• Would you do your own degree?
• General expertise – the gap between rote learning and a different sort of mastery
• Being Serious
• Learn, Play, Work, Play
• The Most Important Thing in Education
• Holistic Hijack
• Flipping lectures – reflections on a term of learning
• Two cautionary tales
• The Impulse to Generalism
• Learning Maths 2.0

• Carl Gombrich - Personal Blog The instruments example is interesting. At music college I think you have to have a s...
• @leonie_learning Yes! I remember liking Klein's firefighter study :-) I think he interpreted expertise...
• kal winston I couldn't agree more: interdisciplinary training through skills + varied content is ...
• Carl Gombrich - Personal Blog Thanks, Kal. I had a stab at this '10,000 hours' question earlier on in my thinking...
• Kal Winston Indeed, it seems clear that if extended reflective practice in one context can lead t...
• Carl Gombrich - Personal Blog Hi Leonie, Thank you for this interesting comment - and thank you for the links, w...
• @leonie_learning Hi. I was really interested in expertise when studying psychology of learning, but fo...
• Carl Gombrich - Personal Blog Kal, Thanks for your feedback. Your questions are very much in line with my own. ...

Hi. I’m Carl Gombrich. This blog contains my personal views and thoughts.

So far, I have studied and taught maths, physics and philosophy. I have degrees in these things. I have also studied and taught music and was a professional opera singer for a while, having trained at the National Opera Studio in the UK, where I was the Royal Opera House scholar.

I work at UCL, the great university in London, directing and setting up a new degree Arts and Sciences (BASc). It’s a wonderful job, full of intellectual and practical challenge and excitement.

Currently, I mostly read political economy and stuff on interdisciplinarity and the philosophy of education. I also had a longish period when I was interested in religion, particularly mysticism, and read in this area. I have published a paper on mysticism and music called ‘Expressions of Inexpressible Truths’ which is to be reprinted in a twenty-year commemorative edition of the World of Music.

I hope to publish more on different things, related to my work and further interests, in the coming years - though my main focus is on setting up the Arts and Sciences degree and on teaching. My feeling is that we are at the beginning of substantial changes in academia and in our relation to knowledge in general (these sorts of things I write about on the blog) and I am interestsed to question my relationship to writing and reading as part of these shifts. In any event, it is a positive development that where one used to be chided for being ‘a perpetual student’, one is now lauded as ‘a lifelong learner’ and admired as showing flexibility, adaptability and an intuitive ability to negotiate the ever-changing modern age.

I come from an intellectual and academic family.

I think people can change enormously over their lifetimes: emotionally, politically, artistically, intellectually, and the rest.

At some point – and up to now – these have been some of the thinkers and doers that have shaped my life in some way. The following are listed by category and in rough chronological order, according to when I encountered them.

School teachers: Philip Pullman, Peter Malin

Fiction Writers/Poets: Homer, Dickens, Hermann Hesse, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Turgenev, Jane Austen, George Eliot, Baudelaire, George Herbert, Shakespeare

Philosophers: Plato, Plotinus, Bertrand Russell, Pascal, Hume, Bergson, Wittgenstein, A W Moore, Graham Priest, George Boolos, Martha Nussbaum

Relgious writers: Augustine, Thomas Merton, Meister Eckhart, St Thomas a Kempis, Nicholas of Cusa

Scientists/Mathematicians: Morris Klein, Richard Dawkins, Paul Davies, Einstein, Feynman, Cantor, Godel

Musicians: The Clash, Ian Dury, Al Green, Chopin, Bach, Stevie Wonder, Bernard Edwards and Nile Rogers, Horovitz, Richter, Haydn, Beethoven, Verdi, Gene Harris, Jussi Bjoerling, Maria Callas, Boris Christoff, Cesare Siepi, George London

Politicians/Leaders/Business people/Sports people: Warren Buffett, Eric Cantona, Arsene Wenger, Michael Johnson, Barack Obama, Usain Bolt

and of course many friends and members of my family.

I am currently using this blog to focus on issues in education, interdisciplinarity and economics. Below is some more personal stuff and some other stuff which I am happy to share with those who are interested

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Personal articles:

NEWS AND CURRENT AFFAIRS

PERSONAL