Kelly goes across the pond to speak to educator Daisy Christodoulou, whose provocative books on education take aim at a lack of teacher autonomy, fact-based curriculums and the misuse of technology in the classroom. 

Some people might be surprised that you take issue with the educational philosophy of folks like Rousseau, Dewey, and Friere in your book “Seven Myths About Education.” 

“So, I’m someone who thinks that the end goal of education should be to create students who are skilled at problem solving, who are creative, critical thinkers, who are good at communicating. I think all those are legitimate goals of education. And I think there’s a fair case to say that perhaps in the past, education’s goals have been too narrow. So, I would agree in a more expansive kind of end goal of education. I think why I differ from those thinkers that you mentioned – and what I was writing about in Seven Myths – is that I think that in service of those goals, I would argue you need facts, you need to remember things. You need facts in long-term memory. And I think all of the thinkers you’ve just mentioned have a very negative attitude to knowledge and to memorization which actually makes it harder to achieve their aims.” 

This is also important because of the various tech solutions people want to impose upon education, right? 

“We’ve got large language models. You can just use Chat GPT to look something up. And what I’m trying to say is that all of these arguments: Rousseau, the smartphone, the large language model, all of them, what they don’t take into account is the cognitive architecture of our minds – the way that we think and reason. And so, I’m not trying to make a political argument. And in some ways, Rousseau, we can forgive him because he didn’t know this stuff, because we didn’t have the research then to know how our minds work. But we do know now, so we don’t have the same excuse to be as ignorant of Rousseau was. We know a lot about how the mind works. And what we know is that every time we think about something, when we’re trying to solve problems, when we’re being creative, when we’re thinking critically, we are really dependent on the knowledge we have in long term memory. So, we’re not doing all those things in a vacuum. And we need that long term memory to recall it fluently and to not get bogged down. And even the little bit of friction is introduced by looking something up on Google or on an LLM actually gets in the way of fluent thinking.” 

This all reminds me of how in improvisation, it appears we are making something from nothing – but you are drawing on all your experience and knowledge to create something that isn’t there. 

“Exactly, exactly. So that’s absolutely right. And I think improvisation is a bit like creativity. We think of them both as being something that almost, as you say, springs from nothing and almost the opposite of memorization. So, students are picking up improvisation with you because it means they won’t have to memorize. And people think of creativity, as I said, being opposed to kind of rote memorization. But actually, they are far more dependent on memory, I think, we realize, maybe just a different type of memory. In the case of creativity, where there’s been a lot of research done, people often find that what creativity is: it’s when people have lots and so much knowledge, lots of knowledge from lots of different fields, and often creativity comes from applying the knowledge that you know really well from one field to a new and unexpected field. And I suspect improvisation has something in common with that, and that that would be an element of it.”