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This post is part of a series of chapter summaries of the arguments made in my new book, Making Kids Cleverer. The rest of the series can be found here. Having made the case that by teaching children more knowledge we are likely to make them cleverer, it's important to address the question of what knowledge ought to be taught. The case made in this chapter is that we should inoculate children against [...]

This post summarises the arguments in the seventh chapter of my new book, Making Kids Cleverer. The rest of the chapter summaries can be found here. I'm sure that some readers who my be otherwise sympathetic to the arguments I advance about making children cleverer will take issue with some of the points I make in this chapter, particularly as I side step some of the thorniest philosophical debates about what precisely constitutes [...]

This post is part of a series of chapter summaries of the arguments made in my new book, Making Kids Cleverer. The rest of the series can be found here. If you've been following the argument so far, you'll know that I'm suggesting that we can make children cleverer by increasing their crystallised intelligence - their store of knowledge in long-term memory - and to do that we need to find ways of [...]

This post summarises the arguments in the fifth chapter of my new book, Making Kids Cleverer. The rest of the chapter summaries can be found here. If intelligence is casually connected with heath, happiness and safety, if the environment matters in determining how intelligent we end up, how can we go about making ourselves cleverer? One thing we can be fairly sure will raise children’s intelligence is sending them to school. Education and [...]

This post summarises the arguments in the fourth chapter of my new book, Making Kids Cleverer. The rest of the chapter summaries can be found here. A central consideration to the project of making kids cleverer is where intelligence comes from; is it in our genes or is it a product of our environments? The answer is, both. In a very obvious sense no one is ‘born clever’. Babies would universally perform poorly [...]

This post summarises the arguments in the third chapter of my new book, Making Kids Cleverer. The rest of the chapter summaries can be found here. Whatever it is you value, intelligence seems to be intimately connected with it. When experts are asked to define intelligence they come up with an unhelpfully broad and diverse range of definitions. Although we all tend to know what we mean when we describe a person [...]

This is the second of a series of posts summarising the arguments in my new book, Making Kids Cleverer.  The second chapter reviews some what we know from evolutionary biology, evolutionary psychology and archeology about how we learn and think. The human mind is both built for and by culture. Although our brains are essentially the same as those of our Palaeolithic ancestors, our access to the vast accumulation of human culture [...]

This is the first of a series of posts about the arguments in my new book, Making Kids Cleverer. The intention is, obviously, to sharpen your appetite in the hope that you'll actually give it a read. In this first chapter I set out what I consider to be the three most commonly stated purposes given to the endeavour of educating the young: Socialisation – in this view, education is [...]