What does EMRI do, really?

There are no longer any teachers. People who used to call themselves teachers now call themselves educators, for much the same sort of reason that garbage collectors are now sanitation engineers.

Teachers teach. Educators work in the education bureaucracy. They are not required to teach – at any rate, not in the USA. This is just as well, for if you ask an educator “What do teachers do, really?” you will not get a useful answer. (If you do get one you think is useful, first look to see if it's already been dealt with here, and if it hasn't, by all means send it to us, and we'll look into it.)

Before we get the right answers, we must ask the right questions. “What do teachers do, really?” is one of those. Teachers generally hate it – probably because it forces them to commit themselves. But there is a more basic question, so basic that we call it the Fundamental Question of Education, or FQE:

When I teach you, what is happening inside your brain?

You can turn this around to form the EQF:

When you teach me, what is happening inside my brain?

The EQF is a little more tractable than the FQE, because one has more insight into what's happening inside one's own brain than what's happening inside someone else's.

These questions address what education is. They can't tell us whether, or why, we want it, and what we want it for. Do we want education? Why do we want it? Those are philosophical questions. How you answer them depends on your goals, your morality, your outlook.

Our answers are simple. We want to learn and teach, because we are mammals, and mammals have an innate drive to learn and teach. And learning and teaching is for us a means to enable all human beings to develop their intellectual capabilities just as far as each would like to.

To achieve this goal, we need to make learning and teaching effective, efficient, and readily available to all who want it. And for that, we need a science of education.

Now you may ask, don't we already have a science of education? If by a science you mean a large body of learning, with thousands of institutions and millions of acolytes and a massive continuous outpouring of materials, then of course there is a science of education.

But if by a science you mean a body of principles and methods that can be applied anywhere with predictable results, then no, there is no science of education.

Until we have an answer for the EQF or the FQE, we can't develop a science of education, and education will forever remain a political football, used by ruling elites for their own purposes. That isn't education, it's propaganda or indoctrination or social engineering, all of which are incompatible with helping human beings to develop their intellects to their full capacity.

The Educational Methods Research Institute was founded to develop a science of education. This sounds like a simple project. Well, Newton's three laws sound pretty simple too, and so they are: but to arrive at them took the development of a new paradigm, plus such incidentals as the calculus. We too found a new paradigm, and the mental tools for using it.

To find out what's happening in the brain at any moment, we looked to neurobiology and its tools, including real-time brain imaging. But neurobiology is above all practical and experimental: a mass of data balancing on a tiny toehold of theory. To interpret what the brain images to tell us, we needed to look elsewhere. We turned to the science of software engineering, and this gave us the tools we needed to model, understand and predict brain activity, given a few basic principles.

The intersection of neurobiology and software engineering led to a whole new paradigm and a new science, and enabled us to answer the FQE in useful, productive and predictive ways. We were then able to develop new and fruitful educational methods.

In the process, we fell out of love with the term 'education', but by then it was too late to do much about it – we still think of ourselves as educational researchers. At an early stage, we discovered that nobody teaches you by messing with your brain: whatever happens inside it you do yourself. In other words, education is a misnomer: we don't teach, they learn. They learn because they're mammals, and mammals are designed to learn. They learn because they have brains, and brains know how to learn without being taught how. This sounds almost banal, but it has very important consequences for the whole educational project.

We are tackling the hard subjects: the hard sciences, mathematics, foreign languages. We developed methods of inculcating mathematical intuition; improved methods of language acquisition, including a method for the painless acquisition of grammar by a process as easy as stringing beads or matching socks; new ways of getting people to learn physics and chemistry.

We have a lot of fun too. We've found an easy way to teach touch typing: we needed this because – as you see – we do a lot of writing, and quill pens are so inconvenient. As an exercise in applying our methods, we worked out a way of showing how to crack Sudoku puzzles. If you love Sudoku, don't go here because we'll show you how to do any puzzle, at any level, in a way so simple we could probably teach a chimp. That will spoil Sudoku for you forever – and it won't cost you a cent!

We found there are lots of things we take for granted that really we shouldn't. The alphabet is one of those: it's an obstacle to teaching good English. So we developed a tool for writing English that not only makes the sounds clear, but improves the grammar too. And we went on to extend the Spanish alphabet to make grammar easy, and make a tool for teaching people who don't know how to write Arabic to learn how to do it in minutes.

We found other people had done a lot of spadework for us. We provided the paradigm, but they provided the stuff to slot into it: things like a sure-fire way to solve a Rubik's Cube, and an at-a-glance proof of the Theorem of Pythagoras.

We're a non-profit. In the USA, donations made to a non-profit are tax-deductible. Also in the USA, the economy is now so shaky that the only thing we can be certain about is that it's going to be uncertain for a long, long time. This means that instead of relying on donations, we rely on royalties derived from licensing our educational tools and our courses. So rest assured, we're not asking for donations but we would like you to consider our products.

Of course, this doesn't mean we'll turn down donations: anyone with an urge to write us a large check is urged to succumb to the urge.

Browse our site. Join our discussions. If you like what we're doing, please tell your friends: if not, criticize us by all means, and we'll consider your criticisms as courteously as they were offered. You'll find books here, courses, opportunities for teachers and researchers, and more about our Academy of Community Tutors International.