Skeptics on the Fringe:StuartRitchie-What's The Point Of Going To School?

Speaker

Stuart Ritchie is a PhD Psychology student in the Psychology Department at The University of Edinburgh. His research focuses on two questions: (a) which educational interventions improve learning, and which don’t work?, and (b) what are the effects of education, anyway? he also has secondary interests in other areas, like the psychology of religion and the paranormal.

Stuart is an Skeptics on the Fringe regular, and is the former President of the Edinburgh University Humanist Society.

He blogs at http://timeoutofmindblog.wordpress.com (http://timeoutofmindblog.wordpress.com/)

Follow him on Twitter @StuartJRitchie (http://twitter.com/StuartJRitchie)

Talk

As if teachers didn’t have a hard enough job, they’re beset on all sides by peddlers of pseudo-scientific interventions and theorists with political agendas.

In this talk, Stuart Ritchie, a PhD Psychology student at The University of Edinburgh, attempts to set out the science behind many controversial questions surrounding education, including:

Does going to school make you smarter? Are there multiple ‘styles’ of learning? Does formal schooling stifle children’s creativity? What can emerging sciences like neuroscience and genetics offer education? Which educational intervention, from Brain Gym to Fish Oil, contains the highest concentration of utter nonsense? http://www.edinburghskeptics.co.uk/events-2/