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The 1000 Hours Outside Podcast
1KHO 638: If You Want Your Children to Read You Have to Limit Screen Time | Dr. Daniel Willingham, Why Don't Students Like School?
00:58:02
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- [00:01]
A
This episode is brought to you by State Farm. Listening to this podcast Smart move. Being financially savvy. Smart move. Another smart move. Having State Farm help you create a competitive price when you choose to bundle home and auto bundling. Just another way to save with a personal price plan like a good neighbor, State Farm is there Prices are based on rating plans that vary by state. Coverage options are selected by the customer. Availability, amount of discounts and savings and eligibility vary by state.
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B
Welcome to the 1000 Hours Outside podcast. My name is Jenny Urch. I'm the founder of 1000 Hours Outside and I am completely honored to bring to you today a cognitive psychologist. I think the first ever cognitive psychologist we've ever had on the show, Dr. Daniel Willingham. Welcome.
- [00:49]
C
Thank you so much, Jenny. Really happy to be here.
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B
So you have written so many articles. If people go to your website and I'll put the link in the show notes, just article after article, very diverse topics but all surrounding for the most part the brain, how the brain works. And then I have three of your books. We're going to focus on two of them today. But three of your books, raising kids who read, why students don't like school and also outsmart your brain and we're going to focus on outsmart your brain is I couldn't like if I ever read more than two or three books, I'm like, I have too many notes and I can't keep up with them. But I just want to. I just want to really so people understand the table of contents for outsmart your brain. How to understand a lecture. This is a great one if you've got kids. How to understand a lecture. How to take lecture notes. How to learn from labs, activities and demonstrations. How to reorganize your notes. How to read difficult books. How to study for exams. How to judge whether you're ready for an exam. How to take tests how to learn from your past exams. How to defeat procrastination. This is a must read for parents.
- [01:50]
C
I think it can be very helpful for parents. I mean the whole point of the book is that as you were reading through that list of topics, I'm sure parents are having a little bit of flashback from their from their own school days and certainly could identify that these are things their children are doing. And what I emphasize in this book is that these are things that when children first start school, none of this is relevant. Right? All everything about learning is on the teacher. It's up to the teacher to make sure that children learn. As children progress through school, more and More of the responsibility of learning falls on the student. We have higher and higher expectations about what they can bring to the table when it comes to learning. So you're expected. Think about it. The first time a child takes a spelling quiz, for example, it's usually the first quiz thing that they encounter. It's usually mid elementary. You are asking the child to commit things to memory. Do they know how to commit things to memory? Do they understand enough about how their memory works that they can do that efficiently? The answer is, in almost every case, no. And none of these things tend to be taught in school. By the time children are in 12th grade, we have very high expectations about their ability to regulate their own memory, regulate their attention, and so on, but no one's teaching them how to do it. So that was why I wrote that book, was to try to fill in that gap.
- [03:25]
B
Yeah. It's not explicitly taught almost anywhere. And I used to teach math. I taught high school math. And I remember talking about to the students, the way that you study for a math exam is wildly different from the way that you would study for an English test that's coming up. So we talked about that some, but certainly not to the depth of what's in this book. So the subtitle here is why learning is hard and how you can make it easy. So these are so applicable for families. Can you give us your background? So, cognitive scientists, can you tell people what that is?
- [03:54]
C
Sure.
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B
And know that your professor and how you got into this field?
- [03:58]
C
Yes. It's actually kind of strange that I'm in this field at all. So I started life as a basic scientist. My degree is in experimental psychology. So I'm sort of right at the intersection of mind and brain. And the particular topic that I was interested in during graduate school was how does the brain change the as we learn? And so I did that work for about the first 15 years of my career. And a lot of it involved brain imaging. You know, everybody's seen pictures online of, like, the brains, like, lighting up in yellow and orange and that kind of stuff. So I use those tools. I also studied memory and learning in patients who have neurodegenerative diseases like Parkinson's disease, Alzheimer's disease, and so on. I was not interested in learning, you know, as a. As a education topic. And then just because I happen to be in the same town as the head of an education nonprofit, he knew about me. And he said, why don't you come to our conference and address 500 teachers? And I said, listen, I don't Know anything about education? Like, classrooms? Like, that doesn't make sense. And. No, no, we get that, that we. We just think teachers would find it interesting. So, Jenny, I've got an ego like anybody else. And so I was like, sure, I'll come talk to a bunch of teachers about learning. So then six months later, I suddenly realized, oh, my gosh, like, I have to give this talk. What am I going to say? And so I really panicked, and I just. I went through my. My notes for the class that I teach to University of Virginia undergraduates in cognitive psychology. So if you come to college, it's kind of like the first course you would take in how the mind works. And I just picked out some stuff that I thought maybe was applicable to classrooms, but I really thought this was going to be a disaster. So I've been dated. Just to give you an idea of how. How anxious I was, I've been dating this woman for a few months who was a teacher. And so I said, she's now my wife, by the way. And so I said, like, hey, do you want to come to Nashville with me and watch me give a lecture to a bunch of teachers? So she said, yes. So then, like, as the talk is, we're in Nashville, as the talk is approaching, I'm getting. I'm like, freaking out. And 30 minutes beforehand, I was like, you can't come. Like, this is going to be so bad. Please don't come. So she didn't. But it turns out the talk didn't go as nearly as badly as I thought. It was like, the stuff that I had to say. First of all, teachers did not know about it.
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B
Yeah.
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C
And second of all, they thought it was really applicable to their classrooms. And so that day, my career changed course and I stopped doing this quite technical work on brain response to learning. And I got more and more interested in what happens in classrooms and how people like me can let teachers know about sort of the breaking front of learning theory and what we know about the brain.
- [07:18]
B
I would imagine that in that lane, when you take what you've learned and you're applying it to the classroom, that there is a lot that's happening right now. And maybe, I don't know if it's like an adjustment or if it's just thinking it through, like, how does AI affect your line of work and. And what your leading teachers, you know, because in these books, it will talk about. So, for example, and why don't students like school? At the end of each chapter, you'll have this. You know, how to apply this to the classroom. They're fantastic books. You have really cool examples. So one of them was, you know, an example of one of the examples is you had all these pennies, you know, and they're like, which one is the real penny? And you're like, you know, from the amount of exposure that you've had to pennies over your life, you should be able to pick out, you know, out of these, 20 ex is the real one. So each of these books has interesting examples, thought provoking examples, and then also, like I said, how does this apply to the classroom? At what point did AI enter the picture for you? As you're a professor, you're dealing with students who are about to enter into the, the world of work. Is it pretty recent? A couple years? 5 years? 10 years?
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C
It broke on me at the same, like the same week it broke on you. It was really the release of ChatGPT, where. And suddenly, you know, you, it was inescapable. Everybody was talking about this tool. I found out later I have friends, like in the department of computer science who knew about this and like, they had access to these tools before any of the rest of us. And they were tinkering with it and like, they knew what was coming. I certainly did not know what was coming. So, yeah, I mean, the people in higher education, just like in K12, no one's talking about anything else except AI these days as it applies to the classroom. And generally speaking, when I talk about, like, here's some stuff we know about how children learn, here's how you might want to think about, like, how it would influence what you do in the classroom. I'm usually very conservative in that. And I, I feel like, yeah, there's all kinds of stuff that like, we think we know, but, you know, I don't want to tell teachers something that then three years later I'm saying, okay, actually that didn't turn out to be like, I want to, I really want to be sure the data are very, very solid with AI. We, we really can't do that. I mean, like, basically, you know, anybody who speculates on the influence of AI in education is speculating. Right? We have no idea. This is all quite new. So normally I try. I'm like, look, I don't have a crystal ball. I don't know how the heck this is going to play out. But that, that issue is sort of too urgent and we, we have to think, we have to think about what's going because it's upon us.
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B
So one of the things that you talk about that I think is interesting and relates to AI is about knowledge. So we're trying to get kids outside, you know, they're trying to play and interact in all the social skills and all the physical things that come along with that emotionally as well. And you talked about how there are all of these philosophers and beyond who have talked, you know, not just since the invention of AI, but for a long time about how knowledge is not very important. Or like there's the quote about imagination is more important than knowledge. That was Einstein, right?
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C
Einstein, yeah.
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B
Yeah. So Einstein said that. So you're, you're pushing back. And I think this is really important for parents to know because especially then when you bring AI in, there starts to be this discussion of, well, what do you really need to have memorized? You can actually just go right to the computer. You can ask it anything. But you tie it to reading.
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C
Yeah.
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B
And you talk about how the fourth grade slump is sometimes, or some people might believe that it's related to the importance of background knowledge. And you talk about how there's kind of this chicken and the egg situation where you gain a lot of your background knowledge through reading, and yet you also need a lot of background knowledge in order to. I don't know if enjoy your reading is the right thing to say, but to help you with your reading, to.
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C
Understand, you really need background knowledge to understand what you're reading. And the thing about background knowledge is so important to not only reading, to just any, any communication, any language, spoken communication as well. It's so important. Your brain is so good at using it. It's so seamlessly integrated into the process of understanding that most people don't notice it. So let me give you an example. This is actually an example from. I think I use it in raising kids to read anyway. So suppose you read. Trisha spilled her coffee. Dan jumped up to get a rag. If all you understood from that was the literal meaning of those two sentences, you've actually missed something important. If you just understood this. You know those two actions, Coffee spill. Dan jumps up to go get a rag. Because the author almost certainly intended you to understand a causal relationship between those sentences. It's not specified, but Dan jumped up to get a rag because Trisha spilled her coffee. So think about the knowledge that you need to bring to that reading in order to make that connection. You need to know that spilled coffee makes a mess. You need to know that people generally don't like having a mess around. And you need to know that a rag can clean A mess, right? So your brain has knows all of this stuff about coffee, about spilling and so on, and it plucks out this all happening outside of awareness, of course, all happening unconsciously. But your brain brings forward this knowledge about spilled coffee and so on in order to sort of build the bridge between the first, second, first and second sentences. In that case, your brain is very, very good at that. And this is something that Google is terrible at, right? So if you said like, you read, huh, Trisha stole the coffee, Dan stumped up, I don't get it. Like, let me go Google coffee. Like, you know what's gonna happen, right? You're gonna get all kinds of information about trying to sell you coffee and so on. So the big leap forward with chat, GPT and other large language models, large language chatbots, is that they're quite good at context, right? If you typed in and said, like, I don't really get this, can you explain it? ChatGPT would do a really good job. So that's one way in which your brain is much better than Google. But ChatGPT is as good as your brain, probably in drawing together contextual information to help you make sense of a passage. But your mind is still much faster than ChatGPT. So one of the things we know about reading for many, many years of research is that people don't like looking stuff up, right? So one of the ways that researchers look at this is they give people a text with a passage to read, and it varies in how many unusual words there are. And they give people a dictionary in some versions, like it's a old school book, and others it's the sort of more modern, like you can touch a word and a word pops up, and you can kind of intuitively figure out what happens if there's a bunch of words in there you don't know, you kind of lose the thread of the passage because you keep interrupting yourself to look things up, and it's kind of disruptive. So one of the things they do is they measure at the end how comfortable were. They ask people how comfortable was that to read, like, scale of 1 to 10 or something, and they look at how many unusual vocabulary words start to bug people and start making people say, like, that was really not very fun because I had to keep stopping and looking stuff up. And the percentage of words that you have to know for it to feel comfortable is surprisingly high. Usual estimates like 97, 98% of the vocabulary words. So the same thing applies, and this is, we don't have direct data on this, but I think it's a pretty safe inference. Same thing applies when you're reading, like when you're so something like Trisha's filter coffee. Dan jumped up to get a rag. The problem there is not vocabulary, it's knowledge of the world. You have to know about rags and coffee and so on. But I think the same thing applies, like, we're just not very tolerant of confusion when we read. And so this is why knowledge still needs to be in your head. Even in the age of chatgpt, you can't just look stuff, you know, figure I'll just look stuff up and I'm good.
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B
Yeah. Is it really important for parents to be aware of that?
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D
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B
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B
Because you talk about how there's this they need to know. 98, 97, 98% for comfortable comprehension. And then you talk about how the benefit of the reading out loud. So I never really considered this. It really doesn't necessarily show up until around grade three or four. That's when it's going to show up. That because you did all of this reading aloud, your child may have this large amount of background knowledge as well as vocabulary. Our fourth grader just yesterday, we were going to a grocery store and she was like, what is a pedestrian? And it was pedestal for the pedestrian crossing. Like, I've never heard of a pedestrian before. And you're like, oh, we must not have. We've never said that word. It's never come up in any reading aloud, you know, and so she wouldn't know how would you? She know.
- [21:37]
C
Sure.
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B
But it's just one of those things that you think about for such young children. You think about when they're 2, 3, 4, but that this is showing up really once they're hitting that fourth grade slump time. So can you just, I mean, light a fire under parents about the importance of reading aloud? And you talk about how parents don't really think about reading motivation until middle school because. And. And you might even miss it. They start to get busy with other things and then you realize, oh, I've got a high schooler that's not hardly reading at all.
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C
Yeah, this is so that what you're touching on is a theme that I write about a lot in raising kids who read, which is parents are sensitive to problems when they become a problem. But a lot of times the seeds of the problem were much earlier. And it makes it sounds like, scary when I say it's a problem. But I really mean, like, there are things you can be doing all along to encourage reading. So let me talk first about the fourth grade slump. So the idea of a fourth grade slump comes from children who are reading at grade level. Everything looks fine. And then suddenly at grade three or four, it's like they fall off a table and you're suddenly told like your child's, you know, a year behind or two years behind. So what has happened is the reading tests change around grade three or four. Up until grade three, reading means the. The terms that reading teachers use is decoding. It means sou out. So if your child is saying the words on the page aloud correctly, they're reading, they're doing everything that's expected. As they get to grade three or so, all the children, you know, unless they've been identified with some sort of a reading problem, everyone is decoding pretty well. And so now reading tests are not measuring whether or not they can say the words aloud. Reading tests, they're expected to understand. They're expected to comprehend. So I've just given you an example through the. Tricia spilled her coffee example of why knowledge of the world or content knowledge is very, very important to reading. So when your child takes a reading test and there's a little passage about spiders or it's about whales or something, if your child already knew something about spiders, they're at a big advantage in how they're going to perform on that reading test. Right? So kids who know a lot about the world perform better on reading tests. It's very weird. It's not the way we're used to thinking about reading tests. People write. Reading tests are well aware of this, by the way. Right. So, but when you're told, like your. Your child scored X on a reading test, you're invited to think, whatever text we put in front of your child, they're gonna, you know, X is their number. That's about how well they're gonna read it. It's really not true because if they know a lot about the topic, they're gonna do much better. So one of the keys to reading success is broad knowledge of the world. So, Jenny, as you said, there's this sort of irony. You know, we normally think, well, one of the ways you learn about stuff is reading, but you need to know stuff in order to read successfully. And that's absolutely true. So there are two things to amplify on that. One is, yes, like, you learn by reading, but at the same time, you need to know to read. So what you need is you need to be reading a text where you have most of the knowledge that will enable you to comprehend the text, but it stretches you a little bit, right? There's a little bit in there that you're puzzling over. You need some help from your parent or you need some help from your teacher or something. That's a fine text, a text that a child can comprehend with absolutely no problem. I mean, it's great. They're enjoying it, right? It may lead to reading motivation and so on. They're probably not learning that much from. From a text like that. Right. And so we're always trying to balance. Like, you know, I don't want. My kids are older now, but when they were younger, I was like, it was always a mix. Like, you know, you don't always want to be. You always need to be learning at the same time. Like, you know, I kind of do want you learning sometimes. So I'm trying to, you know, encourage them in that way. The second thing was you mentioned read aloud. So another thing we could ask is, okay, but my, you know, how does my child learn about the world before they're able to read?
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E
Right.
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C
Read aloud is one of the best ways that your child can learn. Because books are so rich in information. Your children learn from all sorts of sources. They learn just by observing the world. They learn by listening to you and to older siblings. They learn when you, you know, you know, specifically take them places that you think are rich sources of learning, like a zoo or something like that. So there are all these ways that, that children can learn about the world. Read aloud is, is definitely one of the best. And one of the things I say in raising kids who read is very many parents read aloud to their children until their children start to be able to read independently.
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E
Right?
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C
Absolutely no reason to stop reading aloud to your child once they can read independently. Because you weren't just doing it because they can't. You were also doing it because, like, it's a warm family thing to do. Right? Everybody loves reading aloud before bedtime. Children love it. Parents generally love it. It may change a little bit, change shape, but there's no reason to keep doing it. And while I'm on the topic, as your child starts to learn to read independently, don't turn that nighttime read aloud ritual into a time where you're basically quizzing your child. Right. And sort of making them read. And it's effort, you know, it's still effortful for them, right? It's still, it feels like it's work and like, like, yes, it's satisfying, you know, it can be pleasurable. But the bedtime read is a different type of pleasure. And I think you want to think very carefully about whether or not you want to mess with that.
- [27:51]
B
It's so important to know. I mean, I, I learned a while back from one book, it's called the read aloud family, where she said, don't stop reading to your kids once they can read to themselves. But I didn't know that. You know, I think our, our children read a little bit later. They were maybe seven and. But I, I didn't know. I would have thought, well, well, I'm, you know, I'm done with this read aloud. But if the importance is this knowledge and just the enjoyment of it, you know, that you're snuggled up, I would imagine you go as long as you can. You say reading exposes children to more facts and to A broader vocabulary than virtually any other activity. And persuasive data indicate that people who read for pleasure enjoy cognitive benefits throughout their lifetime. Leisure reading is wonderful for building background knowledge. So. But all students also need a strong curriculum, so they need this knowledge. And the read aloud is really going to help that because there's all of these words in there that they're going to be exposed to.
- [28:46]
C
I want to just, like, amplify a little bit on what you were just saying about read aloud. This will be brief, I promise. So many parents that I talk to, and we touched on this before, they're upset because their children drop reading in middle school, and they see that there are children out of their families, like, who. You know, those kids are readers, and they ask, like, what does it take? And I think the most important thing is you need to show your children that you value reading. Reading is a value. And even broader than that, learning about the world is a family value, right? And the key difference is that when you talk about a value, a value is not an activity that we try to make time for. A value is something that is shot through everything your family does, right? So if you are a spiritual family, spirituality affects so much of what you do. And it's. There are all of these silent messages to your children. This is important to us, right? We have things that we make sure we do every week or every year that reflect our spirituality. And the same thing, you know, the same thing. Families that have very strong political orientations, there are all of these silent messages that go to their children about where we stand when it comes to certain types of issues, right? And so learning is another value of that sort is parents showing constant curiosity. It's parents, you know, choosing where their money goes. It's what goes on the walls of your home. So it's not just, yes, of course, your child needs. If you want your child to read, it's of course they need to see you reading, right? They need to see, like, I want to keep reading aloud. Like, I love reading aloud with you. Let's keep doing that, right? But I think that's part of a larger complex of being a family that just loves learning. If you're a family that loves learning, the reading is going to come because reading is the best way to learn.
- [30:58]
B
It's real good. Reading is a value. I had that bolded in my notes. And you just talk about how that it enables entertainment, it enables fun, that the goal is not to be a good reader, but that you enjoy reading. And there's just a Lot in here about. About having that goal for your kids because that you have this statistic. Okay, this is so interesting. So you talk about how the average teen, let's say they have five hours a day of extra time. They've got five hours a day of leisure time. How should they spend it? And so there was a study and they. I don't know if you'd even call it a study. It was like a survey. They, they interview all these people. These kids got five hours of time as an adult. How do you think they should spend it? And it came back that adults thought they should spend 75 minutes out of that five hours reading. I hope, I hope they spend about, you know, a little over an hour. Then the actual time was six minutes. So. And what you're saying is really that there's some kids that aren't reading at all. These are actually really similar, Dan, to the statistics for getting outside. The statistics for getting outside are four to seven minutes a day. Which I don't think to your point, like, it's not like a kid is picking up a book and reading for six minutes. It's that some kids are reading a lot and some kids aren't reading at all.
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C
Most are not reading at all. Yeah, yeah.
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B
And I think some kids are going outside for a half hour once a week.
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C
Absolutely. Absolutely. So in this story, this was a survey, and I, I can't press too hard on this. I think I, I conducted this survey of American parents or American adults, I should say, sorry, not all of them were even parents. But I think I like this. I'm going to defend it anyway, but I do. I mean, I'll just tell you, I'll do what the data were, amplify on it a little bit, and listeners can draw their own conclusions. But yeah, what adults say they want kids to do, they want them to read, they want them to be outside, and they want them to spend time with friends. They're okay with kids spending a little bit of time with screens, but, you know, nothing like the amount of time that kids are spending with screens. And you're right. I mean, of the things that adults wish kids were doing, reading and being outside, those two big two kids aren't doing right.
- [33:24]
B
And, and it's like a very huge discrepancy between wanting it to be 75 minutes and it's actually six. So this is something that I think about a lot and as a teacher, and I love that this came up. This came up in why don't kids like school? Why don't students like school. So this comes up a lot. And I come up as. As a teacher because I taught high school math. So, you know, every single kid is like, why do I have to know this? Right? And I felt like I didn't necessarily have the best answer. However, after reading your book and learning about background knowledge, I think it becomes a clear. There's a clearer picture there, that this is important for a lot of other things because they have these touch points. But then a lot of people would say, well, you don't remember it. So you talk about this. You talk about being exposed to more facts. And the example that you give actually is geometry. So it was a really interesting one. So you give this geometry example and you say, the truth is that you do remember a little bit of it.
- [34:20]
C
It.
- [34:21]
B
So can you talk about that big question that people have, which is, especially in this day and age with AI, how do we figure out how much time to spend on the background knowledge? Does it matter or not matter if they don't remember a lot of the things that they're being exposed to? And then how do you even pick which knowledge? These are a lot of big questions. You go with it however you want. How do you pick which bucket of knowledge that they're exposed to that we want to fill?
- [34:46]
C
Right. For. For these children? On the first point, you do remember more than you think you do. There are different ways that you can access memory. One of the most important is what psychologists call savings in relearning. I think I mentioned this in the book. An example for me that really hit home was learning French. French was my foreign language. By the time I finished senior year in high school, I was, like, not bad in conversational French. Like, I could sort of grope through, you know, a conversation that if it wasn't too taxing, 10 years later, I felt like I did not remember any of my French. I mean, it was absolutely hopeless. And then I had an opportunity to go to Paris. And after a week in Paris, I think my French was pretty close to how good it had been my senior year. So this is called savings, and you can hear why it's called this savings in relearning. So even though I felt like this knowledge is just gone, it wasn't really gone because in the process, I relearned it much, much more rapidly than I learned it the first time. Right? So it was kind of. This knowledge was asleep, if you like, or something, or sort of inner. And it got awakened by being in Paris and doing some exercise. So that's the first thing I'll say is you. You probably remember a little more than you think.
- [36:18]
E
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E
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- [40:04]
C
Second thing I'll say is why would you expect to remember something 15 years after you last looked at it if with no intervening practice, Right? I mean, it doesn't, that doesn't really make any sense. The third thing so then you then that raises the question, okay, well if I'm, you know, fully expecting to forget this in the future, why am I studying it in the first place? And I think the Answer is one is you do get some very broad principles. Like, if nothing else in some of these, you know, in some of these topics, you know, this is the thing that people know about. Like, I have a certain respect for the idea this is knowable.
- [40:51]
E
Right.
- [40:51]
C
We're living in an age where expertise is really not always respected and can even be disparaged. And so if, if children see like, oh, actually this is something people know about, like, and I'm, I'm not sure, I'm like, my understand understanding of it is pretty tenuous. But I at least get, this is complicated and there are people who do understand it and are sort of profiting from that. I, I think there's value in that. But perhaps most important, you know the one, are we ever going to use this? I don't trust a 16 or 17 year old to know what lies ahead of them for the rest of their life. And so I want them exposed to lots of different things, things. And so there are many things that it's like, yes, I forgot my geometry, but the kids sitting next to me went on fire with geometry. Loved it. Right. And then, you know, because of that got interested in all sorts of similar topics now as an architect or whatever. Right. So this is one of the reasons we want to broadly expose kids to lots of different types of knowledge. And that finally gets at the final issue you raise, which is background knowledge is so important. How do you pick the back? What are they supposed to learn? A way this is frequently phrased is, well, whose knowledge? Right. Because it sounds like pretty, it sounds like whoever's picking that knowledge has a lot of power and they absolutely do. So there are a couple of things to think about. One is like, from a cognitive perspective, the answer is very plain. It's like, well, what do you want them to be able to do? Do? Right. When we talk, we talked about reading before and we said if you know something about the topic of the text, you'll be much more successful in reading that passage. And if you don't, what would you like them to be able to read and think about effectively? That's the answer. That's what they, that's what they need to know about. Now in this country we have a very decentralized education system, so there's nobody in the federal government. I mean this was, I was just talking with someone about this the other day. I think it was quite intentional on the part of the founders that they did not make provisions for education in the Constitution. They wanted it decentralized and they wanted this to be the responsibility of the states. The states nevertheless are, I would argue, not, not thoughtful enough about specifying what it is children are supposed to know because it's controversial, right? Like if you specify they should know this and we're omitting that, you know, somebody's going to get upset and it's guaranteed. Like if to everybody listening right now, if you saw a complete listing of what your child are exposed to and what's omitted, some of you are going to be upset, right? Because schools can't cover everything. And so we, we have to be willing, the adults in the system have to be willing to have difficult conversations about what should be included and what's not. If you don't have those conversations, then what your child is exposed to in school, what they're learning in school is haphazard. It's not the result of a systematic curriculum. It's a result of the individual choices that their teachers are making. Their teachers may choose very wisely, but they're not coordinating their choices. And so children may, you know, the knowledge may not be building systematically year, year on year the way it could. And that is a missed opportunity.
- [44:34]
B
So I love how you just always give, you give a follow up for teachers, for parents, and you just talk a lot about how in a lot of the people that are listening are parents, that they have a lot more influence than maybe they realize. And if the reading exposure is one of the things that exposes kids to the most, more facts and broader vocabulary than virtually anything else, at the very least, you can be doing that a lot of reading in your home, reading out loud, possibly longer than you expected or thought you would be doing. You talk about, have like you boil this whole book about reading, this one that is raising kids who read to four words. Have fun, start now. And I love that. And you say even if your child is older and you've done nothing until now, just start, start, enjoy it. Put the emphasis, emphasis on having positive reading experiences so that you know this is going to really build their background knowledge. You say, and why don't students like school? Leisure reading is wonderful for building background knowledge. College, we already talked about that. So making sure that they, I don't know, I mean, try and make sure that they like it. When I was in elementary school, late elementary school, third, fourth and fifth grade, I think they did it, they did one day a year where you would bring in a sleeping bag and, and snacks and the whole day you would read books that you liked. I love the whole day. It was wonderful. It was so wonderful. So you talk a lot about silent pleasure reading and how this is just really foundational for kids. Can you talk about you brought up expertise just a minute ago? You say it's not always respected. It can be sometimes disparaged. What's interesting in a world of AI is that you feel like you could probably quickly become an expert because you've got access to all of this information. But you talk about how the expert's mind. There's really specific things about the expert's mind and how it's not just what they know, it's also organized differently. And you talk about the chess player, that they may have up to 50,000 chessboard situations memorized in there because they've been exposed to so many of them. So in an age where information is at the tip of your finger, even contextual information, talk about how we. Why is it still important to be an expert and how can we help guide our kids to becoming experts in whatever it is that they might be interested in.
- [47:06]
G
In.
- [47:06]
C
Yeah. So earlier in this conversation, we, when we were talking about AI, I said, like, everyone is speculating. No one really knows. I think one of the most astute speculations people have made about AI is that expertise is going to be valued more than ever. And the reason I've heard computer scientists say this, labor economists say this, and the idea is that, that what you get from AI tends to be the average of, like the average of the Internet. Right. That's what they're trained on. They're trained on everything in the Internet. So when you ask it to, you know, come up with a creative project for ice cream cones, what can I do with my. With my kindergarteners that involves ice cream cones. And I'd like it to somehow to relate to geometry. The answer you're getting is sort of the average thing that it finds on the Internet. This is why it's not very creative at all. And the average is not the expert. So it feels expert, like because it knows everything. Right. And it can give you very accurate information on things that appear. A lot of the time it hallucinates is when you ask it a question that's not easy to find on the Internet because you will have noticed these chatbots never say, jim, really sorry, I don't know the answer to that, or I'm kind of making this up. But here's some stuff that might be right. They always are very confidently tell you what the answer is. And that works out great when it's something that is very easy to find on the Internet. It is repeated a lot on the Internet, that. But experts are not like that. Experts are not the average of a whole lot of stuff. Expert knowledge is very, very fine grained. Some people sometimes call this the tail of the distribution. If you think about a normal curve, a normal distribution, the tail that a distribution is way out at one end or the other. It's the things that happen very, very, very infrequently. A system like an AI system is not good at dealing with those. Experts are good at dealing with those because they have, as you said, like 50,000 chess positions in mind. And so they've seen something similar to this. And if they haven't seen this exact one, they know what type of situation is similar to it and they can extrapolate more fruitfully. So yeah, expertise is, that's a reasonable bet about what the future holds for us. What's going to be especially prized now that, that in a way that's great. If, if that's right, that's great. But expertise is not easy to come by. Expertise, you know, it takes a lot of grinding to. You got play a lot of chess games to have 50,000 chess positions in memory.
- [50:15]
B
Yeah, yeah. So that's really interesting to me. It's counterintuitive, Dan. It's counterintuitive. You would think, well, we don't really need expertise anymore, but this is something for parents to be thinking about. You also gave a really good example in why kids don't like school about just the pantry. So you gave the chess example. So the chess example is psychologists estimate that top chess players may have 50,000 board positions in long term memory. You talk about the pantry that food experts will be able to go to your pantry and easily combine. Well, you can make the. And I'm not a food expert, so that was a good example for me to see that this is valuable if you have expertise. It's valuable in lots of different situations. And so then you talked about that. There was a quote from a geologist that said the best geologist is the one who's seen the most rocks.
- [51:04]
C
I mean it. And it, it sort of gets it. It's like that, to make more explicit, like what chess masters are doing, it's pattern recognition. They're saying, oh, I've seen this before and a good thing to do, you know, like what this situation is. The meaning of this is that my queen is in trouble. And so now suddenly they're focused on one part of the board and that, you know, the problem solving part. What we think is like, oh, they're a chess master is, is, you know, saying, should I do this move? Well, if I do that, then my opponent will do that. And then in this response, I'll do that. Yes, of course they do that. But first thing they do is they recognize, they do pattern recognition to see what do I need to pay attention to. And the same thing with the food expert. They look at all of these ingredients in your pantry and they see patterns. They're like, oh, this acid goes. Matches really well with that fat. That. And then that triggers an idea. Oh, I have a. I know a recipe. Oh, but we're missing this thing. But we could substitute this other thing, right? So this is a very common property of expertise. A lot of what goes into expertise is pattern recognition.
- [52:15]
B
Because you talk about, and this is really interesting, you talk about how we don't really like to think. You say, when we can get away with it, we don't think, instead we were, and I hope I said that correctly, you say, instead, we rely on memory. And so if you have this pattern, right, recognition, it's going to make your way through the world, I think, a little bit easier. One of the things you also said for experts is that they basically just make better mistakes, that their mistakes are close.
- [52:42]
C
Right? And that, and that's because they have, because of this rich knowledge, they have a very, very sophisticated model in their mind of whatever it is they're working on. And so they, if they make a mistake, they're not going to make a catastrophic mistake. And I give an example of medical problem solving that a really expert physician has this very sophisticated mental model of the human body and the physiology of the body and how. How everything interacts. And so they're never going to prescribe something or make a diagnosis that that's just wildly wrong. That doesn't make any sense because they, when they think, oh, it could be this, immediately their knowledge of how all the system interacts say, well, if it were that, then you would see this and this and this and this. And then they can very quickly check that. Whereas a novice, they don't have this sophisticated knowledge. It's much more like, it's like a list. It's like when I see a rash, it could be this, this, it could be this, it could be that, right? It's not like all the parts don't interact in their memory in the same way.
- [53:55]
B
It's good to know. I think so many children, and so not all, but a lot of children, they like to be experts. They find a topic. So my youngest brother, he Memorized all the baseball stats. I mean he'd be able to say whatever player and he'd be able to tell you all their baseball stats. You know, when he was like six years old.
- [54:13]
C
Old.
- [54:13]
B
And so kids often have this, this thing that they, whether it's rocks or baseball or whatever it is. Yeah. To allow for that expertise because it has a lot of value and I think it's counterintuitive. In an age of AI, you would think, well, no one needs to be an expert. But you talk about how these experts, they have a sixth sense about what information they can safely ignore and what's important. They notice subtleties that other. That novices might, might miss. Subtleties are more obvious to them. They fail gracefully and their knowledge transfers to new situations, often better than that of novices. So in an age of a. I think that's really important to know and you can find out more of that, more about that and why students. Why don't students like school? I'm back, I'm back to the reading for one quick second because I missed something.
- [55:00]
C
I forgot something in mind that we haven't talked about yet. So let you do yours and then I'll mention mine.
- [55:06]
B
Okay.
- [55:06]
C
If you want to talk about.
- [55:07]
B
Pull back to reading. Well, well, basically because this kind of goes in line with technology. So you're talking about. Technology changes cognitive processes. So be aware, just be aware that it's not just the medium. It all, it's. It may change how students think. It might change their attention spans. You say, and you had this quote from this writer, this well known writer, this author Reynolds Price, who said any writer should proceed on the assumption that what the reader really wants to do is drop the bottom book and turn on the television or get a beer or go play golf. So we're sort of, we're distractible, we're impatient with boredom. But you talk just about how it's not you. This is the quote. It's not enough that the child regards reading as an attractive choice. So this was the four words. It was like have fun, you know, what was the four words? Hold on, I should remember the four words. Start now, have fun. Start now, have fun. But then you say it's, it's actually not enough. Enough that the child regards reading as an attractive choice. Reading must be the most attractive choice available at the moment. The decision is made. This is an enormously important consideration. The average high schooler doesn't hate reading, yet he virtually never chooses to read because there is always another activity available that is more appealing Access to books is important, but it's not enough. You say this. I've never met a parent who has said, yeah, he watched TV a couple times, but really wasn't interested. So can you talk about the, the displacement and, and this is really for all of it. I mean, it's for reading, but it's also for getting outside. It's also for all those experiences that seem like they may be not important, but they're really adding to this bucket of knowledge that helps a child for the rest of their life.
- [56:48]
C
And I said there was something I wanted to bring up. This was it. I wanted to talk about screens in this issue. Yeah, I mean, this, I'm very realistic about this. I mean, my, my wife is an educator. We raise our children quite self consciously trying to build a home where knowledge was prized, reading was prized, and so on. And my children love to read. But if given a choice between reading and a screen, they'll typically pick a screen. Right. That's all there is to it. And the analogy I draw in the book, I think I mentioned, mentioned in the book, my kids also love watermelon. And, you know, if I say, they ask what's for dessert? And I say watermelon, they're pretty happy. But if I say, well, there's either watermelon or candy, they're picking candy. Right. That's, that's all there is. You just have to be realistic about it. And that means you really have to. If you want your children to read, you really need to limit screen time. That's all there is to it.
- [57:47]
B
Yeah.
- [57:48]
C
One of the things that I emphasize is there is a strong research based on the idea that limiting screens and sort of making it punitive backfires. So. Or rewarding your child for reading backfires. Right. And the reason is if you do something like for every book you read, like you'll get X dollars or something like that. That. Or if you say, well, you can't play with your Xbox until you've read 30 minutes. This is very common. Right. Like, it's 30 minutes a day that you have to read, and then you're free to do whatever you want. This really sends the message to the child, like, from the parent. I as a parent recognize this is not something you would choose to do. This is not a fun thing. This is something that I'm making you do. I have to reward you. I think I give the example in the book. No parent says, like, oh, you don't want cake? Well, what if I gave you a Snickers bar? If you ate. If you eat your cake, it's just expected, like, cake's awesome. Like, of course you want cake.
- [58:56]
B
Right.
- [58:57]
C
And the same thing should be true for reading. So this comes up with parents, like, how. Well, that's great, Dan, but, like, they don't choose to read. So I can't just cheerlead and tell them it's great. So an alternative instead of punishing or rewarding is restrict their access to these other activities that you want them to do less. So don't say you have to read. Say you can do whatever you want, but screen time is 30 minutes a day, and that's it. And then once those 30 minutes are up, like, this is where access to books that the child might recognize. Okay, this is a. You know, of the things that are available to me now, reading is the most appealing. Also gave me an example that this was true in my family. And I. I know it was true in other families as well. My parents never interrupted me if I was reading. And that includes, like, when it was time for chores or, you know, to do things around the house. And so, you know, I thought was very clever that, you know, I would, you know, be reading all the time on Saturday morning, which is when we tended to clean the house. And it was many years before I realized I was. Was the one being played. I was not playing my parents in this case. So, yeah, I mean, parents, you know, can be thoughtful about ways of. Of sending this silent message, but don't. Yeah, rewarding and. Or punishing. That's really your very last resort.
- [60:27]
B
There's so many practical takeaways from these books. They're fantastic. They're really needed. Now, the three that I have are, why don't students like school? A cognitive scientist answers questions about. About how the mind works and what is meant for the. What it means for the classroom. I've got like 10 pages of notes here. So we scratched the surface. Outsmart your brain was when we talked about the very beginning, where learning is hard and how you can make it easy going through all of those different types of skills that students may not be getting explicitly. And then raising kids who read what parents and teachers can do. I got so much out of them. And you say this. You talk about in terms of their time. You talk about displacement, opportunity cost. And you say being resourceful about entertaining oneself is a skill like any other. Children must learn it, and you can actively promote this learning. Kids need to know that they can depend on themselves, not a screen, not a parent, for entertainment. My goal is not that My child never sees a screen. My goal is to make space for reading, and that's how we feel about a lot of these things. The goal is not that they live in this world where, yeah, they never see one. The people always talk about the Luddites, but we're. That. We're just making space. We're making space for these things that we. That are so valuable for them. Dan, what an honor. What an opportunity to get a chance to talk with you about all of these different things. I cannot recommend these books more highly. We always end our show with the same question, and the question is, what's a favorite memory from your childhood that was outside?
- [61:46]
C
It's hard to pick because I did spend a lot of my childhood, a period of early to mid elementary school was in the Bay Area, and the weather was almost always beautiful. And so it was always. It was so easy to be outside. Some of my favorite memories surround Little League, which is interesting because I'm. I'm not, like, much of a sports person and continue not to be much of a sports person. But I did love it, and I think it was the. It was sort of building. I wasn't very good, but I liked the feeling of getting better. And I had wonderful coaches who were very encouraging and like, you know, made space for kids like me who weren't. Who weren't really all that good. But we enjoyed it and we enjoyed trying, and I enjoyed being part of a team and working, you know, working with the other kids and playing with the other kids. So those. That's. That's. I think that's the memory I would pick.
- [62:47]
B
That's interesting because it reminds me of. And I had this bolded in my notes from. From why Don't Students Like School? The emotional bond between students and teacher, for better or worse, accounts for whether students learn. And so you have all those great relationships with the coach, and it really makes such a big difference no matter where you're coming in. You know, like, some kids are coming in with a lot of knowledge. Some kids are coming in with a lot of skill. But if you have that positive relationship, it can really help with growth. Dan, thank you so much. Thanks for writing these books. Thanks for helping parents to really understand here in this age of AI while. While technology is changing, how to adjust their parenting and what to be aware of. Thanks for the wonderful reminders to make space for reading and to prioritize that, both for the enjoyment now and the enjoyment to come and the building of the background knowledge. I really appreciate it.
- [63:35]
C
Thank you, Jenny. It was fun.
- [63:39]
G
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