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Teaching Minds: How Cognitive Science Can Save Our Schools
From grade school to graduate school, from the poorest public institutions to the most affluent private ones, our educational system is failing students. In his provocative new book, cognitive scientist and bestselling author Roger Schank argues that class size, lack of parental involvement, and other commonly-cited factors have nothing to do with why students are not learning. The culprit is a system of subject-based instruction, and the solution is cognitive-based learning. This groundbreaking book defines what it would mean to teach thinking. The time is now for schools to start teaching minds!
240 pages, Hardcover
First published October 1, 2011
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271 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 22 of 22 reviews
March 21, 2013
Very interesting perspective on how to fix education. Would have liked more specific reference to principles of cognitive science that recommendations were based on.
September 14, 2012
What I liked: Roger Schank has a distinctive voice. And he's a maverick. Not as familiar a maverick as Alfie Kohn, but a maverick nonetheless. He thinks the educational mindset is a joke, that it educates young people to perpetuate itself, as if every kid is being taught to become a professor (only most of them will be something else entirely). He reveals universities for what they are -- political and capital entities, as interested in advancing their own self-interests and bottom lines as much as they are in educating students. In fact, the educating part is mostly a nuisance. They'd rather do research and talk to each other. They live, in fact, for May through September.
Schank's belief is that all teaching should be project-based. We should teach kids only skills that will serve them in the real world. How? By creating "cases" that reflect true situations in the real world. He boils it down to these essential skills:
Conceptual Processes
1. Prediction
2. Judgment
3. Experimentation
4. Evaluation
Analytic Processes
1. Diagnosis
2. Planning
3. Causation
4. Judgment
Social Processes
1. Influence
2. Teamwork
3. Negotiation
4. Describing
I especially like it when Schank goes off on a rant (of course, this leads to what I DON'T like, too). He picks on easy marks, like algebra. Who the hell needs algebra, except for a minute number of engineers and future math teachers? Kids know it. We know it. Only math teachers perpetuate the myth that it's of any use. And, as kids want to get into "good schools," they play the game. Once there (college), the game becomes finding the easiest teachers who harness you with the least amount of work. Not much learned is of use. You come out of school erudite, maybe, but also often unemployed.
What I disliked: Though Schank's rip-roaring style is undeniably fun, it's short on substance and often repetitive. In one chapter he shares some of his "case studies," but they're all of a business slant. Teachers from all the self-perpetuating content areas reading this book want to know how his ideas translate to their fields. In other words, what does it look like? The question hangs like a curveball that never quite breaks. It's a shame, too, because I like the theory behind his argument. Too bad (not to mention ironic) that he favors teaching concrete practicalities first and theories second (if at all). Maverick, heal thyself!
Schank's belief is that all teaching should be project-based. We should teach kids only skills that will serve them in the real world. How? By creating "cases" that reflect true situations in the real world. He boils it down to these essential skills:
Conceptual Processes
1. Prediction
2. Judgment
3. Experimentation
4. Evaluation
Analytic Processes
1. Diagnosis
2. Planning
3. Causation
4. Judgment
Social Processes
1. Influence
2. Teamwork
3. Negotiation
4. Describing
I especially like it when Schank goes off on a rant (of course, this leads to what I DON'T like, too). He picks on easy marks, like algebra. Who the hell needs algebra, except for a minute number of engineers and future math teachers? Kids know it. We know it. Only math teachers perpetuate the myth that it's of any use. And, as kids want to get into "good schools," they play the game. Once there (college), the game becomes finding the easiest teachers who harness you with the least amount of work. Not much learned is of use. You come out of school erudite, maybe, but also often unemployed.
What I disliked: Though Schank's rip-roaring style is undeniably fun, it's short on substance and often repetitive. In one chapter he shares some of his "case studies," but they're all of a business slant. Teachers from all the self-perpetuating content areas reading this book want to know how his ideas translate to their fields. In other words, what does it look like? The question hangs like a curveball that never quite breaks. It's a shame, too, because I like the theory behind his argument. Too bad (not to mention ironic) that he favors teaching concrete practicalities first and theories second (if at all). Maverick, heal thyself!
March 16, 2012
Schank thoroughly examines just what we mean when we use the term intelligence, and then offers his thoughts on what we should mean. Schank asserts that diagnosing and analyzing should take precedence over information retrieval in education. I couldn't agree more.
What is difficult is Schank's tone--and he probably doesn't care. He comes across as arrogant and confrontational. Not a fun guy to meet at a party.
On the other hand, I read his book and don't have to converse with him, so I'm able to get over it and learn from his writing. He articulates some issues that have been bothering me for years--knowing that I wanted education to do more, but not being satisfied with a vague "let's teach critical thinking" approach. Schank echos Liz Coleman's call to re-invent the concept of what a discipline means--and if you haven't seen her TED talk--you should.
I'm hoping some more friends/tweeple of mine will read this so that I can have a discussion with them about how to make the twelve cognitive processes part of the real world of school. Here are the twelve that Schank says underlie real learning: prediction, modeling, experimentation, evaluation, diagnosis, planning, causation, judgement, influence, teamwork, negotiation and describing. Hardly--reading, writing, etc. . .
What is difficult is Schank's tone--and he probably doesn't care. He comes across as arrogant and confrontational. Not a fun guy to meet at a party.
On the other hand, I read his book and don't have to converse with him, so I'm able to get over it and learn from his writing. He articulates some issues that have been bothering me for years--knowing that I wanted education to do more, but not being satisfied with a vague "let's teach critical thinking" approach. Schank echos Liz Coleman's call to re-invent the concept of what a discipline means--and if you haven't seen her TED talk--you should.
I'm hoping some more friends/tweeple of mine will read this so that I can have a discussion with them about how to make the twelve cognitive processes part of the real world of school. Here are the twelve that Schank says underlie real learning: prediction, modeling, experimentation, evaluation, diagnosis, planning, causation, judgement, influence, teamwork, negotiation and describing. Hardly--reading, writing, etc. . .
October 15, 2014
Most useful takeaways? Give people problems to solve. Show what they'll be building. When students are wrong, ask them questions rather than telling them the answer.
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November 26, 2020Not impressed when Schank positions school ontology without critiquing the socio-economic ecosystem that education is embedded in. And it is precisely how science is being criticised for its reductionist approach to segmenting complexity. Teaching as a category is convenient, but it is also a mind trap that blocks us from finding where the activism is located, and even tackling the hopeless heroism implied in the title.
August 10, 2025
I’ve a love/hate relationship with cognitive science. But this is an occupational dislike. Cognitive science ought to be about how people learn, but Australia (and much of the world) uses the ‘settled facts of cognitive science’ to say the most incredibly daft things about learning. Things like you need to teach things piecemeal or people won’t learn them, or that you need to test and test again whether what you have taught has been learned, or that it is too easy to overload memory and so you need to avoid distractions and just teach what it is you want people to learn. That people are best considered empty vessels and so you always have to start with the basics and work up from there. None of these things seem particularly true to me, I would argue with all of them, and yet they are being mandated in Australia and elsewhere as the best cognitive science has to offer. So, it is refreshing that the last few books I’ve read by cognitive scientists are as dismissive of these pieces of received wisdom as I am. This book should be made compulsory reading for Australian educational policy makers – those who like to refer to themselves as experts. Of course, this isn’t going to be the case anytime soon. And more is the pity.
I’ve also been increasingly coming to the view that the disciplines are exactly the wrong way to teach people anything worth learning. Amusingly, this author thinks the same thing – even if he is even more radical than I probably am. He sees the disciplines as mostly about keeping people out of tertiary education – and as a way to ensure that university professors don’t have to teach things they’d rather not teach. And so they push these things down to high school – which is too often seen as preparation for tertiary education, whether you plan to go on to tertiary education or not. Ironically enough, this is all seen as essential 21st century knowledge – despite it not being all that much different from what had been essential 19th century knowledge. He makes the point that it is quite possible to live a full and rewarding life and to have never studied algebra. Now, I really liked maths at school. But I the only time I have used much of it since was in helping my daughters with their maths homework. He provides a list of things he would rather see schools teach. Twelve cognitive skills. These are not at all discipline related. They are making predictions about the outcome of actions, building a conscious model of a process, experimentation and replanning based on success and failure, using evaluation to assess the value of something, diagnosis, causation, judgement, influence (understanding how we influence others and are influenced by them), teamwork, negotiation, and how to describe things (not least, to be able to see where they went wrong).
His concern with education is that these twelve skills aren’t taught, but rather that we teach facts – and facts are dangerous, not least because they are often boring and don’t really teach us things we want or need to know. He gives some cute examples. Like the ‘fact’ the George Washington never told a lie. As he points out, this fact is the opposite of the case – Washington was something of an expert liar – and it isn’t in the least bit clear how learning that supposed fact would actually help you in life, even if it were true.
Every now and again I see short videos of people in the US being asked what seem like insanely simple questions, that they don’t have a clue how to answer. You know the sort of thing – does the earth go around the sun, or the sun go around the earth? Name five countries in Europe. Who was the first President? And they’ll say something like, I can’t remember anyone before Obama. This is then used as an explanation of why the entire education system is a failure and how we need to do something about it. The problem is that while these examples of general knowledge are all well and good – it isn’t at all clear how knowing them helps people in their actual lives. I’m not saying you shouldn’t know these things, but that knowing them hardly makes you a better person than not knowing them. Sure, it’s infuriating that people might not know that Africa is a continent, rather than a country – but it is also clear that you can live a productive life and not know who Emmanuel Macron is. He says at one point in this that you might think the whole point of education was to make you a winner on Jeopardy. And when he said that, I couldn’t help think a better example might be Who Wants to be a Millionaire? The point being that lots of people do, but I think in the Australian version of the show it took years before the show actually made someone a millionaire. Knowing lots of trivia isn’t particularly useful in life. Whereas, his 12 skills really are things worth being able to do.
And that’s his point. For him, learning shouldn’t be disconnected from doing. And if this was the case, we wouldn’t spend quite so much time bored out of our minds in classrooms – but actually want to be there – since the curriculum would be based around things we know are important and need to know. As he says at one point, we generally tell students that what they are learning might not seem important to them now, but in a few years time they will see exactly how important it is. And, like algebra, that time never seems to come. Now, don’t get me wrong – like I said, I enjoyed maths. But it wasn’t ever clear to me that I would ever use it in real life. Neither of my parents ever learned algebra and they seemed to get along fine without it. The benefits of it, to me looking back maybe 50 years, was that it taught me persistence – not something to be sneezed at – but not really what I was promised in learning it.
Like I said, this book is written by a cognitive scientist and he is saying the exact opposite of what we, in Australia, are currently being told is the received truth of cognitive science. That is, that learning is hard, it needs to be taught piecemeal, that students are dumb, and that education should be based on direct instruction. Instead, he says education should be project based and what elsewhere is called legitimate peripheral participation, that is, learning that is less about being in a classroom and more about being treated as a kind of apprentice doing real things, even if real things in a kind of cut down version of them.
Some of the best bits of this book – and a lot of this is quite amusing – where the bits where he discusses why all of this has come to pass and what we might do about it. I don’t really have too much hope that any of the problems with how we go about educating people will change any time soon – as he says, the vested interests in keeping things as they have been for the last couple of hundred years are too strong to be overcome – but we really are reaching a crisis point, a point where a decision will need to be made – and finding better ways to prepare young people to meet the demands of a world that simply does not deal in the black and white, teacher knows best, answers we are giving them at the moment is becoming urgent. Not urgent enough for any real change to appear on the horizon, obviously, but urgent enough.
I’ve also been increasingly coming to the view that the disciplines are exactly the wrong way to teach people anything worth learning. Amusingly, this author thinks the same thing – even if he is even more radical than I probably am. He sees the disciplines as mostly about keeping people out of tertiary education – and as a way to ensure that university professors don’t have to teach things they’d rather not teach. And so they push these things down to high school – which is too often seen as preparation for tertiary education, whether you plan to go on to tertiary education or not. Ironically enough, this is all seen as essential 21st century knowledge – despite it not being all that much different from what had been essential 19th century knowledge. He makes the point that it is quite possible to live a full and rewarding life and to have never studied algebra. Now, I really liked maths at school. But I the only time I have used much of it since was in helping my daughters with their maths homework. He provides a list of things he would rather see schools teach. Twelve cognitive skills. These are not at all discipline related. They are making predictions about the outcome of actions, building a conscious model of a process, experimentation and replanning based on success and failure, using evaluation to assess the value of something, diagnosis, causation, judgement, influence (understanding how we influence others and are influenced by them), teamwork, negotiation, and how to describe things (not least, to be able to see where they went wrong).
His concern with education is that these twelve skills aren’t taught, but rather that we teach facts – and facts are dangerous, not least because they are often boring and don’t really teach us things we want or need to know. He gives some cute examples. Like the ‘fact’ the George Washington never told a lie. As he points out, this fact is the opposite of the case – Washington was something of an expert liar – and it isn’t in the least bit clear how learning that supposed fact would actually help you in life, even if it were true.
Every now and again I see short videos of people in the US being asked what seem like insanely simple questions, that they don’t have a clue how to answer. You know the sort of thing – does the earth go around the sun, or the sun go around the earth? Name five countries in Europe. Who was the first President? And they’ll say something like, I can’t remember anyone before Obama. This is then used as an explanation of why the entire education system is a failure and how we need to do something about it. The problem is that while these examples of general knowledge are all well and good – it isn’t at all clear how knowing them helps people in their actual lives. I’m not saying you shouldn’t know these things, but that knowing them hardly makes you a better person than not knowing them. Sure, it’s infuriating that people might not know that Africa is a continent, rather than a country – but it is also clear that you can live a productive life and not know who Emmanuel Macron is. He says at one point in this that you might think the whole point of education was to make you a winner on Jeopardy. And when he said that, I couldn’t help think a better example might be Who Wants to be a Millionaire? The point being that lots of people do, but I think in the Australian version of the show it took years before the show actually made someone a millionaire. Knowing lots of trivia isn’t particularly useful in life. Whereas, his 12 skills really are things worth being able to do.
And that’s his point. For him, learning shouldn’t be disconnected from doing. And if this was the case, we wouldn’t spend quite so much time bored out of our minds in classrooms – but actually want to be there – since the curriculum would be based around things we know are important and need to know. As he says at one point, we generally tell students that what they are learning might not seem important to them now, but in a few years time they will see exactly how important it is. And, like algebra, that time never seems to come. Now, don’t get me wrong – like I said, I enjoyed maths. But it wasn’t ever clear to me that I would ever use it in real life. Neither of my parents ever learned algebra and they seemed to get along fine without it. The benefits of it, to me looking back maybe 50 years, was that it taught me persistence – not something to be sneezed at – but not really what I was promised in learning it.
Like I said, this book is written by a cognitive scientist and he is saying the exact opposite of what we, in Australia, are currently being told is the received truth of cognitive science. That is, that learning is hard, it needs to be taught piecemeal, that students are dumb, and that education should be based on direct instruction. Instead, he says education should be project based and what elsewhere is called legitimate peripheral participation, that is, learning that is less about being in a classroom and more about being treated as a kind of apprentice doing real things, even if real things in a kind of cut down version of them.
Some of the best bits of this book – and a lot of this is quite amusing – where the bits where he discusses why all of this has come to pass and what we might do about it. I don’t really have too much hope that any of the problems with how we go about educating people will change any time soon – as he says, the vested interests in keeping things as they have been for the last couple of hundred years are too strong to be overcome – but we really are reaching a crisis point, a point where a decision will need to be made – and finding better ways to prepare young people to meet the demands of a world that simply does not deal in the black and white, teacher knows best, answers we are giving them at the moment is becoming urgent. Not urgent enough for any real change to appear on the horizon, obviously, but urgent enough.
April 30, 2021
This book is centered around the core idea that schools (and universities) really should teach how to think. And that they don't, focussing on learning facts and optimising tests instead.
I read this book because I've held similar ideas for many years, and because I was curious "how cognitive science can save our schools" (as the subtitle claims). Indeed, I found many a statement that I could subscribe to. But I also have some points to criticise:
- The book (as many of its breed are) is highly redundant. Everything that needed saying could have been said on < 100 pages.
- The author (and this I find really disappointing) does not give any scientific evidence for his statements. Given that he was an active researcher in cognitive science for most of his life, I expect that he could have done so, but he doesn't. Which is a shame, since this way, all he says sounds like a personal opinion, not like a scientific fact.
- The author tends to go over the top. School system is not working well? Let's abandon it altogether! People should only learn what they're interested in! In my experience, he is rather too optimistic about human nature here - quite a lot of people are not interested in ANYTHING except having a full fridge and a working smartphone. Does Schank really believe that they will suddenly become curious, self-driven pupils if we remove all external pressure? My own experience tells me something else.
Nonetheless, the core of his analysis is imho correct: The way we teach IS wrong, and an incredible, incredible amount of young people's lifetime is wasted on a school system that does NOT make you fit for life. Quite the opposite. If you have a job that has anything to do with teaching, I recommend that you read the book, think deeply about it and ask yourself whether you could make some improvements. For most of us, the answer is probably "yes".
I read this book because I've held similar ideas for many years, and because I was curious "how cognitive science can save our schools" (as the subtitle claims). Indeed, I found many a statement that I could subscribe to. But I also have some points to criticise:
- The book (as many of its breed are) is highly redundant. Everything that needed saying could have been said on < 100 pages.
- The author (and this I find really disappointing) does not give any scientific evidence for his statements. Given that he was an active researcher in cognitive science for most of his life, I expect that he could have done so, but he doesn't. Which is a shame, since this way, all he says sounds like a personal opinion, not like a scientific fact.
- The author tends to go over the top. School system is not working well? Let's abandon it altogether! People should only learn what they're interested in! In my experience, he is rather too optimistic about human nature here - quite a lot of people are not interested in ANYTHING except having a full fridge and a working smartphone. Does Schank really believe that they will suddenly become curious, self-driven pupils if we remove all external pressure? My own experience tells me something else.
Nonetheless, the core of his analysis is imho correct: The way we teach IS wrong, and an incredible, incredible amount of young people's lifetime is wasted on a school system that does NOT make you fit for life. Quite the opposite. If you have a job that has anything to do with teaching, I recommend that you read the book, think deeply about it and ask yourself whether you could make some improvements. For most of us, the answer is probably "yes".
February 29, 2020
Schank believes that teaching has been reduced to the dissemination of inert facts. Teaching and learning should focus on cognitive processes, elevating the experience from knowledge-based to process-based. Knowing a fact does not endow a person with the ability to think critically about the fact within the domain of its context or without nor does it bestow upon a person any influence to change behavior, character, or perspective. A knowledge-based system, then, devolves into indoctrination—informing people what to think instead of how to think.
Premises for NCLB:
All schools should teach the same subject
Some subjects are more important than other subjects
All important subjects can be tested easily
Seeing who did better than whom in school is an intrinsic part of the educational process
All children have the same educational needs
Premises for NCLB:
All schools should teach the same subject
Some subjects are more important than other subjects
All important subjects can be tested easily
Seeing who did better than whom in school is an intrinsic part of the educational process
All children have the same educational needs
February 28, 2018
This book was both inspiring and depressing. Inspiring because Schank presents some really great ideas about how education could be reformed to better serve students. Depressing because his ideas are not really new and have been kicking around for a long time getting nowhere because, as Schank points out in this book, there are vested interests that have nothing to do with what's good for students that serve as a bulwark against substantive education reform. Schank argues for a system of learning by doing (project based learning) that seeks to teach kids what they really want to learn. He argues for a cognitive process based education instead of a subject based one. He argues against the notion that teachers exist to increase student knowledge of facts or information.
March 1, 2015
A thought provoking book that raises good questions about schools, what they teach, and more importantly how a change in the focus might be more productive. I liked his suggestions about focusing on cognitive skills rather than different subjects and knowledge. I have found in hiring graduates for the past twenty years that something was wrong with education. It just isn't turning out people who can immediately succeed in schools. My HR team has been focused on teaching some of the cognitive skills (like decision making) that we need in the workplace. Now I have a more comprehensive idea of the skills needed and a curriculum of sorts for my HR team to focus on.
August 27, 2013
Really thought provoking book about what is wrong with the university system, and to a lesser degree the k-12 system in education. Makes a number of very valid, harsh criticisms of the tenure and reward structures for faculty. Thought the conclusion regarding online schools was exaggerated a bit, with little evidence that it would truly make a difference. Well worth the read, particularly for folks in education.
December 6, 2014
Far from being a complete book, in the sense that much remains unsaid, including failure to submit empirical data to support central ideas, this book is still capable of generating discussion, compel us to reflect on what school is, because is there, because we have created, what we expect of it, and what society expects of her.
More in my blog, in portuguese: http://virtual-illusion.blogspot.pt/2...
More in my blog, in portuguese: http://virtual-illusion.blogspot.pt/2...
March 26, 2022
Given that I am a public school teacher who believes in the value of what my department teaches it's students, my positive review of Schank's book may come as a surprise. However, the argument he puts forth, that students are forced into countless courses that have them do little and learn content for a year rather than skills that improve their lives, is compelling. Though most teachers and parents will defend the importance of Algebra or World history as necessary steps to adult competence, we rarely draw on anything we learned in these areas, and those who need to know them for a practical reason will learn them far more effectively than a captive audience will.
One could call this book an act of muckraking with goals as grand as those of Sinclair's Jungle, and the best teaching at the secondary through collegiate level will implement the very tactics Schank calls for. The issue is that such grand designs are the work of exceptional teachers rather than being inherent in the design of school. Another irony of this book is that I took it in as an audiobook experience, which is akin to a lecture hall class. The difference, though, is that I chose the book and can turn it on or off at my discretion. If school could just create the space for students to grow, possibly in the story-driven and cognitive domains that the book suggests, we could have a great deal more engagement and relevance. Educational Utopia may not be possible, but books like this one are essential building blocks toward the effort.
One could call this book an act of muckraking with goals as grand as those of Sinclair's Jungle, and the best teaching at the secondary through collegiate level will implement the very tactics Schank calls for. The issue is that such grand designs are the work of exceptional teachers rather than being inherent in the design of school. Another irony of this book is that I took it in as an audiobook experience, which is akin to a lecture hall class. The difference, though, is that I chose the book and can turn it on or off at my discretion. If school could just create the space for students to grow, possibly in the story-driven and cognitive domains that the book suggests, we could have a great deal more engagement and relevance. Educational Utopia may not be possible, but books like this one are essential building blocks toward the effort.
February 19, 2026
There’s a good bit of info I won’t use in this book-but I really like how he distilled learning (and what teaching should be) into 12 cognitive processes:
Conceptual:
Prediction
Judgment
Experimentation
Evaluation
Analytic:
Diagnosis
Planning
Causation
Judgment
Social:
Influence
Teamwork
Negotiation
Describing
Conceptual:
Prediction
Judgment
Experimentation
Evaluation
Analytic:
Diagnosis
Planning
Causation
Judgment
Social:
Influence
Teamwork
Negotiation
Describing
August 1, 2018
Pragmatic approach to how and why we learn.
April 3, 2016
I've been an English teacher for 6 years. Next year I'm starting a PhD in computer and cognitive science so imagine how excited I was to find a popular science book by a professor of computer science promising to boldly put cognitive science into teaching practice.
I am often disappointed by the lack of rigor that authors like Ken Robinson show when writing on education. Roger Schank is a charmless holier-than-thou Ken Robinson. While Robinson aims to help people find passion in their lives, Schank aims to suffocate such passion and turn education into a series of algorithms.
The book does not even attempt to back up its hilariously prescriptive claims. Chapter titles like "How to teach evaluation" are an account of how Schank himself does this - the only case studies refer to his own poor students and children. The book relies on the idea of teaching "cognitive skills" instead of subjects. Apparently there are 12 cognitive processes that the brain does. Exactly 12. Instead of teaching heart surgery, history or jazz composition, teachers should instead teach "diagnosis" and the rest of the 12. This will help students to "run scripts" for real life situations ensuring that they achieve mastery.
Schank points to the fact that we don't "use" the historical knowledge or the poems we learned at school in our jobs as adults to argue that such things should not be taught. He gives examples of "stupid people" like Sarah Palin. He attributes her failure to know the Bush Doctrine not to the fact that she did not learn what it was but to a failure of "Causality", "Evaluation" and other such apparent cognitive processes.
Other unfounded claims include the idea that babies cry at certain times because they ran crying experiments and observed the reactions they got and the admission that Schank's alcoholism is the result of watching his own father drink.
The only strong evidence I can find in the book to support its thesis that we do not learn things by reading or hearing them is the book itself. I read it from cover to cover an have not learned a thing.
I am often disappointed by the lack of rigor that authors like Ken Robinson show when writing on education. Roger Schank is a charmless holier-than-thou Ken Robinson. While Robinson aims to help people find passion in their lives, Schank aims to suffocate such passion and turn education into a series of algorithms.
The book does not even attempt to back up its hilariously prescriptive claims. Chapter titles like "How to teach evaluation" are an account of how Schank himself does this - the only case studies refer to his own poor students and children. The book relies on the idea of teaching "cognitive skills" instead of subjects. Apparently there are 12 cognitive processes that the brain does. Exactly 12. Instead of teaching heart surgery, history or jazz composition, teachers should instead teach "diagnosis" and the rest of the 12. This will help students to "run scripts" for real life situations ensuring that they achieve mastery.
Schank points to the fact that we don't "use" the historical knowledge or the poems we learned at school in our jobs as adults to argue that such things should not be taught. He gives examples of "stupid people" like Sarah Palin. He attributes her failure to know the Bush Doctrine not to the fact that she did not learn what it was but to a failure of "Causality", "Evaluation" and other such apparent cognitive processes.
Other unfounded claims include the idea that babies cry at certain times because they ran crying experiments and observed the reactions they got and the admission that Schank's alcoholism is the result of watching his own father drink.
The only strong evidence I can find in the book to support its thesis that we do not learn things by reading or hearing them is the book itself. I read it from cover to cover an have not learned a thing.
August 19, 2012
Yes, Roger Shank is at times pompous, incredibly self-assured and often prone to vengeful comments against those he has perceived to have wronged him.
That's the bad stuff. The good is that I find myself buying much of what he says about where education has to go and why, and the root causes of why our system is as it is. There is never any question as to Shank's viewpoints - he pulls no punches and gets right to the point.
There are really two books here: one in which he talks educational philosophy (my favorite part) and one in which he outlines a cognitive science-focused approach to education.
The educational world needs more Shanks - the system is not one that can be adjusted piecemeal without hurting anyone's feelings. When we talk education revolutions, remembers that in every revolution there are major losers - it's one of the hallmarks of a revolution.
That's the bad stuff. The good is that I find myself buying much of what he says about where education has to go and why, and the root causes of why our system is as it is. There is never any question as to Shank's viewpoints - he pulls no punches and gets right to the point.
There are really two books here: one in which he talks educational philosophy (my favorite part) and one in which he outlines a cognitive science-focused approach to education.
The educational world needs more Shanks - the system is not one that can be adjusted piecemeal without hurting anyone's feelings. When we talk education revolutions, remembers that in every revolution there are major losers - it's one of the hallmarks of a revolution.
January 12, 2014
I really wanted to like this, as I agree with his main thesis. However, despite having the phrase "cognitive science" in the title, the models and science presented are either very shallow or very dated. I suspect he may be trying to support lay readers. If so, he badly underestimates the audience that would be attracted to the work. Further, the "evidence" he presents to support a fairly radical agenda seem to invariably be cherry-picked anecdotes, convenient generalizations or appeals to so-called common sense. A disappointing effort from an author who could do much better.
November 11, 2015
I just heard about this author a couple of weeks ago and I really like what he has to say about education. I have had these same thoughts over the years, but I didn't have his experience in the university setting.
I look forward to examing his work more thoroughly to see how to incorporate these ideas into my own parenting and teaching.
I appreciate his willingness to question all assumptions of schooling and teaching.
I look forward to examing his work more thoroughly to see how to incorporate these ideas into my own parenting and teaching.
I appreciate his willingness to question all assumptions of schooling and teaching.
partly-read
April 30, 2012This book is not academic which is appropriate since it critiques the existing academic system. Its main idea is that we should focus on crucial cognitive processes, not subjects. I agree with this, however I would have appreciated some connection with cognitive science findings having become accustomed to the more academic tradition. The book belabors the point. My advice: read quickly.
November 12, 2012
Excellent book; a must read for anyone that questions what is wrong with our current educational model and who wonders what learning should look like.
April 10, 2014
Roger C. Schank presents a promising view.Should be read by everyone interested in education as he makes excellent points.
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