GRASP: The Science Transforming How We Learn

Learning is an adventure, but education is a process of selection and the results can be destructive. The criteria used to separate pupils of differing aptitudes are riddled with cultural assumptions, as the author discovered when he flunked a unit in his engineering degree in India. Nowadays he is head of Open Learning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the journey that got him to one of the world's most prestigious universities also showed him the fallacies in modern educational programmes. Selectivity, starting with IQ tests which became popular in the 1930s, represents a massive squandering of resources, because IQ tests are contingent on surroundings and circumstances, and fluctuating scores within families of lower socioeconomic status indicate the disproportionate effect environment has in those groups. Over 100 years ago E L Thorndike regarded learning as a mass-replicable response to stimuli, while at the other end of the educational theory spectrum was Dewey, who approached the cognitive science of learning as a multi-layered process. Thorndike saw forgetting as a negative aspect of learning, but in the 1970s Robert and Elizabeth Bjork of UCLA posited that forgetting was an essential tool in the mind's armoury of storage and retrieval. Examining in detail the neurological processes involved in learning, the author charts the different schools of learning theory including Montessori, Piaget and Loewenstein. He follows memory phenomenon Claire Wang to Elon Musk's elite training campus Ad Astra, where the ultimate goal is to teach knowledge that will affect world outcomes. The experience reinforces his misgivings about elite education, and access rather than exclusivity continues to be Sarma's mantra. 321pp, paperback.