There are many books out there that deal with education myths. Daisy Christodoulou’s “Seven Myths about Education” is excellent and I have recently been sent “Urban Myths about Learning and Education” by De Bruyckere, Kirschner and Hulshof which I will review when I have finished reading it.

However, in this necessarily brief post I am going to characterise some common ideas as misconceptions rather than as myths. To me, this is how such views often present themselves; they are plausible, a wide range of people seem to arrive at them independently and yet the available evidence suggests that they are flawed. They feel ‘truthy’ in much the same way that it seems reasonable that something must be pushing the Moon around the Earth.

1. Novices should emulate the behaviour of experts

This misconception has legs. It is a key driver behind inquiry-based programmes in science, mathematics and history. For instance, in an article…