Anthony Harradine
3.1K posts
What you *can* teach is logic, how to construct a valid argument, and how to unravel one that is not. You can teach epistemology, and the knowledge of how we know what we know. But the crucial last leg of the journey to think critically about anything is domain knowledge. If you don't know much about a topic, you cannot discern if the premises of an argument are true.
Tom Bennett OBE@tombennett71
You cannot teach critical thinking. You can teach domain specific expertise, which enables you to think critically about that domain. Brilliant chess players do not make great military commanders. More problematically, people who think they have great critical thinking skills are often the ones who get hoodwinked by any fashionable idea, because they lack the domain expertise to interrogate nonsense.
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@tombennett71 @TroyPrimaryEd 😂
I was serious. How about you Google and point to the one you like.
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You cannot teach critical thinking. You can teach domain specific expertise, which enables you to think critically about that domain. Brilliant chess players do not make great military commanders.
More problematically, people who think they have great critical thinking skills are often the ones who get hoodwinked by any fashionable idea, because they lack the domain expertise to interrogate nonsense.
James Melville 🚜@JamesMelville
“I think critical thinking should be a school subject. I've always encouraged my kids to question absolutely everything.” ~ @sequi_simon Completely agree. Critical thinking should be on the school curriculum. But governments hate critical thinkers.
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@dylanwiliam @MatthewAKraft Amazing how hard it is sometimes to understand a comment. Seriously, the word from people I know working at the heart of this space is that power consumption of current AI systems is not a non-issue.
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@apharradine @MatthewAKraft Yes. Almost as much as watching ten seconds of Netflix.
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When asked about AI and the future of K-12 teaching during a panel at #AEFP2026, I responded that I thought very little of what teachers do on a day-to-day basis *in classrooms* would change in the next 10 years.
The reaction I got suggested this is a heterodox view. Am I wrong?
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Three years after I stood down as Deputy Director of the Institute of Education, it began a run of 13 consecutive years at the top of the 2026 QS World University Rankings for Education: bit.ly/47J3NL1. All league tables are stupid, but this has got to mean something...
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@MatthewAKraft I would have agreed with you a few months ago, but as I work with Google's Notebook LM, I am now much less certain than I was. One important difference is that Notebook LM is more extractive rather than generative AI...
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@greg_ashman What would your purpose be for asking that question?
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A good question to ask when considering engaging an education consultant is: Why are they doing this and not teaching or running a school?
There are some very good reasons for doing consultancy. Who knows, I may do it one day. However, it’s worth asking the question.
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@edulorechris Who knew turning back time could be so hard.
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Retrieval practice stands out as one of the most effective strategies in education research, yet it still seems uncommon in classrooms.
Agarwal et al. (2021) reviewed 50 school-based studies with over 5,000 students.
Here’s what they found 🧵⬇️
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Friendly math advice: unless you are a genius like Tao, you will never learn math just by reading a textbook and hoping that you understand things. You actually have to roll up your sleeves, grab a pencil or pen, a notepad, find a quiet place, and do the exercises. Do the math💪
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It’s not just Harvard. It’s not just outreach/education stuff. It’s EVERYTHING. Do you think some part of modern math, physics, biomedical etc. research is important? Then I’ve got bad news for you.
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Something I find slightly heartening: the modal MAGA response I’m seeing to my tweets about the Trump admin’s massive cuts to science funding is that they simply can’t believe it’s happening.
They really are cutting everything, including science of the highest quality.
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Just heard someone refer to an academic paper “dropping,” rather than “publishing.”
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@WSPcio We have been experimenting with mathematical battles now for a couple of years. If you are interested in connecting, please send me a message.
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Happy Easter to everyone who celebrates the holiday! We hope all students and parents enjoy their extended weekends and feel refreshed for the final half-term of the Maths Circles!
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@jillenelouise @tombennett71 My experience is called Ada Therapy, an almost silent experience. Ada, who is Taiwanese, tells me I am “quite Asian”, as apparently it is common to close one’s eyes and just sit, as hair is cut in Asia. 🙂
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@tombennett71 Although I’m not male, I too love the ‘silent visit’.
Thankfully I now have quite obvious hearing aids which require removal around sharp scissors, so this gives the visual cue that I will not be conversing in the immediate future. 👍
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On behalf of almost half of the world’s population, please do not do this. We go to *not talk to someone*. An almost silent visit to the barbers is an act of self care. A chirpy chatterbox who loves the bants is a guarantee I’ll search elsewhere. Which in this economy, usually means about fifteen meters away.
BBC News (UK)@BBCNews
Barbers train to talk to men about mental health bbc.in/42ol9KV
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@rpondiscio That is more or less what my Dad told me. Can a society be without a “working class”?
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“The only way out of the working class… is education."
Honestly with Bari Weiss@thehonestlypod
FP columnist @NFergus says the historical lesson for working class people in deindustrialized cities is clear: “The only way out of the working class… is education. Where the American people have been failed, especially the working class, is that their education has deteriorated… The problems can’t be blamed on trade policy, can’t be blamed on China, when they really have much more to do with an unsustainable policy mix ranging from public finance through to education. Donald Trump’s [idea] that we can return to our glorious industrial past via tariffs is a fantasy.” Listen to his full conversation with @BariWeiss now: thefp.pub/4loiCHJ
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I would be interested in a longitudinal study of students who had been to Michaela. Without denigrating the school's achievements at all, are the *dispositional* characteristics lasting?
i.e >
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Schools need immediate solutions, not convoluted philosophies requiring years of costly training and implementation. They must have inexpensive, self-explanatory math resources that empower teachers and students starting 𝘯𝘰𝘸. #YouTeachYou #notech #reproducible #teachertraining #equityineducation #mathcrisis
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@Miss_Snuffy Can you briefly tell me what the merits go towards, if anything. Or is it a simple and powerful and positive acknowledgement?
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This is why at Michaela, we hand out 30 to 50 merits per lesson, with the emphasis that lots of those merits go to quiet hardworking kids who can often go unnoticed.
Those kids MUST be SEEN or your school culture collapses.
James A. Furey@JamesAFurey
It’s a strange kind of message: act out every day, and eventually you’ll get a reward just for behaving once. Do the right thing consistently, and no one notices. That’s PBIS logic.
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@littmath Gotta know when to turn your back on it, like anything. But humans are not good at that, and seem destined to edge closer and closer to the cliff’s edge. Curiosity could well be our downfall, how ironic.
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AI cannot destroy the understanding you gain from a work; it can’t understand things for you. If you’re worried about the economic effects of AI, fine—but if the market value of a piece of cultural or scientific work is its primary value to you, you’ve already lost the plot.
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My wife and I (both teachers) were talking last night about how much we had to teach ourselves about teaching AFTER finishing our teacher training. We both landed somewhere between 'most' and 'basically everything.'
We also talked about how much of what we WERE taught was total BS, and we both landed somewhere between 'most' and 'basically all of it.'
Teacher education is a brutal misnomer.
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