Good teachers don't need to know the genetics of their students

Some envisage a future in which teaching is tailored according to genes. But there are lower-tech ways of being responsive to learners' needsRobert Plomin is a psychologist of international repute who has spent much of his life working on the genetics of developmental delays, intelligence and behaviour. His work is rigorous and extensively grounded in data from the Twins Early Development Study (TEDS), which he set up and which looks at a high proportion of the twins born in England between 1994 and 1996.Plomin's most recent work shows that genes matter a lot for learning, accounting for 58% of variation in exam results. To many biologists this isn't that surprising. After all, genes matter for just about anything to do with us. The problem is that to many people saying that something is the result of genes is equivalent to saying that something is fixed, determined, and that there isn't anything you can do about it. To be fair to Plomin, that is not what he is saying but too often that is how it is interpreted.Let me give an example. Type 1 diabetes (the sort of diabetes a person may have from childhood) is as much to do with genes as the speed of a child's learning. But nowadays, thankfully, we have treatments (insulin injections) that mean people with type 1 diabetes can live relatively normal lives. What once was a fatal disease of childhood is treatable.Plomin and his co-author Kathryn Asbury argued in their recent book, G is for Genes, that our increasing understanding ...
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