Teaching Minds: How Cognitive Science Can Save Our Schools

“Finally, some fresh thinking about teaching and learning. You will come away understanding what’s wrong with how we teach today and what an effective pedagogy looks like. If you care about education, you will love love love this book!”

—Elliot Soloway, Arthur F. Thurnau Professor, University of Michigan

“Roger’s insights tend to be a decade or two ahead of the insights of others. You can find his insights in current machine translation technologies, recommender systems, game-based learning environments, and even intelligence-gathering systems. The insights in this book are likely to be equally prescient and enduring.”
—Janet L. Kolodner, Regents' Professor, Georgia Institute of Technology


“Roger Schank shows that we can learn more by concrete challenge and disagreement than through disinterested lectures and gingerly-put abstractions.”
—Jonathan Zittrain, Professor of Law and Professor of Computer Science, Harvard University

From grade school to graduate school, from the poorest public institutions to the most affluent private ones, our educational system is failing students. In his provocative new book, cognitive scientist and bestselling author Roger Schank argues that class size, lack of parental involvement, and other commonly-cited factors have nothing to do with why students are not learning. The culprit is a system of subject-based instruction and the solution is cognitive-based learning. This groundbreaking book defines what it would mean to teach thinking. The time is now for schools to start teaching minds!

Roger Schank was the founder of the renowned Institute for the Learning Sciences at Northwestern University, where he is John P. Evans Professor Emeritus in Computer Science, Education, and Psychology.