PINNING DOWN POTENTIAL 29informed by neuroscience.” As an example, he reports the design of a web
app known as “Zondle Team Play, that allows teachers to teach whole
classes using a games- based approach and which draws on concepts from
neuroscience.”^33
Not to be outdone is the London Royal Society, with its series of Brain
Wave s modules starting in 2011. Th ese modules are designed to “pres ent
impor tant developments in neuroscience that have the potential to con-
tribute to education.” Th e Society makes big claims about connections
between brains and genes and the implications for education and policy:
“Neuroscience is shedding light on the infl uence of our ge ne tic make-up
on learning over our life span, in addition to environmental factors. Th is
enables us to identify key indicators for educational outcomes, and
provides a scientifi c basis for evaluating diff er ent teaching approaches.”^34
Science transformed medicine about a century ago, so neuroscience can
help transform education today, the module claims.
Just as Plomin and colleagues urge teachers to be ge ne ticists, so well-
meaning educational psychologists like the late John Geake (author of
Th e Brain at School) had already spoken of “teachers as brain scientists.”
And with a similar Platonic idealism, we are told how diff erences in
gene- brain make-up demand diff er ent “class groupings.” Again, parents
are being swept along on a tide of scientifi c optimism, oft en promul-
gated through popu lar media before due scientifi c pro cess. And teachers
are now receiving dozens of unsolicited ads in the mail each year selling
“brain- based” learning schemes.
Again, I do not question motives— only the conceptual furniture
on which these aspirations and claims are based. In the rush to join the
bandwagon, that furniture is demonstrably fl imsy. Take, for instance,
the workshop held by the British Psychological Society on the “Neuro-
science of Coaching” in July 2013. Its declared purpose was to develop
a “brain- based approach” to teaching and learning. It claims, on the
website, that much of this depends “upon the same brain networks to
maximize reward and minimize threat as the brain networks used for
primary survival needs.... In other words, social needs are treated in
much the same way in the brain as the need for food and water.”^35 Th is
prompts the obvious question of why, then, do humans have such big
brains?
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