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What does a failed 19th-century Chinese civil exam and one of the deadliest wars in history have to do with how we hire, educate, and test people today? In this EconTalk conversation, Russ Roberts and education expert Daisy Christodoulou trace a surprising thread from the Taiping Rebellion through Britain's Northcote-Trevelyan reforms, Samuel Pepys's naval exams, and Macaulay's belief that a hard exam on anything—even alchemy or the Cherokee language—reveals the best minds.
Christodoulou dismantles that idea with evidence that skills are stubbornly domain-specific: chess masters, surgeons, even Steven Spielberg couldn't simply transfer their brilliance elsewhere. Along the way they wrestle with meritocracy, why bureaucracies fail without feedback, and whether great teachers must resist irony. A rich, wide-ranging discussion that will change how you think about testing and expertise.
Resources
Daisy Christodoulou. “Daisy Christodoulou.”
Daisy Christodoulou. No More Marking. Substack.
Daisy Christodoulou EconTalk episodes. EconTalk. Interview by Russ Roberts.
Michael Coolican. No Tradesmen and No Women: The Origins of the British Civil Service. London: Biteback Publishing, 2018.
William G. Chase and Herbert A. Simon. “Skills in Chess.” American Scientist, Vol. 61, No. 4 (July-August 1973), pp. 394-403.
English National Opera. “Major-General’s Song from The Pirates of Penzance.”
“David Epstein on Mastery, Specialization, and Range,” EconTalk. Interview with Russ Roberts. May 27, 2019.
Abraham Flexner. “Education as Mental Discipline.” The Atlantic, April 1917.
James C. Kaufman and John Baer. “Could Steven Spielberg Manage the Yankees?: Creative Thinking in Different Domains.” Korean Journal of Thinking & Problem Solving 12, no. 2 (2002).
Thomas Babington Macaulay. “Government of India: A Speech Delivered in the House of Commons on the 10th of July 1833.” 1833.
Stafford H. Northcote and C. E. Trevelyan. “The Northcote-Trevelyan Report,” Wiley Online Library, 1854.
Samuel Pepys. The Diary of Samuel Pepys. Edited by Richard Le Gallienne. Introduction by Robert Louis Stevenson. New York: Penguin Random House, 2003.
“Edward Thorndike.” Wikipedia.
“Daniel Willingham on Education, School, and Neuroscience,” EconTalk. Interview with Russ Roberts. October 12, 2009
Russ Roberts is a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution. In 2006, he founded the award-winning weekly podcast EconTalk, which has featured guests including Milton Friedman, Martha Nussbaum, Christopher Hitchens, Agnes Callard, Bill James, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Amor Towles, and Emily Oster. All 875+ episodes remain available free of charge at EconTalk.org and reach an audience of more than 125,000 listeners in 200 countries.
Daisy Christodoulou is the director of education at No More Marking, a provider of online Comparative Judgement software for schools -- an innovative method to assess and judge written essays. Before joining No More Marking, Christodolou was head of assessment at Ark Schools, a group of academy schools in the UK, and before that, a secondary English teacher in London. She has written four books: Seven Myths about Education, Making Good Progress, Teachers vs Tech, and I Can’t Stop Thinking about VAR.