The 2014 lecture was devoted to the links that the cognitive sciences have, or should have, with the educational sciences. These links are numerous and reciprocal. Understanding how education succeeds in transforming the human brain is one of the great open problems in cognitive neuroscience, which raises many fascinating questions : how does school learning (first and second languages, reading, writing, mathematics) fit into the circuits of our brain ? What respective roles do early organization and brain plasticity play in these changes ? Why are humans the only species to have succeeded in modifying their mental representations and brain circuits through explicit readings ? Education specialists, for their part, expect the cognitive sciences to help them meet the major challenges posed by mass education in the 21stcentury : how can we maximize the potential of all children ? What teaching methods and classroom organization principles are best suited to facilitating learning for all, and thus reducing the social inequalities that are particularly glaring in our ?
Over the past thirty years, significant progress has been made in understanding the fundamental principles of brain plasticity and learning. The functioning of memory, the fundamental role of attention and the importance of sleep are all discoveries with far-reaching consequences for school organization. The skills of very young children in language, arithmetic, logic and probability estimation call into question certain fundamental postulates of constructivist learning theories, demonstrating the existence of early, abstract intuitions on which teaching must be based. The reality of developmental pathologies such as dyslexia, dyscalculia, dyspraxia and attention disorders is no longer in doubt, and strategies exist to detect and compensate for them.
I'm convinced that we can't teach properly unless we have, implicitly or explicitly, a mental model of what's going on in a child's head - what intuitions they have, right or wrong, what stages they need to go through to progress, and what factors help them develop their skills. All children start life with a similar cerebral organization. There are therefore fundamental principles that all effective readings must respect (while remaining compatible with a high degree of pedagogical freedom). The aim of this lecture is to highlight these principles and draw the consequences for teaching.