Children in the wild do need to be taught that jackals, wolves, coyotes etc are not dogs. (Even in the modern world it is important that you teach your children that not all dogs are safe pets.) If people left this to experience rather a lot of children would be mauled — so we teach them *explicitly* what is a “dog” and what definitely is not.

Moreover, when my children got an animal wrong, I didn’t tell them what the animal really was and leave it at that. I explained what mistake they had made — goats have tails that go up, regardless of how sheep like they look, for example.

With animals and little kids it is often not much more relentless drill — lots of practice with very clear pictures.

We tend to romanticise “authentic” learning without examining that a whole pile of it is actually explicit instruction. Just not taught by teachers and not in a classroom. Hence the massive deficit that children that don’t get this teaching at home have compared to those that do — those left to their own devices simply do not learn anything like as much as those that are actively taught by their parents.

And I take exception that academic maths is a “dead end”. It is for most students only to the extent that they won’t take academic maths as such. But we teach it primarily so that they can use it in other subjects.

I like my architects to understand the way forces work, so that their buildings stay up. I like my pilots to understand wind sheer. I like my accountant to understand exponential growth. I personally needed quite a lot of calculus in my Chemistry degree (and those with weak Maths really stuggled).

I just read the retweets. Any reaction to “I tweet therefore I am” or “I don’t tweet therefore I …?