction that are on offer. School usually has a different flavor than learning.
  
  It turns out, the skills we need to use in life (and in school) aren’t subject specific. But we use those subjects to teach the skills we actually end up using. Everyone knows that the typical person doesn’t need binomials, but the argument is that problem-solving, etc, are totally worth learning and so we pretend to teach the subject when apparently, we’re teaching the skill.
  
  Perhaps, instead of organizing school around data acquisition and regurgitation, we could identify what the skills are and separate them out, teaching domain knowledge in conjunction with the skill, not the other way around.
  
  It turns out that the typical school spends most of its time on just one of those skills (obedience through comportment and regurgitation).
  
  What would happen if we taught each skill separately?
  
  Obedience
  Management
  Leadership/cooperation
  Problem-solving
  Mindfulness
  Creativity
  Analysis
  
  Indeed, you are required to do all seven of these things in math class, but in what proportion? Is a kid who has trouble with obedience “bad at math” or is it that the obedience part of class got in the way of the analysis or problem-solving part of class instead?
  
  It’s entirely possible for a kid to make it through 16 years of organized schooling with a solid B average and never do much more than do well on just one thing–remembering what’s on the test. We’ve failed when we’ve turned out someone with just one of the 7 skills.
  
  What happens if we are clear what we’re doing and why? Because obedience isn’t the point of math or science, but sometimes it’s taught that way.
  
  And then, when obedience session is over, we can find other ways to approach the work at hand, developing the other essential skills. A 45 minute Creativity class that uses algebra is going to feel very different from a Leadership class covering the same material.
  
  Some kids spend a decade in the school sports system and learn leadership and management and creativity and analysis. And some learn nothing but how to follow the coach’s instructions and sit on the bench. This has nothing to do with sports (or geography or biology) and everything to do with what we decide we’re teaching in any given moment.
  
  Is there a cognitive difference between solving a chemistry problem and solving a crossword puzzle? Not really. Getting good at solving–putting on your solving hat and finding the guts to use it–is a skill that gets buried under the avalanche that we call obedience.
  
  “How’d you do in Creativity today, son?” or perhaps, “Wow, you got an A in Analysis–that’s going to open a lot of doors for you…”
  
  Bureaucracies over-index for obedience. They do that out of self-preservation, and because it’s the easiest thing to sell to clients, funders and parents (and to measure). But since we’re currently overdoing that one (they do it far more in other countries, though), we end up getting confused about what it means to learn a subject area in a useful way and we definitely under-develop people on the other six skills.
  
  My guess is that most parents and educators are afraid to even discuss the topic

Choose Your Own Adventure Games

• Three months ago, Edris Senfuka, 27, a farmer and property broker from Mukono, Uganda, received a curious text on his cellphone: an invitation to play an educational game for free. It piqued his curiosity. “I had not seen anything else like it,” he says.
  
  The game, based around financial literacy, had Senfuka listen to a story and make decisions by pushing his phone’s buttons. Each choice led to a different outcome — much like the choose-your-own-adventure books popular in the 1980s.
  
  Today, the CYOA model is being used on cellphones as an educational tool, covering topics from better farming techniques to how to have safe sex, in a string of developing countries.
  
  The idea came to Paul Falzone in 2014, when he was working with nonprofit Peripheral Vision International (PVI) in remote Karamoja, in Uganda’s northeast. PVI was trying to locate public TV screens to show contraception videos, but sometimes 100 miles lay between one screen and the next. Flip phones, though, were ubiquitous. “That got us asking the question, ‘How can we use this old technology in a new way?’” Falzone says. When he was in a used bookshop in New York and came across a copy of an ’80s choose-your-own-adventure book, “that’s when the lightbulb went off,” he says.
  
  Wanji Games (wanji means “what” in Luganda, a major language in Uganda) was launched in 2017 by Falzone and co-creator Leah Newman. Users call what’s known as the 3-2-1 Service, a toll-free hotline that provides information via interactive voice response on a range of development topics, and select a game from the Topic menu. Each of the eight participating countries have at least one game to play — such as sex education (Malawi), domestic violence education (Cambodia), farming techniques (Uganda) and how to avoid sex traffickers when immigrating (Ethiopia).
  
  In “Smart Finances Happy Life,” players make about 300,000 Ugandan shillings ($81) a month through casual labor. Since work isn’t guaranteed, they must budget their money. “How can you keep track of your income and expenses?” the game asks. There are two options: “Press 1 to keep track of expenses in your head so that no one can see how you’ve spent your money” or “Press 3 to purchase a book and a pen to record your daily expenses.”
  
  Spoiler alert: The first option leaves the player without money when it’s time to pay school fees — game over. Choosing the second option allows continued play.
  
  Another example: In the Malawian sex education game, callers who opt to play as male can “Press 1 to have sex without condoms and try to ejaculate on the outside” or “Press 3 to stop now and purchase condoms.”
  
  Wanji games are designed to be both fun and educational, says Newman, product director at mobile communications provider Viamo, which works to create the games in 18 local languages. The interactive narratives allow players to “explore the decision that they may want to make in the real world but without the consequences,” Newman says.
  
  Leveraging the platform for different topics and audiences is “really important,” says Lauren Frank, an associate professor of communications at Portland State University who has studied the games in Cambodia and Uganda. Frank is in the early stages of researching, via surveys and talking to players, how the games can be improved.
  
  There have been a few hiccups along the way. Falzone recounts how they tested a prototype with a fantasy element in Uganda — the community became convinced that PVI was practicing black magic. The lesson? Finding narratives that reflect the daily lives of community members and teach practical skills, Falzone says.
  
  The games are catching on. In the first nine months of 2019, there have been 771,000 unique callers — more than the number of calls received in 2017–18 combined (about 665,000).
  
  Senfuka, who last played the game a few weeks ago, says what he’s learned has already paid off. The 27-year-old father of two is earning more, and he’s bought a motorbike that he uses as a taxi to make even more money. “I learned the importance of saving and put it into practice,” he says.

Other Resources

• Books About Schools
• Anecdotes About Schools
• Quotations About Schools