ABSTRACT
Education systems are bound by conventional wisdom: they act on tradition, habits and prejudices rather than rigorous evidence. Children learn in certain ways because that is how it has been done in the past, not because there is evidence that these are the best ways to learn. Educationalists operate through prejudice – historical prejudice, true, but prejudice nevertheless. We do not learn from our mistakes: thousands of years of formal education have yet to show much progress in how we teach. It is as meme theory would have it: ideas in education that are popular for whatever reason have a life of their own quite separate from their truth.
