Guy Claxton's Dean's Lecture

What is there to debate?

In the end, I did not get to debate Guy Claxton. This seems a shame, but also a reasonable outcome. At the start of the Dean’s lecture that Claxton delivered recently at the University of Melbourne, he made clear that he has recently received treatment for cancer and that this is causing him to lose the thread at times. A debate would not be appropriate and I wish him a full and speedy recovery. I hope he is being given the very best healthcare available.

And before I go on to disagree with several of Claxton’s arguments, it is worth highlighting an area where we agree. Early on, he states that problem solving is not one thing and that ‘fixing the fault in your bicycle’ is very different to ‘fixing the fault in your marriage’. I have made a strikingly similar point in the past. Unfortunately, the same logic could be extended to many of the other generic cognitive skills Claxton seems to think exist.

Regardless of health, I get the impression Claxton would not consider me a worthy debate opponent anyway because he is all about credentials. The second slide in his talk is literally titled ‘My Credentials,’ in which he refers to himself as, ‘MA (Cantab), DPhil (Oxon), FBPS, FAcSS, CPsychol,’ and lists his eight books. Professional status is clearly important to Claxton. He seems to be of the view that it imbues people with the authority to speak because the presentation then proceeds with him introducing a series of researchers, stating their impressive credentials and then quoting them. It is an extended argument from authority.

Claxton begins with Roger Schank who he calls ‘The Godfather’ and who he claims invented the term ‘learning sciences’. He quotes Schank as stating, ‘Learning happens when someone wishes to learn, not when someone wishes to teach,’ and adds, sardonically, ‘Which would come as a surprise to a few teachers.’ A dismissive attitude towards the work of teachers and schools is a motif he returns to throughout. At one point, he quotes Mary Helen Immordino-Yang—a ‘rising or risen star’—as arguing that, ‘It’s fairly obvious there is a fundamental mismatch between secondary education and the way kids learn,’ before adding, sarcastically, ‘Hold the front page!’

The discussion of Schank causes Claxton to muse that, ‘Beethoven was a slow learner. Shakespeare was a slow learner.’ I am not sure what he bases this on but it doesn’t make any sense. Beethoven published his first compositions at the age of 12—a set of variations on the work of composer Ernst Christoph Dressler. Shakespeare demonstrated an extraordinary breadth of knowledge at least partly acquired, we must assume, from his Grammar school education. There is a common trope that famous people—often it is Einstein—struggled at school. Sometimes it is supported by the famous people themselves in moments of (possibly feigned) modesty, but such claims originate more from the urge to encourage the rest of us mediocrities than from objective fact.

The work of the next star player, Cecilia Hayes, causes Claxton to take a somewhat contradictory line. First, he frames the role of knowledge as simply a medium through which to practice cognitive skills:

“Of course there have to be some things we are applying our developing capacities to. You cannot learn to hammer without having a hammer and nails.”

Yet he then proceeds to complain that he believes in the importance of subject knowledge and it’s frustrating when people suggest otherwise. I don’t think that’s the argument. Instead, I would argue there is no meaningful separation between cognitive skills and knowledge—what is hammering without a hammer and nails? Knowledge is what we think with. If you want to solve an algebra problem, you need to be able to read the question and you need knowledge of algebra. There is no ‘cognitive skill’ or ‘capacity’ that exists beyond that and certainly not one that is trainable and generalisable to different kinds of problems—as Claxton almost explains himself in the bicycle/marriage analogy. Instead, attempts to develop such nonexistent generic cognitive skills are wasteful of the precious resource of schooling.

Given his contradictions, it is tempting to take Claxton at face value and wonder whether he really is anti-knowledge. Perhaps he does value the hammer and nails and it is unfair to suggest otherwise? His stance is helpfully clarified at the end of his presentation when he states:

“The fundamental driver of learning is the urge to derive accurate predictions from experience that will guide future action, not to stockpile explicit knowledge. That is ancillary.”

This is a false choice, but one that Claxton is quite clear in asserting. It seems he wants to downgrade the value of knowledge—it is ‘ancillary’—while avoiding criticism for doing so. It’s a nice trick if you can pull it off.

After introducing the impressive Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, Claxton goes on to describe an experiment she apparently conducted that involved subjecting teenage students to a two hour reflective interview in which they were shown videos and contemplated figures such as Malala Yousafzai. The way Claxton tells it, these sessions caused the students’ brains to grow. This would be huge, if true, because brain growth is commonly assumed to be constrained by the inner dimensions of the skull.

To demonstrate such an effect, the study would need a control group who were not subjected to the treatment and whose brains did not grow.

I cannot find a peer-reviewed research article by Immordino-Yang that has quite the features Claxton describes, even though there are some that seem to have similar features. Immordino-Yang has either conducted a few interview-plus-brain-scanning studies or has written up the one study in different ways to address different research questions. However, I think an article she wrote for Kappan in 2022, that mentions Malala Yousafzai, describes the experiment in sufficient detail to address Claxton’s point.

In short, there was no control group and the study involved investigating correlations between participants’ uncoached performance in the interview and later brain development:

“The more the participants spontaneously engaged in thinking about the big issues and personal lessons they could take from the stories — what we are calling a “transcendent” disposition of mind — the more they grew their brains over the next two years.” [my emphasis]

Immordino-Yang goes on to clarify that by brain growth, she means the strengthening of connections in important parts of the brain.

What this experiment does not demonstrate is that the interviews and videos caused the brain growth in the way Claxton suggests. He has seriously misrepresented it. Is he aware of this? Is he indifferent to it? It is hard to tell.

Claxton goes on in a similar vein, naming and quoting other luminaries. He lists Lauren Resnick, David Perkins—who is a great friend—and Jean Piaget. He criticises ‘information processing’ theories that suggest the mind is like a computer. He does not level this charge at cognitive load theory as he has in the past, perhaps now aware that the charge is false. Nevertheless, it seems he feels it’s too compelling a piece of rhetoric—too good a flourish—to drop entirely. Nevertheless, he self-consciously uses the metaphor himself in talking of brain ‘upgrades,’ before summarising his overall throwing-everything-at-the-wall position.

He makes a weird comment about working memory. He seems to think it’s important that working memory is not in a single location in the brain and he claims it is not a ‘funnel’ which, in some ways, it is. Then he fires through his summary slides, listing various platitudinous statements such as:

“Mind is organic and ecological, not computational. Learning naturally grows out from what is already known. Mind is a tree, not a computer.”

As Claxton’s talk progressed, I was reminded more and more of the titular character in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum: Oz the Great and Terrible. Where Oz sought to provoke awe by displaying the various gadgets and lights he controlled with his levers, Claxton seeks to provoke awe by displaying his credentials, his books, and a flurry of quotes from distinguished academics.

Yet for both Oz and Claxton, it is all a furious pyrotechnical show and when you pull back the curtain, there stands but an ordinary man who does not have the answers we seek.