Social Sciences
How people learn, how they are taught, and the wide gap between the evidence and standard practice.
9 fields · 87 topics · 109 curated works
What is actually known about acquiring and retaining knowledge.
Foundations & Overviews · Spaced Repetition · Retrieval Practice · Interleaving · Desirable Difficulties
Structuring instruction so it works.
Foundations & Overviews · Direct Instruction · Inquiry-Based Learning · Worked Examples · Scaffolding
What gets taught and how it gets measured.
Foundations & Overviews · Curriculum Design · Knowledge vs Skills Debate · Standardised Testing · Formative vs Summative Assessment
Learning without an institution — the core use case for this index.
Foundations & Overviews · Building a Study Plan · Reading Strategically · Note-Taking Systems · Taking Smart Notes
Schooling as an institution — funding, teacher quality and school choice, where evidence often defies the politics.
Foundations & Overviews · School Systems Compared · Education Funding · Teacher Quality & Training · Class Size Research
Universities, and their several simultaneous crises.
Foundations & Overviews · University Purpose & History · Admissions · Academic Research Incentives · Peer Review
Tools, and honest assessment of their track record.
Foundations & Overviews · Online Learning · MOOCs & Their Outcomes · Adaptive Learning Systems · AI Tutors
Teaching people who learn differently.
Foundations & Overviews · Learning Disabilities · Dyslexia · ADHD in Education · Autism & Education
Competing answers to what education is for.
Foundations & Overviews · Classical Education · Liberal Arts Tradition · Progressive Education · Montessori
No prior grounding assumed.
Up From Slavery
Booker T. Washington · 1901
An autobiographical account of building Tuskegee Institute from nothing, arguing that practical, dignified industrial education was the surest route…
+28 more at this level
Assumes you know the vocabulary.
Mindstorms
Seymour Papert · 1980
Children should program the computer rather than be programmed by it — the argument behind every constructionist tool since.
+32 more at this level
Primary sources and full treatments.
Democracy and Education
John Dewey · 1916
Education is not preparation for life but life itself; a democracy needs schools that practise it rather than describe it.
+46 more at this level
12 of 109 works
Booker T. Washington
An autobiographical account of building Tuskegee Institute from nothing, arguing that practical, dignified industrial education was the surest route to genuine freedom for people just emerged from slavery.
about 5 hours to readlink checked 17 Sept 2026Mortimer J. Adler & Charles Van Doren
Argues reading has levels — inspectional, analytical, syntopical — and that most readers never go past the first, mistaking recognition for understanding.
link failing as of 17 Sept 2026Dorothy L. Sayers
Argues modern schooling teaches subjects but never taught the medieval trivium's actual skill, how to think, argue and express an argument, and that reviving grammar, logic and rhetoric as a sequence would fix it.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Milton Friedman
Proposes that government fund schooling through vouchers parents can spend at any qualifying school rather than by owning and running the schools itself, arguing competition would serve families better than a public monopoly.
link checked 17 Sept 2026David N. Perkins & Gavriel Salomon
Argues transfer of learning almost never happens by itself and must be deliberately designed for, either by drilling a skill to the point of automatic reflex or by teaching students to abstract a principle and bridge it to new contexts.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Paul Black & Dylan Wiliam
Argues that frequent, actionable feedback given to students during learning rather than after it produces some of the largest achievement gains found anywhere in education research.
link checked 17 Sept 2026US Department of Education
Walks parents and teachers through what an IEP legally must contain, arguing the document only works as intended when it is treated as an individually negotiated plan rather than a compliance form.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Daniel T. Willingham
Argues that the rote, inflexible knowledge teachers are often told to avoid is actually the necessary first stage of expertise, since flexible understanding is built out of facts that have first become automatic.
link checked 17 Sept 2026US Department of Education
Sets out classroom accommodations and instructional strategies for ADHD grounded in the legal requirements of IDEA and Section 504, arguing most useful accommodations are inexpensive changes to routine rather than specialist intervention.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Daniel T. Willingham
Argues critical thinking is not a general skill that transfers across subjects but is inseparable from deep factual knowledge of the specific domain being reasoned about.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Association of American Colleges and Universities
Argues employers and educators converge on the same conclusion against the era's vocational pressure: a liberal education spanning both the humanities and the sciences is the preparation that actually transfers to unpredictable, cross-disciplinary work.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Ken Robinson (TED)
Argues that school systems rank subjects in a hierarchy inherited from nineteenth-century industrial need, and so train children out of the willingness to be wrong that originality requires.
link checked 17 Sept 2026