Episode 3 - Daisy Christodoulou: The risk is a Stupidogenic Society

0:00Amol Rajan: Is it the case that humans are getting dumber? There is some evidence. It's the lowest scores recorded by the OECD on these tests in history, and they've been running since 2000. Almost every country in the world has seen their scores plummet. And one of the very few countries to have bucked that trend is England. And the current government have seemed very hostile to it and want to undo it. It is completely baffling. Everything you are thinking about right now is going on in working memory. So if I say capital of France... Paris! Yeah, the word Paris is going to pop into your head. Thinking is friction, and a lot of people don't like friction.

0:41Amol Rajan: Do you sort of single-handedly won University Challenge for Warwick, and you can pretend that you didn't, but the evidence is actually quite abundant, and it's there on the internet? You just kind of consistently answer everything on every subject. So I just really love this idea of schools as gymnasiums for the mind. When we're learning, we are going to have to have protected spaces. OK, tell me something. When was the last time you heard someone say this? We are getting education badly wrong. Our system was built for the Victorian era and it needs to be radically updated. Traditional teaching methods, a knowledge-rich curriculum and rigorous exams just don't make sense in the age of AI.

1:23Amol Rajan: What we need for the economy of tomorrow is practical skills, vocations and children who are masters of empathy. That line of thought has appeared without much challenge in thousands of articles, in podcasts, in academic seminars, in teaching union conferences over the past couple of decades. And it's also, by the way, the basic position of Britain's Labour government. But what if it is completely and utterly wrong? what if counter-intuitively the old ways are the best what if we have an ideal natural experiment in our country in our time that shows england is getting something very very right that scotland wales and northern ireland are getting wrong and that what england is getting right is that basically the education we need today and tomorrow looks quite similar to the one we had yesterday allow me to introduce perhaps the most interesting smart original and influential thinker about education in Britain today.

2:22Amol Rajan: Daisy Christodoulou grew up on a council estate in East London, won a scholarship to a top private school, and in 2006 appeared to almost single-handedly win University Challenge for Warwick University, which led to her being dubbed Britain's smartest student. Today, she writes an influential substack, and she's the boss of an assessment company called No More Marking. I want this to be simply the most useful conversation you have ever heard about education. What it's for, what we're getting right, what we're getting wrong, and above all, what your kids need to learn if they want to win the future.

3:02Amol Rajan: Before we get into this conversation, I just want to say a really heartfelt and sincere thanks to our launch partners because they make all of this possible. So thank you to NatWest, thank you to Waitrose, thank you to Amazon, and thank you to Google Cloud. We simply could not do this without me. Daisy Christodoulou. Hello, great to be here. I've been waiting a very long time for this. Fantastic. I think I've read every word that you've ever written about everything. I think I've watched you on a certain well-known quiz. Yeah. And I think the other thing that we've got in common is that we're both failed cricketers.

3:38Amol Rajan: Is that right? Yes, good point. Very true. Are you actually a failed cricketer? Do you know, I played a little bit. I played a lot more football. There wasn't a lot of girls' cricket in London when I was growing up. So a failed cricket would probably be too strong. We're going to talk about your amazing work and actually quite amazing life, particularly in the domain of education. And we should start with what you do now and then we'll wind back. What is No More Marking? So No More Marking is a company that I run and we provide schools in England and across the world with a different type of assessment.

4:10It's called comparative judgment. It's a different way of assessing writing, very different from the traditional kind of exam rubric-based approach. But it gives you very reliable, incredibly accurate, very quick and very valid results. And we use quite a bit of AI in our system as well.

4:28Amol Rajan: What's the case of doing that? That's comparative versus what else? So the alternative kind of traditional way of assessing writing is to have one piece of writing and a mark scheme. That's a technical term for that would be it's absolute judgment because you're looking at one piece of writing and trying to place it on an absolute scale. The problem with that is that human beings are not very good at absolute judgment. How dare you? So they disagree a lot. And you get this sort of every year, probably exam time, you get these perennial complaints around inaccurate marking. And part of the reason for that is because human beings find that kind of thing very hard, not just if they're making judgments of children's writing, but if you're making judgments of a whole range of things.

5:08It's the same with height. So if someone walks into the room and I say to you, how tall is that one person? That's an absolute judgment. If two people walk into the room and I say, who's taller? The person on the left, the person on the right. That's comparative judgment. Comparative judgment is just much easier. Human beings are much better at it. And actually one of the reasons is, this ties into a lot of my other work on education, is that we are kind of hardwired to think in concrete terms. We find abstract thought actually quite difficult. so wherever you can it is really good to ground your thinking in something concrete and specific right so the thing about comparative judgement is you're just looking at two kind of concrete representations and saying like yeah who's taller which piece of writing is better and you're not getting into the much more difficult judgments around placing something on an absolute scale

5:59Amol Rajan: how's the company doing well great I mean I've been doing it for 10 years it's a lot of fun I really enjoy it we work with about 2 ,000 schools in England and around the world Wow. So it's great. So Steve Jobs has this line where he says, we always connect the dots in retrospect. And someone looking at what you do now would say, Daisy, you know, as we'll get into, rather famously clever, was always going to work in education. Did it feel like that when you were growing up in East London? No, I don't think so. I always thought maybe it might be something I'd like to do, maybe become a teacher. But I think there were other things I'd like to have done too, as well as maybe play cricket or football for England.

6:35And I left university. Firstly, I did Teach First, which was quite a new programme for teacher training at that time, which was great. I'm not sure I would have necessarily become a teacher if Teach First hadn't been around. It was a really kind of new, exciting thing.

6:47Amol Rajan: In 2006-7, there was a certain TV quiz, which I now have the pleasure to be, well, I can say this, to host. And you, I've watched this on the internet many times over. What essentially happened, if I could describe it, and you could describe your version of these events, is you sort of single-handedly won University Challenge for Warwick and you can pretend that you didn't, but the evidence is actually quite abundant and it's there on the internet. If you watch this, you just kind of consistently answer everything on every subject. Warwick Christodoulou. Warwick Christodoulou. Warwick Christodoulou.

7:22Amol Rajan: Warwick Christodoulou. Warwick Christodoulou. Reuse, recycle. Correct. So why did you decide at the age of 21, 22, do why did you decide to become a teacher and end up in a comp which was really struggling not that would be a surprising thing to do but I would suggest it's a noble thing to do yeah so as I said I was always quite interested in teaching and teach first did seem like a really amazing concept so it was quite new then and it was this idea that you could go and train to be a teacher and you would deliberately they would place you in a difficult school you know place you in a school that was maybe you know challenging circumstances or whatever and you would kind of get a qualification but they would also be doing lots of other stuff to help you um you know develop your career in other ways if you wanted to at what point in that journey did you start thinking hang on a second a lot of the evidence not just in this country but around the world is pointing towards yeah quite solid indicators that we should do education this way yeah and yet the actual policy impulse is to go in the exact opposite direction yeah so really quite early on I would say.

8:30Amol Rajan: Really quite early on you thought we were getting education wrong. I don't think this was just even an England specific thing. Just this huge narrative that this was 20 years ago, but this whole idea was everyone was just getting smartphones. So the whole thing was we're all getting smartphones, we don't have to know anything anymore because we can just look it up. And I just never bought that. And this culminates in 2013 in a very influential book which we're going to get into called Seven Myths About Education. And we'll go through the seven myths. but just before we do that it's worth saying there's a very you write a very influential substack I'm a subscriber in the most recent post you talked about this amazing natural experiment that we've had in the United Kingdom of Great Britain because we've had England go down one path and Wales and Scotland and Northern Ireland go down other paths and they've gone in very different directions we'll come to what that natural experiment has revealed in just a moment but before that can I just put to you and I'll try and distill it to a paragraph a very very common trope that you hear within and outside of education, which I think is a thing that in a sense you're taking against.

9:31Amol Rajan: It goes a bit like this. It's not what I really think, by the way. We have an education system that was built for the Victorian age. We prioritise, like Thomas Gradgrind in Dickens' hard times, facts, facts, facts, facts, facts. And what we really need to do is to get with the times. We need to create kids who are more empathetic, who are better at listening, and we need to make education about the specific needs of the child rather than about knowledge with a capital K. That's a kind of quite common thing. And I think, and sorry, the addendum to that is we should give equal weight at an early age to vocational training.

10:08Amol Rajan: Actually, we're going to get into Labour Party policy. That is something I've read thousands of times or heard thousands of times or watched thousands of times over the last 20 years. Why is it so popular and is there any truth to it? So you're right, I've heard that thousands of times too. You've heard it more thousands than I have, I'm sure. Yeah, and disagree with large parts of it. So I'll explain why I disagree and why I think there's a problem with that kind of common take on education. So the reality is we need knowledge to think with. So there is a kind of evidence-based point here about how the human mind works and how we think.

10:46And I think people like to think that, oh, you don't need knowledge, what you need are skills. And what you really need in the modern world, are critical thinking skills and problem solving skills and communication skills. And this is what really matters because again, you can just look the knowledge up. But it doesn't work like that because if you examine what those critical thinking skills are and what problem solving skills are, what you find is they are all really tied up with the main specific knowledge that is stored in long-term memory. So let me give a couple of concrete examples. You know, reading, when you are reading you are relying on lots of knowledge that you have stored in long-term memory and the obvious example of reading is the vocab like what the words mean so there's a like a layer beneath that actually which is the phonics like knowing what sounds the letters make but even once you know that you need to know what words mean so I always say to people of course if you're reading a book for the first time and you're reading the first page of a novel of course it is possible if you don't know what words mean to look them up but let's say you don't understand 10 % of words on that page let's say you don't understand 20 % let's say you don't understand 30 % clearly at some point your understanding is just not going to be as good as the person who doesn't know what all the words mean even if you can go and look them up on a phone right so having a wide vocabulary and knowing what words mean and knowing those words having them in long-term memory.

12:13It's just a prerequisite for like fluency and understanding.

12:20Amol Rajan: NatWest partners the Amol Rajan Connection. It's the bank that I've used for 25 years since that first day I walked into a South London branch with my dear dad. What sets NatWest apart is its mission to help people turn ambition into action, from taking a first financial step to building a business or planning what comes next. It is next level banking with practical support, ideas and expertise behind it. I'm very grateful to them for their support. As they say, let's do this. Let me provoke you by asking a different version of that, which is what's the point of being able to do your times tables when you've got a calculator?

12:59Yeah, so the point is, again, it's this cognitive science point that how our minds work is you have working memory and long term memory. and working memory you can kind of equate with consciousness. Everything you are thinking about right now is going on in working memory. So if I say capital of France... Paris! Yeah, the word Paris is going to pop into your head.

13:20Amol Rajan: Was that long-term or working? So, well, that's really interesting. So it was in long-term memory and then what happened is there was a queue in the environment and the queue was me saying, what's the capital of France? And then what you were able to do is to seize, retrieve it from long-term memory and pull it into your working memory. The problem with working memory, working memory is great and it's really vital and it's hugely important. But the problem with working memory is it's really limited. So it's limited, best guess, to about four to seven new items of information at any one time. So like the way you can sometimes think of it, you know, think of it, you're walking home from the supermarket and you've got four bulky items and someone puts a fifth on and a sixth, you end up dropping something.

13:59That's working memory, okay? Long-term memory is vast. It's enormous. We can store thousands and thousands of pieces of information. And so there's no real way that you can kind of directly increase working memory. But what you can do is long-term memory is a kind of hack. The more stuff you have stored in long-term memory and the more, you know, it has to be really well stored and fluent, that kind of works a bit like an expansion pack for working memory. You can think of it with that shopping example. If you're just trying to carry every item on its own, you get to four or five and you drop one.

14:33If you've got a bag, you can put four or five items in one bag and you can have another bag and put four or five items. And in the cognitive science literature, that's chunking. You can chunk things up. So the value of knowing loads of stuff...

14:45Amol Rajan: And the bigger the bag, the more you can fit in. Exactly. So the value of knowing loads of stuff in long-term memory and having it really solidly locked down in long-term memory is that it enables you to almost free up that working memory to do more. So go back to your time tables question. The value of that is when you are doing a complex multi-step maths problem, which actually you could be in the supermarket looking at a three for two offer. Is the three for two offer a better deal than another thing where you can buy it, but individual items, but they're a bit cheaper. That's a maths problem that involves a few steps.

15:21if your times tables are locked down so solidly and you know them so well it doesn't take up it doesn't take up one of those precious precious spaces in working memory so if you just know for example that two nines are 18 right you just know it that is freeing up that space in working memory if you on the other hand have to think really hard and do that some live in real time or take your phone out and do it it's going to occupy one of the it occupies that pressure space and then what you get again think of it as all the items are shopping just falling on the floor you get cognitive overload right and you see this with students in the classroom that when they don't have those basic building blocks locked down they are using up that pressure space they get to the end of the multi-step math problem and they forget where

16:12Amol Rajan: they were at the beginning by extension of that analogy knowledge with a capital k which is kind of the most important idea in my life is freedom because if you've got that long-term knowledge it frees up a space in the working memory that's what it's about let me put another provocation to you which is isn't it all right for you you swat you quiz winning mega brain famous for your intelligence and what about people who aren't as bright yeah who um basically don't find knowledge as interesting or stimulating as you why should they have to go down this academic route so i would say whatever field you want to do well in this applies this point about the working memory and the long-term memory so there's a lot of talk at the moment about vocational education but if you look at the really high quality vocational education options they also tend to require you to have to know stuff and to know it so well and to be able to put it into practice you know the example I gave you is the the knowledge the test that black cab drivers in London take that requires a huge amount that's a vocational course it's a vocational course that requires a huge amount of knowledge you look at something like a vocational qualification if you want to be an electrician you know the electrical apprenticeship electrical installation apprenticeship you have to know stuff to do that and you have to get stuff locked down in long-term memory both in terms of the algebra you need to know to be an electrician but also in terms of yeah the practical elements of what you do with a fuse box that's still stuff that you have to get into long-term memory in one way or another so even vocational education requires even practical manual fixing something you know yeah you know be doing the stuff that some people think robots should do but even practical manual vocational education requires a foundation of knowledge with a capital k and actually the more of that knowledge you've got the better you'll be at the vocation so if you look at again the electrician one's a good one and my dad did this when i was growing up um he was an electrician he did his city and guilds i remember him studying for it just explain what city and guilds is it's like it's a vocation yeah it's a kind of quite a high state is quite a high prestige vocational option.

18:30I think a lot of people in my parents' generation have a lot of respect for it. My mum's got one as well in hairdressing. So if you look at the electrician's one, I remember my dad, he had his books. I was about nine or ten when he did it. He did it at Tower Hamlets College. It's quite hard. It's not an easy option. And it has algebra in it. It has trigonometry.

18:51Amol Rajan: Well, I'm going to say the NPC thing here, which is when I was doing GCSEs at the end of the 1990s and early noughties, probably, yeah, GCSEs or A-levels, there was a qualification called GNVQ. And at my school, which was a good state school in South London, Grant maintains a good selective at the top and bottom, a good state school, GNVQ stood for generally not very qualified. And it was an insult. It was such a, it was a cuss. If you did GNVQs, you're done, basically. And this is what gets us into another argument you often hear against your position, which is that what people like Andy Burnham and Lucy Powell, the Education Secretary, are trying to create is parity of esteem.

19:27Amol Rajan: They think that we have a culture, and a lot of people who are nowadays against meritocracy say we have a culture which prizes cognitive aptitude and cognitive ability, which is just one form of human aptitude above all others, and that's good for the posh-os who go to posh schools, but it's bad for other people who just want to be a carpenter, which is a noble trade. So I think this is where we need to distinguish between high-quality vocational courses which do have status and prestige and good labour market value and other vocational courses which do not have that value. You said just then there's vocational courses that basically were punchlines in jokes.

20:06The knowledge is a vocational course. Nobody ever makes fun of it. I've never heard anybody say, oh, you must be a ficko if you've done the knowledge.

20:14Amol Rajan: To be clear for our international audience, if you want to drive a black cat around London, you need to do a test an exam called the knowledge where you need to know every street in London by heart it's pretty crazy it's like a lot of the streets and it's also certain routes and I think the test you get at the end it will say to you know you can just get told right you need to go from I don't know yeah you know St Pancras station to the Charing Cross hospital what's the quickest route you know drive it's incredibly hard and working class people did it for four years and they still do it and I've got a younger cousin who did it my grandfather did it it's And as I say, I've never heard anyone say, oh, if you've done that, that's just a stupid qualification.

20:54Amol Rajan: Is one of the dangers of vocational education at too young an age, we'll get into the ages in a second, is the danger that the practical consequence of maybe what Lucy Powell and Andy Burnham are advocating for is that you end up with schools for the rich and skills for the poor? Yeah, so I think that is a big problem. So I think the problem we've got at the minute is, as you say, we've got Andy Burnham and Lucy Powell arguing for wanting more vocational education at age 14. I think that is a problem because the other thing I would say is I am all in favour of this good, high quality, high status vocational education that gets you a good job at the end of it.

21:30It is very hard to do that in schools at 14 to 16.

21:35Amol Rajan: Why? Because schools are smaller than FE colleges. That's one really important structure. Further education. Yeah, so a further education college where kids go at 16, they're bigger. And because they're bigger, they have more scale and they can do more specialist teaching. So good vocational education requires a few things. It generally does require an element of specialism. It generally requires some then specialist equipment. So let's say you've got kids who want to be an electrician. You actually need some kind of plan and stuff for them to practice on. And it also requires specialist teaching and good links with employers.

22:11it is very hard just structurally it's not even a money thing it's very hard to do that in secondary schools where you might have maybe one or two kids every couple of years who want to be an electrician you just haven't got the scale or the depth at age 16 people can specialize all the kids who want to be electricians to go to a college you've got a critical mass of 15 to 20 of them

22:32Amol Rajan: because it's a college for electricians so they've got the equipment they've got the connection and then they'll an employer will want to spend their time there if they know that they've got actually 15 to 20 kids who are genuinely committed to this. But what's the negative impact of allowing, let's be, let's talk in stereotypes. Yeah. What's the negative impact of allowing Billy from Huddersfield to do carpentry at 14? The negative impact is that what you end up doing is you don't, what schools, because it's very hard for them to get the specialist teaching to get the links with employers, what ends up happening is you end up having qualifications that can be taught in a classroom by a non-specialist teacher to a group of 30, right?

23:12And that's where you get, you were talking about the GMVQ. It was this idea that we could do something to a class of 30 and we could teach them something that would have some vocational value. And that's really hard to do. Doing something really high quality with carpentry or an electrician, it requires this kind of specialist teaching, specialist equipment, links of employers, that it's just incredibly hard for three and a half thousand secondary schools to do. There's three and a half thousand

23:35Amol Rajan: secondary schools in England. Can you just enumerate, and I promise we're not going to click this up and take it out of context. You're arguing against the new clear position of the new Labour Prime Minister. What is the argument, which just to be clear you disagree with, what is the argument, which is now, by the way, policy in this country, of Andy Burnham and Lucy Powell, two very well-qualified graduates, what is the argument that they make for vocational education at 14? So the argument Andy Burnham and Lucy Powell are making in favour of vocational education is that there are a bunch of students, depending on how you define it, maybe up to a third of students who are not getting great results at GCSEs, who are turned off by school and they would be better off studying something else, moving into a vocational job focus qualification earlier on than 16.

24:26Why is that wrong? The reason why that's wrong is because as I say, firstly, it's very, very hard to do the high quality vocational education at 14. So you're actually going to end up doing stuff that the risk is, and this is not just a risk, as I think we've seen it in recent history, you're going to end up putting kids into courses that have very limited labour market value. The other reason it's wrong is that in our economy today, and in the labour market, I think what Andy Burnham in particular sort of seems to have is this idea that there's a way we could sort of re-industrialise and go back to a world where there were a lot of unskilled jobs for 14-year-old school leavers.

25:04So we go back to a world where you can leave school at 14 and there's three local factories and you can walk into them.

25:10Amol Rajan: Those factories are now gone. Right. And even if, this is the other thing, even if you buy into re-industrialisation as a concept, and I actually have to say, I am relatively sympathetic to that and we can talk about that. Depends what industries you're doing. There's a couple of, interestingly, there's a couple of really interesting new factories have opened up not far from where I grew up in East London, South and East London, that are saying, look, we do need to be building more things in Britain. We do need to have a little bit more maybe sovereignty and control over kind of crucial industries.

25:40I'm very sympathetic to that argument. But if you look at the kind of factories, modern factories, not just in the UK, but in Germany, in China, you know, wherever you look in America, wherever you look in the world, the modern factory floor is not like the factory floor 50, 60 years ago. There's a lot of robots, there's skilled technicians, and then there's often PhD students out the back tinkering away with the next iteration.

26:04Amol Rajan: But isn't the other argument against vocational education at 14 that you don't know if Billy from Huddersfield was going to discover that he loves astrophysics? Right. And maybe Billy at the age of 14 should have the invitation to read the stuff that I found absolutely impenetrable at 16, 17, where I had to do medieval literature. and now I get into my 40s, I think, God, I would give anything to be able to learn medieval literature. What a privilege. So if you specialise too early, not only do you fail on the sort of priorities you set yourself, which is labour market value, and actually sometimes it doesn't provide labour market value, but you basically close off a range of options.

26:43Amol Rajan: Absolutely. And you close them off for kids from poorer backgrounds. Absolutely. And I think the real risk with this is that it will end up de facto almost being selection at 11. because there will be some schools that will maybe start to specialise in doing the vocational courses. But because schools start at age 11, you will have parents and kids looking around and you will end up with a sort of de facto 11 plus tournament. It won't be an 11 plus, but you'll end up with a de facto sort of grammar school, secondary modern potential. And if there are schools that focus on this and then the other schools are the ones where you get to study your GCSEs and academic qualifications, get to go to university.

27:23so I think there is a real risk of that happening as you say even if you are going to go on to be a plumber you're going to go on to be an electrician why shouldn't you learn some history about your country why shouldn't you read some Shakespeare as you say why shouldn't you up to the age of 16 have a little bit of time where you're doing that even if you're going to go on and do some something else entirely at the age of 16 that there is an aspect that all of our students should have some entitlement to the best that's been known and thought. And that doesn't mean they have to do a three-year degree in medieval literature.

27:56It just means giving them some awareness and some kind of framework and some kind of, we talked about knowledge and the long-term memory, but some kind of sort of schema for understanding the world around them. An invitation to great thinking. Absolutely.

28:07Amol Rajan: Which is one of the best things about thinking. And the other thing is, I do think it is important at the moment, you know, we have economic problems, wage stagnation. It is important that we have a big focus on labour market value, economic returns. Those things are important. And I think about them a lot, as you can hear. But we also don't want to forget the fact that school is not just about preparing students for the workplace. It is about preparing students for life in a modern society. The future of food is an issue very close to my heart. If we get it right, it could unlock so many benefits for us as a society.

28:42Amol Rajan: that is one of the reasons why I wanted Waitrose to be a launch partner. Waitrose was the first UK supermarket to commit to regenerative practices. Since then, they've been working to support over 1 ,500 of their UK farms to transition to nature-friendly farming. They're also the only UK supermarket with their own farm, the Leckford Estate, where they've been farming regeneratively since 2020. More in the link below and keep an eye out in store for their new label on products that champion these practices. What's the purpose of education? I think it's all those things. I think it's lots of different things.

29:18There's a great line by GK Chesterton where I think he says something like, it's the soul of a civilisation being handed down the generations. And I think what I like about that, I think what I like if you view it in terms of a civilisation is that encompasses everything because economics and jobs and the cutting edge technology, those are important aspects of civilization but so also is shakespeare history all of these other things which maybe don't have the direct labor market value so it's everything so roger scruton

29:50Amol Rajan: who's a conservative late conservative philosopher and a bit later on we might get into how some of this is coded left or right but he wrote a book um probably 20 years ago now about the time you were on university challenge called culture counts and the third chapter was had the title teaching knowledge and in it Scruton says that great teachers love their pupils but they love knowledge more and he says they don't so much see knowledge as a benefit to their pupils but their pupils as a benefit to knowledge in other words the supreme goal of education is the transmission of knowledge through the generations that is something that about 15 years ago the conservative liberal coalition with Michael Gove as education secretary championed as an idea they're championed and extended a new labor policy around free schools and academies.

30:34Amol Rajan: And I mentioned a moment ago that we have had, and this is how one of your most recent sub-stat posts begins, we have had an extraordinary natural experiment in this country in different education policies. Extraordinary because it's gone on for a long time, it's provided us with a lot of data, and that data couldn't be more emphatic about the relative success of one approach versus another. What has that natural experiment showed? So education within the UK is devolved. So you've got Northern Ireland, Scotland, England and Wales, and they all have control of their own education systems. And in 2010, as you say, Michael Gove, ironically, a Scot, became education minister.

31:24You had the Conservative Lib Dem Coalition in 2010.

31:27Amol Rajan: Did it with a guy called Nick Gibb, who's a schools minister for a long time. Yes, absolutely. And Nick Gibb was actually schools minister for a lot longer than Michael Gove was the cabinet cabinet minister for education. And Michael Gove, I think, quite deliberately, quite explicitly changed education policy in England, brought in a number of sort of key changes, which we could go into in more detail, things about the curriculum, about exams, which you might in a broad brushstroke say were probably more traditional, favouring more knowledge in the curriculum more explicit instruction, more terminal exams High expectations, lots of testing High expectations, focus on standards removing the sort of element of teacher assessment and coursework focusing on traditional subjects all of those kinds of things and around about the same time actually probably starting a few years before Scotland went down a very very different route and basically the opposite route and they had a program and a curriculum called curriculum for excellence which you would say in many ways was the opposite of what gov did so it was more about things like 21st century skills a lot of the skills-based things i talked about not not you know not being explicit about the knowledge that has had to be learned much more of a focus on project-based learning not as much of a focus on the sort of terminal exams another thing i should have mentioned which Nick Gibb was particularly focused on was phonics.

32:54So early reading, Nick Gibb, who was the junior schools minister, brought in a big focus for primary schools on phonics, teaching how to teach reading, a method of teaching reading, brought in a phonics assessment. Again, none of that in Scotland. One of the designers of the Scottish curriculum for excellence, then a few years later, went and did the same thing in Wales. So the Welsh curriculum was then heavily influenced by the Scottish one. And at the time, I remember at the time, everybody was saying, Scotland and Wales have got the right idea. England are stuck in the past. And I can remember this.

33:28What has happened now? What has happened just in the last few years? Well, we're starting to get some data in on the relative success of these different approaches. And there is a big international test of 15-year-olds in many countries around the world. Yeah, it's run by the OECD and it's called PISA. I think the Programme for International Student Assessment. And they assess 15-year-olds in reading maths and science in dozens of countries around the world. And for quite a few years now, England has been doing much better than the other countries in the UK. The most striking results that came out just a few weeks ago, just the start of September.

34:05These are amazing, yeah. It's really remarkable because the average for all of the countries taking part, so not just the countries make up the UK, but all of the countries globally, it's the lowest scores recorded by the OECD on these tests in history. And they've been running since 2000. And so almost every country in the world has seen their scores plummet. And one of the very few countries to have bucked that trend is England. So if you go back in time now, if you go back to 2012, back in 2012, Scottish students were doing as well as students in England. and in some subjects doing a bit better.

34:45So I think for reading or maths, they're about six months ahead of students in England. What you see now is students in England are about a year ahead of Scottish students in maths and science and ahead in reading as well. By what kind of age? This is at 15. This is all 15-year-olds. And the gap with wows is even bigger.

35:06Amol Rajan: I think it's worth just pausing for a bit because what you're describing has such profound implications. in other words if you live in England by the way to be clear although you're saying something which kind of lords what Michael Gove and Nick Gibb did you're not sat here as a member of the Conservative Party you're not really party political in that sense you know what you're describing is that over 15 years we've accumulated a huge amount of evidence that basically kids in England are so lucky that they grew up in a system which didn't go down an alternative path and Scottish kids have lost a year and Welsh kids following Scotland have lost a year this is an astonishing thing to have as a natural experiment in our country.

35:47Amol Rajan: And it is, and actually, I shouldn't really confess this, but after I saw your substack about it, I'll be honest with you, it's not that I didn't believe you, because obviously I believe what you said, I was so taken by the starkness of the divide, all countries going down, England going up, and I live in England, that I spent a bit of time looking into the data in some detail. And England is this sort of exception, this kind of, this miracle. and you know England gets a hard time at the moment and British politics gets a hard time because it's not been very successful in many respects over the last 15 years one thing that has really worked is education in England and yet yeah I know I know I know what are you about to say?

36:24I just find it astonishing because as you say the data is really stark and there were a lot of people when PISA came out were saying oh but you know it's just one data point it's one test what about the sampling what about this like trying to pick holes in it There's another less famous international test, which is run by a different organisation, does something slightly different, different ages. England also does really well on that. So in this alternative one, it's called Tims and Pearls. England is also the only country outside East Asia to come in the top 10 of every subject.

36:56Amol Rajan: But to make explicit what I think was implicit in what I was saying and you alluded to, is that we have a position in this country which regardless of your politics, and I'm not party political in any way, shape or form, We now have a policy which looks to undo this exceptional case. Right, exactly. And as you say, it is not like the British state has been remarkably successful on a lot of public policy issues over the last 10, 15, 20 years, OK? Like, there are clearly a lot of problems in things like health and things like defence. You know, you look across the public sector, the public realm.

37:22I would say English schools are one of the only, if not maybe the only, like, bright spot. There are people from around the world who come to England to look at what its schools are doing, right? it. People get in touch with me, like journalists, officials, they'll just get in touch with me on my website. They want to talk about what are England doing. I don't think this is happening in many other parts of the British state. And yet what is remarkable is you have what I feel like is one of the few success stories of British public policy. And the current government have seemed very hostile to it and want to undo it.

37:56It is completely baffling.

37:58Amol Rajan: I should just make it clear for people watching and listening, this is not because you're some sort of ideological hater of the Labour Party. You're not sat here as a kind of, as far as I know, you're not a member of the Reform Party. You're not here. You're not here. You're just, I think you basically want kids to get a great education. Why has that happened? Why is it that you can get to a stage where despite abundant evidence, maybe some people see it as a Tory thing, maybe some people, you know, despite the fact that Andrew Adonis with the new Labour government brought some of this stuff in.

38:24Amol Rajan: And I would suggest that it has happened because of the prevalence of certain myths, perhaps seven of them. And I wonder if we might just quickly rattle through some of these before we talk about the implications for the people listening to this. I should say, I think I made this explicit, our slogan on the Imol Rajan Connection is win the future, right? I want to give people the ability to understand these trends and equip themselves with the knowledge and the agency and the confidence to kind of really prepare for the future. And all the things that you're alluding to with AI, I want to get your advice on how we need to think about education to prepare people for the future.

38:54Amol Rajan: But to think about education correctly, we need to bust a few myths. and seven of them were outlined in your book of 2013 and I want to go through them and I'm going to push back on a few. Myth one, as you put it, that facts prevent understanding. Why is that a myth? Because actually facts enable understanding. Are facts necessary for understanding? Yes. Why? In long-term memory, because of what I said before about the long-term memory, working memory approach. Everything you see and hear and do in life is influenced by the facts you have stored in long-term memory. And sometimes you don't even realise they're facts in long-term memory because they're so well understood.

39:33So when you're reading a book, you're not necessarily thinking at this point, I'm just retrieving all the words that I know, all the facts I know from memory to make sense of it. It's just automatic. So people forget the facts that they have in long-term memory because they're so well understood. But in order to make sense of anything, to have any understanding of anything, you absolutely need facts in long-term memory.

39:53Amol Rajan: Practical consequence of that position, though, isn't there a danger that what you end up doing is overloading children with huge amounts that they can't consume. Yeah, I think you do have to be careful. I've said about cognitive overload. Cognitive overload is a real thing. So you do have to be careful, particularly with young students. You don't want to overwhelm them. And that is where you need to be structuring lessons and structuring your pedagogy so that students have enough time to absorb facts. And particularly when they're starting out, the hardest thing to learn often are the building blocks, the first things.

40:25because the more you know, the easier it is to learn new things. Because you've got a schema in your memory, which can be like Velcro, that when new facts hit it, if you've got a lot of old facts, it's really easy to pick up the new ones. So again, to think of the vocab example, if you know lots of prefixes and suffixes and lots of word roots and etymologies, you can hear a new word you've never heard before, but you can sort of piece it together because you've got knowledge that will help you do that.

40:50Amol Rajan: Because the way our brains work is we understand new ideas in relation to old ones. Absolutely. So the more old ideas you have, the easier it is to learn new things. A word about Amazon, one of the proud partners of this show. You know, around a million young people in Britain are not in work or education. And solving that is a real passion of mine. Amazon do a lot here, but there is one programme that really inspires me. Supported internships, training for young people with learning disabilities and autism, where 95 % are unemployed despite most wanting to work. Amazon give them real jobs with a coach beside them the whole way and more than eight in 10 go on to find permanent work.

41:35Amol Rajan: Search online for more. Myth number two, teacher-led instruction is passive. What do you mean? So people think that teacher-led instruction is very passive and that it just means students are kind of sitting at the back of a classroom, listening to a teacher drone on and they'll never learn anything. And what I show in the book, the most successful methods of teaching are teacher led, but they involve something called direct instruction. And direct instruction is actually quite active and quite interactive. It is teacher led, but it's very interactive. So the whole theory behind direct instruction, One of the main names in it is this American guy, Seyfried Engelman.

42:17And he developed a lot of direct instruction programs in the 1960s, 1970s. I've taught some of them. They're really incredible. And they do involve some quite high energy, quite interactive, lots of questioning and answering and a teacher kind of at the front of the class, but making sure the students are always being engaged, a lot of call and response with bigger classes. so a lot of evidence shows that is the most effective form of instruction where you do have a teacher leading everything it is very sort of direct and explicit but it isn't just a teacher lecturing it's a teacher constantly listening asking questions hearing the responses adapting what they're doing based on on what they're hearing from the class i bet you're an amazing what subject do you teach i taught english yeah i hear so many pupils and so many teachers

43:07Amol Rajan: and so many people who wouldn't agree with your position saying, you don't learn by listening or hearing, you learn by doing. So even with Shakespeare, get out of the classroom, go to a park and act it out. Why is that wrong? So the grain of truth is that in order to learn, there does need to be activity. But where it goes wrong is the activity doesn't have to be physical. It needs to be mental activity. and the problem is that mental activity can be going on while you're sitting still so the great challenge of all teaching and learning and one of the reasons why I am now so obsessed with assessment is learning is invisible because the mental activity is invisible right so when people say learning is active the true thing is your mind does have to be ticking over and there is an issue that a kid can be sitting there kind of sort of zonked out not paying any attention the great challenge is how do you tell that the student is mentally active And actually, you can have a student staring out the window, maybe having great thoughts about what you're teaching them.

44:09You can have another student staring out the window. Having great thoughts about breakfast. Yeah, exactly. So it's really hard to tell, but just by looking at a student, if the mental activity is going on. And this is why we have assessment. Assessment is like the bridge between teaching and learning. If kids always learn what you taught, you wouldn't need assessment. The reality is you need assessment because they don't always learn what you taught them. and sometimes they learn something very different from what you intended and sometimes yeah they're just not learning anything at all so there does need to be some mental activity going on I think where people have gone completely wrong with that learn by doing thing is they then assume oh goodness they've just got to be you know they've got to be doing papier-mâché all the time they've got to be doing something with their hands um so one of the examples I gave in my book seven myths which was probably the most controversial aspect of it is I said you go back to that Shakespeare example, there was a lesson which back in about 2010, Ofsted said was good practice.

45:04And it was a lesson on Shakespeare in an English lesson. And it was being sold as good practice for English, where the students were making puppets, finger puppets of Romeo and Juliet. And my point was, that is fine if the aim is to be making finger puppets. But if the aim is to be learning about Romeo and Juliet, they need to be thinking about Romeo and Juliet. If you're making finger puppets you're thinking about the mechanics of the finger puppet so why can't you be okay i say

45:30Amol Rajan: this conscious that you've got the complete works of shakespeare right behind you if you want to pull down a little bit why couldn't you why couldn't by the action of making the finger puppets why couldn't you be imagining the beef between the montagues and the cats so there is a great uh great piece of advice from one of my favorite writers in education a cognitive scientist called professor daniel willingham and he says yeah professor daniel willingham he's a cognitive scientist at the University of Virginia. He's written a fantastic book called Why Don't Students Like School? And what he tries to do in that book is to boil it down, all of cognitive science, into nine chapters with what are the most useful things that a cognitive scientist can tell teachers?

46:08What is it they need to know from the whole cognitive science literature? And within those nine chapters, he then says in one of them, if I can boil it down to just one thing, like just one piece of advice from all of cognitive science that a teacher needs to know, is this and it's coming up. So this is your like golden takeaway if you're a teacher. He says, review every lesson plan in terms of what a student will be thinking about. And that might sound totally banal. You might think, isn't that obvious? Review every lesson plan in terms of what a student will be thinking about. And the reason he says that is because it's what we think about that we remember.

46:40And so everything I've said about long-term memory being important, the way stuff gets into long-term memory is you think about it. So you need to be thinking about what your students are thinking about because that's what they're going to remember. If they are thinking about the mechanics of the finger puppet, that's what they're thinking about. That's what they'll remember. Okay? If you want them to think about the relationships between Romeo and Juliet, the Montagues, the Capulet, you need to be doing activities that will help them think about that. And the reason why Willingham is so right that this is the most important piece of advice ever, and it's actually a great piece of advice in life, because you kind of become what you think about.

47:15Well, it's quite good for parenting. I think parenting. you are what you think about and this is why I think a lot of people now as well they realise with like TikTok and infinite scroll and social media algorithms if that is what you are thinking about all the time it kind of is what you you become so Willingham I think is 100 % right there for teachers for students for life

47:33Amol Rajan: why is it the case that we are what we think about I think as I say another great line from Willingham he says memory is the residue of thought we don't remember what we want to remember we remember what it is we think about so you can be highly motivated to want to remember something but that is not enough that actually the brain makes a bet the brain makes a bet to itself if I have to think about something a lot it's probably worthwhile remembering and those are the things that we remember and that's why you can end up remembering things that you're not that interested in if they're just constantly there so if you go on the London Underground or buses or trains a lot, you know, you will hear the same recorded sound all the time and it will just stick in your memory because you're hearing it so many times.

48:25Amol Rajan: See it, say it, sort it. There you go. You didn't want to remember that, did you? You did not. Five years ago, you did not think to yourself, you know what I'd love to do. No, but five years ago, I asked the eternal question, which is, is it see it, say it, sort it? I know. Or is it sorted? I know. It's a glottal stop issue. It's a glottal stop issue. Okay. you are making an incredibly strong case for rote learning which we might come back to in a second because again for some reason this is seen as something which is right wing and I don't get it myth three the 21st century this is myth three from Daisy Christodoulou the 21st century fundamentally changes everything doesn't it?

49:01Amol Rajan: no no it doesn't okay let's move maybe the 22nd century great historical great historical questions ah okay maybe the next century will you know what was funny is when I started writing in you know I started to write 2007, I became a teacher. Everyone, 21st century skills were so sexy. Everyone talked about it. And I remember saying at the time, when are people going to start talking about 22nd century skills? And actually, I've just heard it in the last few years. Everyone's like, 21st century skills are dead. 22nd century skills, yeah. Why does the new world of robotics and AI and calculators and frictionless compute not change what we should be learning?

49:38So it goes back again to what I'm saying about this long-term memory, working memory, this structure of our brains. A nice idea I like to use at the moment is, look, machines, physical machines transformed the need for physical labour. So it is true now, there's a lot of jobs in the past, you would have to put in a lot of physical labour, and the machines transformed that. And it is entirely possible that cognitive machines, thinking machines, computers are going to do a lot of that in terms of cognitive labour too. I get that, I'm not going to deny that. But let's think of it in terms of, you know, when you go to the gym, why don't you use a forklift truck to move the weights from one side to the other?

50:15You don't do that because the point of going to the gym is to develop yourself. It's not actually to move the weights. You want to develop your own abilities, your own strength. It's the same with learning. If the aim is to just get a job done as quickly as possible, the technology is often going to be better than you. But if the aim is to develop your own capacity, your own skill, your own ability to think, your own ability to do stuff, you're going to have to put in the hard yards yourself. Thinking is friction. And a lot of people don't like friction. Correct. And lifting a weight is friction.

50:54And it's by lifting the weight that you get stronger. And it's by doing the thinking about hard stuff, specific stuff, the maths problem, memorising the times tables, learning the meanings of new words. It's that friction, it's doing that, that enables you to develop your own capacities.

51:14Amol Rajan: Is your concern, one of your concerns, you've got many concerns, is one of your concerns that machines in the 20th century came for our muscle power and now in the 21st they're coming for our mind power? Yeah, and I think this is a real tricky one because I'm not a Luddite. I work for an edtech company. are I'm very pro using technology in the same way that I would say I think physical machines have been a huge gift to civilization I think there's every chance that thinking machines will too but I think why the thinking machine physical machine comparison is a good one is that it is true that as jobs required less physical labor that was broadly speaking a good thing but as you had jobs requiring less physical labor more sedentary jobs you do get issues with obesity you do get issues with people then thinking to themselves I'm going to be sitting at a desk all day maybe then in my own leisure time I need to go to the gym and I think there's potentially something here where we might have to start thinking about this and maybe we need to think of schools as being gyms for the mind right that we need to start thinking that actually at the everyday world is maybe not going to provide the same level of mental stimulation that it did in the past, that jobs and everyday life are potentially going to have a lot less friction in them, a lot less mental friction.

52:33Amol Rajan: And friction is good, and friction and effort is good. Myth four, you can always just look it up. Well, you can, can't you, Daisy Christodoulou? Again, the problem I just always come back to with this is the working memory issue. Your working memory is limited. This is like a fundamental limitation of human cognition. So every time you look something up, it's taking up one of those precious limited slots in your working memory. If you have something memorised and locked down, it isn't taking up those pressure slots. You've got that space free to be thinking about other things. You can carry more shopping home.

53:05Exactly.

53:08Amol Rajan: AI is changing the world, but the dilemma we face in business is making AI work for us and not everyone else. That's where Google Cloud is delivering results for big UK customers and why I am so pleased that they are launch partners of the Amol Rajan Connection. Their work is based on 20 years of research and development. And as part of that, Google Cloud's AI assistant, Gemini, helps each company design a unique platform, bringing together fragmented data and workflows. Discover more about making AI work for your business, cloud.google.com forward slash AI. Myth five, we should teach transferable skills.

53:49Amol Rajan: What, Daisy Christodoulou, have you got against transferable skills? So I am in the midst of a huge series on my substat where I'm going into even more detail on this. The Northcott Trevelyan report has been out in force. It's turning into a bit of a... It's war and peace, basically. It is, it is. It's going to go on forever, this thing about transferable skills. This is the one I would say. What are transferable skills? So transferable skills, it's the idea that there are things like critical thinking, creativity, problem solving that you can learn and then apply across any domain, any subject, any field.

54:23So people will say, and this gets a big, big, this is very popular in the world of AI because people are saying to themselves, well, look, if we don't know the AI is getting so good and the AI is getting really good at stuff, we don't know what jobs are going to be around in 10, 15, 20 years. So instead of learning the specific skills you need for a job, you should learn transferable skills. The problem is, it goes back to what I said right at the start about how things are much more concrete and domain specific than we think. The problem is that all of these skills, problem solving, critical thinking, creativity, they are so much more tied to specific domain knowledge than we think.

54:58One of my favourite papers on this has a fantastic title. It's by an expert in creativity, a leading researcher in the field, a guy called James Kaufman. And he's written this research paper and it's called could steven spielberg have managed the yankees and the theory is well steven spielberg is an incredibly creative and talented film director and leader

55:18Amol Rajan: and leader and visionary and to manage the yankee and therefore people and therefore people person right able to spell out a vision correct bring people with him i think he'd have been quite a good manager what have you got against steven spielberg well this paper concludes no he wouldn't of it that you need in order to and I find it really striking you might find this too actually it is quite hard to go into a sports team not just from outside sports but from outside a specific sport and become a manager in that field like it is really remarkable yes that's so weird when journalists become entrepreneurs I don't know why I think being a journalist for 20 years would make them ready to run a business but anyway yeah so I think the whole thing I talk about is what are the overlapping there's a term from the very early days of research and this it talks about identical elements are there identical elements between the two things you're talking about well does being able to grasp the loss of energy between energy levels in a atom and the journey of an electron does that help you understand the end that Malvolio confronts in 12.

56:29Right so this is what I would say I would say those things are quite different and they are domain specific but isn't malvolio's journey from

56:37Amol Rajan: from kind of from kind of socially approved yeah funny person to absolute loner saying i'll be avenged on a whole pack of you doesn't that kind of somehow equate to the journey of an electron no it doesn't really i remember in my very early days teaching someone talking about their new sort of project-based curriculum that was based around themes not subject knowledge and they said, you know, we do balance when kids are on the balance board in PE and then we do balance, the balance of powers in World War I. And I was like, no, no, no. So, no.

57:18I'm glad you like that. I was in a meeting and couldn't respond like that. I had to sit there and look serious.

57:28that's like a great line in a sitcom yeah yeah yeah that was what my whole early era teaching was like I was like a character just walking around

57:40that is so funny who said that to you? I can't tell you but it was you know a teacher? yeah it was an educationalist it was someone who was a senior leader in a school there was a show

57:52Amol Rajan: there was a sitcom called The Fast Show and it sounds like a line you come up with in a sitcom. There was a lot of stuff like that. A lot of stuff like that. Myth number six, projects and activities are the best way to learn. This is the learning is doing. Yeah, exactly. So this is, again, one of the problems with the learning is doing. And so I think, and this is where, you know, again, there's sort of tensions and trade-offs. Again, the grain of truth in this is that actually what I said with transferable skills, you do need to be focusing on the specifics of what it is you want to learn. you know it is hard to transfer across from from different different domains we do learn things in the context that they're presented in the problem with project-based learning is again the long-term memory working memory issue is that projects real world projects are quite overwhelming and so a lot of the time real world projects there's so many things going on it's very hard for students to focus on and learn specifically what it is they need to do and to get enough practice so we do have to break things down into small chunks it's what i said before about about getting overwhelmed that's the idea of phonics really exactly phonics is a very good example the alternative to phonics the more project-based approach is like whole word learning where you know you just say well look give them a book and they'll and they'll learn from the book or give them some picture books and then they'll pick it up it's worth saying the evidence on phonics is i mean it's it's open and shut you know phonics works absolutely absolutely i want to do your last with and we're going to apply this to how people should think about the future and winning that future final myth is to do with if you believe in knowledge who gets to choose what knowledge myth number seven from daisy christa doulu is that teaching knowledge is indoctrination well some people would say it is indoctrination yeah you end up kings and queens you write black people out of history and you teach actually a narrow set which is a set chosen by the powerful people so if again i think grain of truth here is the choice and selection of knowledge does matter and who gets to choose it and how we choose it does matter.

59:47Where I think people, again, get misled with this is they go, well, because teaching knowledge is indoctrination, let's not teach knowledge, let's just teach skills. Let's just teach the ability to critically evaluate. That doesn't work because of all the reasons I've said that we think with knowledge. So somebody, what is true is somebody does have to be making the call here. Somebody does have to be making a judgment call about what is in the curriculum and what isn't. And we can't teach everything and there will be difficult. difficult calls. And I don't want to deny the fact that some of those calls are big P and small P political, you know, that they will involve democratically elected governments making judgment calls and they will involve debate and discussion.

1:00:28That is actually, I think, as it should be. I also think that there is a less political way you can look at this. And I talked about Professor Daniel Willingham earlier, and he has a good example of this. He says, from a cognitive science perspective, the kind of knowledge that you should teach in school, if you want to try and take the political heat out of it, and I think to some extent you can, although to some extent there is an irreducible core of politicalness here that we can't, but to the extent that you can, Willingham says what you need to do is you need to look at the kind of knowledge students need to understand the world.

1:01:02Amol Rajan: Why is it that the vision of education that you have outlined, if you don't mind me saying, as someone who came from an ordinary working-class family in the East End and for whom education was a transformative power, why is it that pretty much everything that you've described is, in political terms, right-coded? As in, it's seen by people to be a right-wing thing and you are outlining a position which goes very much against what the Labour government of Britain at the moment believes in. And I'm just going to preface your answer by saying This is a historically, it's almost a historic aberration.

1:01:36Amol Rajan: I don't know if we've got it here, but there's one of my favourite books is called, is it here, The Uses of Literacy. It was written by a guy called Richard Hoggart, whose son Simon actually was a guardian's parliamentary sketch writer. And he talks about growing up supremely poor in interwar Leeds. And books and literacy were his emancipation. And he was a figure of the left. And for quite a long time in the 20th century, it was the left with its kind of cardigan-wearing Marxists who believed in the position you're outlining. Everything that you say now, for instance, believing in rote learning.

1:02:09Amol Rajan: Now, you know, I don't think this is a right-wing issue in the slightest. I really believe in rote learning because I think if you can give a kid a poem, you've got a friend for life. How did your position come to be, in modern terms, right-coded? So that is a great question. It's one I think about a lot. I've probably been thinking about it for 20 years. and I'll be honest with you, I don't think I have a particularly brilliant answer, but I would tell you roughly what I think. You're absolutely right that if you go back in time, this wasn't the case. You mentioned Richard Hoggart, another fantastic book, Jonathan Rose, The Intellectual Lives of the British Working Classes.

1:02:44This great history about working class people essentially trying to educate themselves. Reading, autodidacts. Autodidacts, absolutely. So it's not always been the case. there is a really strong tradition, as you point out, in working class history of working class men and women wanting to learn more, wanting knowledge, seeing knowledge, as you said, as freedom, seeing knowledge as a means to... Emancipation, which is what the left is all about. And a means to understand, you know, perhaps the way the inequalities and the injustices in society is a way to better understand those. So it definitely hasn't always been the case.

1:03:20This year, 2026, the 50th anniversary of a famous speech by James Callaghan, a Labour prime minister. It was called the Secret Garden speech. It was a real landmark speech on education where he was kind of voicing some of his wariness and scepticism about newer methods of education. And I think you can read in the subtext of what he's saying, newer methods of education that maybe didn't place the emphasis on knowledge enough. And I think, you know, you look at what Callaghan was trying to do in that speech. I think he would have been somebody who was, again, you know, a working class man who'd come up through the trade unions and who saw that kind of education as a way that working class people could, as I say, understand the world about them.

1:04:02Amol Rajan: Professor Jonathan Haidt, who people know through The Anxious Generation, perhaps most recently, but he wrote a brilliant book called The Righteous Mind and he talked about the different pillars of moral thought. There's a sort of thing, perhaps on the left, amongst liberals, this feeling of you elevate the importance of compassion and maybe if you have too much of a knowledge-based education, it's tough love and if it's more child-centred, that's more kind of compassionate. I genuinely don't understand it because I do think, thinking about what you just said there, it is a historical aberration.

1:04:30Amol Rajan: And I think it's a bit tricky for a lot of people who I speak to on the left of politics in Britain when, for instance, people like Catherine Beerble-Singh, who's got a reputation as Britain's strictest head teacher and I know very well, you go to a school, the fact is it's completely transformed the lives of an extraordinary number of people from very poor backgrounds. And that's tricky if you're on the left because you say, that's not the education that we believe in and yet she's emancipating in some ways and helping lots of people from poor backgrounds. I can't figure it out. I don't know quite why.

1:04:57Amol Rajan: Maybe it would just take guts for someone on the left to say, yeah, we believe in knowledge. I know and I think, as I say, there are these traditions on the left that do support it. In a more modern sense, I think there are people within the Labour Party in the modern left who do get it. There are a lot of teachers who would think of themselves as on the left but are very committed to these ideas. So there are still those traditions there. I think what has been quite disappointing about where the Labour Party are now is I'd sort of hoped that they'd seen these debates and had maybe realised this and we could sort of move on from it and all accept the value of knowledge.

1:05:34And it does seem a real shame that that hasn't happened. And as you say, you've still got these kind of political divides there.

1:05:42Amol Rajan: Two kind of final thoughts, can I end with technology? Just before we get there, I think the biggest emergency, and it is an emergency, not a prospective one, but the current emergency that we have in this country is to do with young people not in education, employment or trade. NEATs. There's a million of them. 16 to 24 should be the prime of their lives. And it is just absolutely extraordinary. Lots of different causes. It's very hard to undo, it seems. The numbers seem to be rising, then falling, then rising again. Why have we got so many young people who are NEATs? so I think part of this is to do with economic policy that is outside of education so I think if you talk to a lot of employers so in neat not in education employment or training if you talk to a lot of employers I think the cost of employing a young person has gone up by a third in real terms in the last six years this is things like in hospitality if you are running tight margins you're not making much money on your food you're not making much money on your drink the minimum When wage goes up, all these things make it harder and you're not going to give that job to that 18, 24-year-old.

1:06:49Well, it basically used to be, and again, I'm not an expert on economics, but I think it used to be that there was a separate minimum wage for 18 to 21 or 16 to 21. There was a separate minimum wage. And that's now been equalised with the main minimum wage. I think you have to have a little bit of realism of however great your education system is, young people joining the workforce for the first time probably need a little bit, maybe a little bit more support, a little bit more guidance from people in the team than older workers. And therefore, I think you probably can justify having a lower minimum wage.

1:07:22Other people would say, no, it's very unfair to have a lower minimum wage for younger people. It's inequitable.

1:07:27Amol Rajan: But if it's the difference between being in work or not in work, and if the evidence is that if you're not in work and you get onto welfare or benefits or social security, whatever you want to call it, the chance that you're going to stay there because it's not a trampoline. It's a net. It literally traps you. So I think that, I think there's ways in which government needs to look at that. I think that for me would be an issue. And one of the things that's frustrated me is you've seen a lot of this talk about NEAT being pinned on schools. And obviously, as I said to you before, schools do have obviously a function of what they do is producing students ready for the job market.

1:08:00But there are obviously so many other factors in what creates the NEAT rate. And my favourite statistic to quote here goes back to that natural experiment we were talking about, which is that that NEAT rate you talked about a million out of work that's UK wide and so actually if it was all to do with education we might see different NEAT rates in Wales and England and Scotland and actually when we look at the NEAT rates across all the regions they seem to be similar and actually in Wales the NEAT rate has gone up at a faster rate than it has in England so that would be a reason why I would say I think some people want to say oh the education system in England they might have taught the kids lots of things but they're not it's not making them ready for work i don't think it can just be that otherwise why are we seeing a higher neat rate in wales which has a very different education system got it so i think the neat rate schools definitely have a role to play but it can't just be schools and i think the recent spike in it probably has more to do with some of these tax and and and minimum wage changes yeah let's end

1:08:58Amol Rajan: on technology one of the reasons for setting this show up is that i think you know we are living through this extraordinary kind of super accelerated era of human history and a lot of people feel very very very overwhelmed particularly by technology smartphones internet social media all of that and now AI I just want to kind of set the context for this which is something quite astonishing happening which you could describe better than me which is it is true is it not that one of the supreme ironies of this age of super abundant intelligence is that the evidence globally owing to something called the Flynn effect is that we are possibly getting dumber.

1:09:34Is it the case that humans are getting dumber? That's a great question. Is it the case humans are getting dumber? There is some evidence that this could be happening. And I talked about PISA earlier. So the PISA studies have shown the lowest average scores on record. It's been going since 2000. even before those PISA results though as you say you talked about the Flynn effect the Flynn effect named after a researcher James Flynn who investigated it the Flynn effect so just the original Flynn effect was the idea that people were getting smarter over time and the evidence for that was IQ tests which began sort of late 19th early 20th century IQ tests over time populations seem to be getting better and better at them and then depending on when you look at sort of maybe 1970s, 1980s, there's some evidence that they're going into reverse.

1:10:31And this is called the reverse Flynn effect. So this is the idea that maybe for decades, it looked like everybody was getting smarter. And all of a sudden, maybe that's now gone into reverse. And why might that be? One theory, which I find quite persuasive, is hard because there's evidence, it's patchy here. But one theory I find quite persuasive is that it is to do with technology. And it goes back to that point we were talking about to do with friction, with mental friction, that often it is the thinking you have to do in everyday life and the things you have to do to get by. It's those things that make you smarter and keep you on your toes.

1:11:10And if there's just not as many of those things, is there the potential that you kind of, you just stagnate cognitively and you just do, everybody gets a little bit more stupid. and so the really interesting bit of data on this which is quite suggestive is a lot of the data we have on iq tests come from scandinavian countries who for years for decades now do iq tests on all the 18 year olds who are conscripted at age 18 so they all have to take an iq test as part of the conscription and that's where a lot of the evidence for the reverse flinn effect comes in and what's also really interesting is they found a lot of this reverse flinn effect they could see it happening within families.

1:11:50So what I mean by that is when the Flynn effect was happening, like kids were getting smarter, they would find that the younger kids in a family would be smarter than the older kids. And as it went into reverse, they found the reverse was happening, that the older kids in a family were smarter than the younger kids. And that suggests maybe it is as more and more technology comes into our lives, and as kids are picking it up and using it, that you just have to think less.

1:12:16Amol Rajan: Correlation does not mean causation, and this is hard to prove definitively, but were it to be the case, what would be going on is that modern technology, which has gone from, just say, automation robots, the white goods of the 50s and 60s, which meant the dishwasher and the Hoover and the iron, it's gone into doing thinking for us, is a form of cognitive offloading. And if machines are doing the cognitive work, the problem-solving computational work of the brain, we're using our brains less. Correct. And if we're using our brains less, we're going to be less good at thinking. Exactly. And I think there's an issue that all of us, human beings, both physically and mentally, we are lazy.

1:12:59And I don't mean that in a bad way. Like we're hardwired to be lazy to try and save effort. It's like a good thing in a lot of ways. But what that means is, again, I talked about the analogy with physical exercise. it means that then obesity can become a problem there is a risk people talk about the obeseogenic society there is a risk that we are becoming a stupidogenic society that is a society where it's basically easy to be stupid right it's just everything around you if it makes it all easy for you you

1:13:27Amol Rajan: won't have to do any thinking so if we had to distill all of this down i'm sure we're gonna have some questions you're answering on this distill all of this down we are moving to a world where the friction has been taken out the technology is doing all the cognitive work for us education policy it seems to be being unwinding some of the benefits of the last 15 years if people listen to this think god that daisy chrisatuda she's very persuasive what does this mean for my kids last thought is how do we change how should parents you or your parent how should parents reimagine or rethink what they're doing for their kids in order to prepare them for the new future so i just really love this idea of schools as gymnasiums for the mind you know that is the one I keep coming back to I do think even though the world is going to be saturated with technology and there's lots of good reasons for that as I say I'm not a Luddite there's reasons we need that but I think that when we're learning we are going to have to have like protected spaces we're going to have to have spaces where children do not see screens where they're not using calculators they're not using large language models and where they are just developing their own mental faculties you know they're thinking hard about hard stuff without the crutch of technology.

1:14:34I think that is the way we're going to have to go.

1:14:37Amol Rajan: A bit like this studio. Absolutely. I love it. I love it. Seen here, talking, you know, no phones, no large language models. That's what it is. Conversation. Questions and answers. And you're answering some questions from our listeners. Daisy, it is such a pleasure and a privilege. Thank you for coming on the Amal Rajan Connection. Fantastic. Thank you, Amal. It's a pleasure. There is just so, so much to take away from that conversation with Daisy Christodoulou. She is just, by the way, objectively one of the most interesting and intelligent people I have ever met. And as ever, I'm going to try and distill that conversation to three lessons.

1:15:14Amol Rajan: That's a pun on lessons, by the way. Lessons on education. Get it? Right, lesson one. I just love the metaphor about long-term memory and working memory being like going home with your bags of shopping. Basically, the more you have in your long-term memory, the more that's stored up there, the more space is freed up in your working memory so you can learn. In other words, memorize things, because if you memorize things, that frees up space to learn new stuff. Lesson two, Daisy Christodoulou is not against vocational education. She's just against vocational education starting too early. In other words, at 14.

1:15:54Amol Rajan: Now, the practical reason for that in her telling is that specialist education of any kind requires specialist colleges with specialist teachers and special connections to some industries. But the principle is that some people are late developers. Lesson three. It is just a bit weird that believing in a type of traditional education which has been shown by abundant evidence to really help people from disadvantaged backgrounds is somehow seen as right wing. It doesn't really make sense. You know, Krista Dooloo spent 20 years thinking about it. She doesn't really get it. And there was, as she says, this older tradition on the left, which really believed in academic rigor precisely because education and knowledge was a way of helping people potentially out of poverty.

1:16:38Amol Rajan: Thank you so much for watching. We're going to have the questions episode with Daisy on Monday. Please make sure you listen to that. She's going to be answering questions that have been sent in. And I should just say, final request before we go, please do subscribe to the Amal Rajan connection. That way we can stay in touch and having you here means the world to me. Before we go, thank you again to NatWest, to Waitrose, to Amazon and to Google Cloud. They are our launch partners and they make all of this possible.