I’m working my way through Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness. The book’s argument is fascinating and full of implications for education. I keep mapping the authors’ thoughts by analogy onto everything from curriculum to instructional design to advising to student life. So far they’ve not talked about any of these topics directly, but the ideas and examples they do discuss offer themselves readily to analogies in teaching, learning, and schooling generally. Although their advocacy of “libertarian paternalism” probably won’t please either the rigid high-stakes testers or the unschoolers, it does (so far) offer in my view a very interesting model for education that takes into account the need for expert understanding and guidance of the developing learner.

More thoughts as I move along.