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Steven Pinker

What teachers need to know about intelligence – Part 1: Why IQ matters

2017-05-22T15:14:22+01:00May 21st, 2017|psychology|

Intelligence is required to be able to know that a man knows not. Montaigne Although it’s become a truism to say we know relatively little about how our brains work, we know a lot more now than we used to. Naturally, everything we know is contingent and subject to addition, but that doesn’t mean we can ignore it or pretend we don’t know enough to draw some fairly clear conclusions. Despite the many myths surrounding it, intelligence is a good candidate for being the most well researched and best understood characteristic of the human brain. It’s also probably the most stable construct [...]

What’s the point of school?

2017-03-14T15:58:31+00:00March 14th, 2017|Featured|

Education is a technology that tries to make up for what the human mind is innately bad at. Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate Schools have only ever existed in cultures where culturally specific knowledge has outpaced universal folk knowledge. What is universal - speech, recognising distinctions between the properties of inanimate objects and plants and animals, cooperating in groups, etc. -  is clearly the result of evolutionary adaptions; if it wasn't it wouldn't be universal. Children don't have to go to school to learn how to walk, talk, recognise objects or remember the personalities of their friends, even though these things are much [...]

Do gender differences make a difference?

2023-02-13T15:37:26+00:00July 18th, 2015|psychology|

It's a well-known fact that boys underachieve. Every statistic tells us so. But ever since writing this post I've been suspicious of gender as the root cause for differences in achievement. Yes, girls outperform boys but is this due to fundamental differences in gender? Or is it more to do with expectations, perception and bias? Or is it, perhaps, an illusion? Might differences in performance be due to other, less beguiling causes? There's no doubt that boys and girls are biologically different. But, as Gertrude Stein put it, “A difference to be a difference must make a difference.” Do the very obvious [...]

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