Once a student sees the opportunity and enjoys the craft of writing enough to do it of their own volition, they’ll end up learning the granular rules that schools teach at the outset. The text Kirschner and Hendrick offer alongside each seminal article does a wonderful job of situating the content in the broader scientific context, and in the classroom. The book consists of commentaries on 28 papers that the authors consider key to understanding how we learn. For example, this book uncovers the fact that the cognitive architecture of the brain has been ignored in education despite the transformative change it would bring. Kirschner himself is referenced in some sections, which sceptics may claim is self-serving and driving a particular ideology.

Part 2 discusses the prerequisites of effective, efficient, and enjoyable learning, delineating issues including self-regulated learning, self-efficacy, and goal orientation.

But because our school system undervalues the necessity of inspiration, students don’t learn as much as they could. Plenty of examples are included and there is always a discussion of how the ideas from each chapter can be used in teaching. A rather strange claim about the typing efficacy of children on page 27: "most kids today can type as fast as a teacher talks".

Enjoyable learning begins with inspiration—both to get you started and to help you push through the struggles of knowledge acquisition.

I know it not because I was forced to memorize it but because I was obsessed with baseball for more than a decade.

This book looks great and strikes a well-structured balance between text and useful figures throughout. What I love about the book the most, is that you can read each chapter in isolation, very similar to reading academic articles - only more accessible and affordable.Since the school system operates at scale, it tends to squash things that are hard to predict, even if they reflect a student’s unique interest. But, unless we stand on the shoulders of giants who have gone before us, each generation is doomed to rediscover what their ancestors painstakingly uncovered. The papers are grouped into six distinct fields: how the brain works; prerequisites for learning; how learning can be supported; teacher activities; learning in context; and, perhaps most interestingly, cautionary tales and the deadly sins of education. If there’s anything I’ve learned by writing on the Internet, it’s that small tweaks in the way an idea is packaged can have an exponential impact on how much it resonates.

I saw this in my writing education, which focused predominantly on spelling and grammar instead of what really matters: how to identify, develop, and communicate engaging ideas.There are some “famous” (in the realms of educational psychology at least) academics here: Sweller, Rosenshine, Wiliam and Black; and there are some not so famous, such as Rothkopf and Pintrich. The book further reveals the cumulative nature of learning knowledge as a perpetually changing process that is redefined and built upon previous knowledge and discovery.