As we know, education is undergoing a major transformation which has, at its heart, a fundamental shift in the nature of the teacher-student relationship. This is a shift from a teaching relationship to a learning relationship and as teaching itself professionalises it is a shift from a focus solely on what a teacher does to include also who a teacher is.
Read MoreI have been spending half an hour per day listening to some of The Great Courses audio books which package full courses in 30-minute sessions. The Learning Brain is made up of 24 lectures and is extremely insightful, building up how we learn from first, neurological, principles.
Read MoreI have been reading ‘The Better Angels of our Nature’ by Steven Pinker which is an exhaustive analysis of violence in all its forms (spanking to murder to genocide, and everything in between) and in more than sixty detailed graphs he shows that every form of violence has been in long-term decline and the first decade of the twenty first century, is, he asserts, the least violent period in history (he wrote the book in 2010). Worth reading (it’s long though, 758 pages), as this conclusion is by no means intuitive but by the end overwhelmingly compelling.
Read More“There is no greater drama in human record than the sight of a few Christians, scorned or oppressed by a succession of emperors, bearing all trials with a fierce tenacity, multiplying quietly, building order while their enemies generated chaos, fighting the sword with the word, brutality with hope, and at last defeating the strongest state that history has known. Caesar and Christ had met in the arena, and Christ had won.”
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