I was at a bookstore last night looking to learn more about learning itself. I was horrified by the state of things. I figured in a massive Barnes and Nobel which has entire aisle devoted to focused niches such as Manga or Personal Fitness, doctor that Education should have an entire area – strange that I didn’t remember seeing it before since I’m in bookstores quite often. I mean… it’s education; a book store should be just the place to find this info.

After poking around for a while, I had to ask for help. I was finally shown the single “Education” rack (there’s about 5 racks on each side of a single aisle). I poured through the titles on the shelf and there wasn’t a single volume on pedagogy (roughly: the study of teaching) or epistemology (the study of how humans learn). All of the books I found were basically just mis-classified and belonged in the “teaching” section next to this rack. There were nice little memoirs about a teacher’s first day on the job, a book about the challenges of being an administrator in a poorly-funded inner city school… but no actual scientific studies of how to teach people or how people learn.

Something is terribly wrong here.