3 Sep 2021

The magic of teaching magic tricks at school

From Nine To Noon, 9:30 am on 3 September 2021

Magic tricks are not only fun to learn, the process of learning them also fosters creativity, self-esteem and perseverance, says psychologist and magician Richard Wiseman.

boy with magic wand

Photo: Rodnae / Pexels

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 Richard Wiseman Photo: GUY HINKS

A simple childhood wish to know how his grandfather did a certain magic trick is what led Wiseman to eventually become a professional magician for a time.

"I'd read lots about magic so I got hooked on it as an eight-year-old kid and was performing magic tricks by the time I was about 10 and 11, and actually worked as a professional magician for a while before getting into psychology."

Magic and psychology work hand-in-hand, he says, because to fool an audience you have to understand how the mind works.

"You have to think what are the assumptions an audience is making, where are they looking at any particular moment and what are they going to remember from this performance? So you have to be a good psychologist."

Magic is not only fun to learn, it also helps foster all the life skills we wish for our children, Wiseman says.

"It encourages kids to sit down, to focus, and to think about how the practice and mistakes they make feed back into their performance and so on.

"Also it gives you a sense of mastery that you can do something if you practice hard enough."

When children try to figure out how a trick is pulled off, they're engaging in creative thinking, he says.

"In our study, we went into a school, we randomly assigned the kids to two different groups. One of them was taught a magic trick, the others took part in a fairly standard art lesson and then we measured their creative activity before and after the trick or lesson.

"The magic trick actually made them far more creative thinkers."

Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (2001) starring Emma Watson and Rupert Grint.

Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (2001) starring Emma Watson and Rupert Grint. Photo: Warner Bros / Heyday Films / Collection ChristopheL via AFP

Rehearsing how to pull off an illusion, children learn to persevere when they make a mistake, Wiseman says.

"There's all sorts of different stages there, so there's the trying to figure it out, there's the mastery, there's the confidence to stand up - when you first perform a magic trick, you will almost certainly make a mistake ... and so they could see themselves and their friends making mistakes and learning from those mistakes.

"Within magic, mistakes are highly valued. That's what you want to be doing when you're rehearsing, not when you're on stage with an audience."

Wiseman recently co-authored David Copperfield's History of Magic, with the famed American magician.

Readers are taken through Copperfield's astonishing private museum of magic, which apparently takes three hours to walk through.

"The book, yes, it's about the history of magic, but it's really about what magic has done for the world, why it matters," Wiseman says.

"[The museum] has incredible artefacts there, so [Harry] Houdini's props are there, [Jean-Eugène] Robert-Houdin - who was the founding father of modern-day magic - all of his apparatus is there."

*Richard Wiseman is a professor of the public understanding of psychology at the University of Hertfordshire.

He shares magic tricks on the YouTube channel Quirkology: