The 5 kinds of understanding seem to map almost perfectly onto Kegan (not Egan) stages of development, an idea that floats around the rationalist/postrationalist scene thanks mainly to promotion by David Chapman.
In this framework, "Stage 3" corresponds to someone who sees the world and their obligations mainly in terms of social roles and relationships; "Stage 4" is someone who can think in terms of formal systems, legally-bound institutions, and concrete, explicit obligations; and "Stage 5" is someone who understands how to shift between different formal systems depending on which is most appropriate.
These were inspired by Kohlberg's stages applied to ethical reasoning. Kegan's stages are not widely known, I don't think, but Kohlberg's stages of ethical development are popular so probably Egan had heard about them. But if not it's interesting to independently come up with a scheme like this.
> I remember my surprise when I realized that they couldn’t all be true — because you can’t follow “look before you leap” and “he who hesitates is lost” at the same time! I’m embarrassed to say that I think I only realized this when I was in college.
My wife's favorite example of this: do opposites attract, or do birds of a feather flock together? (She says she's seen studies claiming to demonstrate that the latter is much more true than the former.)
Slightly off topic, but the survey results bring to mind Scott's "I can tolerate anything except the outgroup post", that my bubble is so all encompassing at filtering out certain viewpoints that I don't know anyone who would answer those questions wrong. Who are the 46% of Americans that don't believe the Earth orbits around the Sun, or the 71% who don't believe that tomatoes have genes?
I’m going to have to admit that it’s hard for me to read something where the lede is buried; I scrolled through, read the conclusions so I had some context for what I was reading, and then went back and read the explanations/set-up. I did appreciate the dialogue explanations and the feeling of excitement expressed by the reviewer throughout.
I don’t have a singular reaction to Egan’s theory, I’m going to have to let this percolate for awhile to to have a real reaction.
While admittedly anecdotal, the two things that stuck in my mind throughout the entire read were:
1. The idea that rote learning is bad (or something not good) smacks up against how so often, rote learning really helped me get a grasp of something - only by seeing the pattern again, and again, and again, and again, did it become predictive for me. (And btw kids do this repetitive thing naturally too, it’s just we hate it because for us it’s watching Frozen for the 10 millionth time.)
2. When you are a person who is naturally intellectually inclined, it’s really hard to put yourself into the shoes of someone who isn’t and to not fall prey to thinking, if they aren’t getting it/don’t care, it must be the method, not the person on the receiving end of the method. Day in and day out, I see evidence of people who are incurious at best, and I don’t think they are that way because they never were enlightened to the value of curiosity.
> An Ironist thinks we build beliefs the way that you’d wrestle a trans-dimensional octopus: carefully. A catchy idea isn’t an object that will just let you put it down, it’s a slippery, multi-tentacled monster that wants nothing more than to crawl in your brain, grab the levels of motivation and speech, and use you to spread itself to others. Anyone entering the octopus-wrestling arena needs to take proper care.
Honestly, if I for some strange reason found myself in the position of having to fight an octopus, I'd look for some way to smuggle a hand grenade or two into the arena, or failing that, a sword. (And yes, I did just rewrite it from an wrestling match into violent combat. Animals generally aren't particularly good at the whole "tap out" concept.)
That's a very important aspect of "what it is to be human:" when faced with difficult tasks, we don't just take them at face value. We find ways to use tools to make the tasks less difficult and tilt the odds in our favor.
Any evaluation of the American education system that doesn't control for race is worthless.
Without non-asian minorities, America produces extremely capable highschool graduates compared to the rest of the world.
And importantly, no factor in our education system per se can be shown to be the cause of minority underperformance (nor can family wealth or education). No reform or intervention has ever reliably and durably worked, and there's nothing left to try but increasingly absurd crap about 'eliminating bias' from how arithmetic is taught or something.
If there were some way of getting black and hispanic achievement up to the level of white or asian achievement, this would be revolutionary and the impact what dwarf anything about making schools "better prepare students for society" or "cultivating every student's uniqueness". But nobody knows how to do this, especially not Egan.
(It's worth pointing out that if an Egan-style charter school is established and black students attend, it is only possible to judge the effectiveness of this school by measuring and controlling for the intellectual ability of the students ENTERING the school, not just leaving. We should expect that any black kids who got sent to this school are likely smarter than average, because smarter parents are more interested in stuff like charter schools in the first place, but the smartness of these students needs to be controlled for or else it's all worthless. And I say this from having experienced people using black student performance at charter schools as 'proof' that black underachievement is caused by flaws in the public school system, and yet they predictably did not measure the ability of students upon admission to even demonstrate they were dealing with a representative sample of the black community, which they almost certainly weren't).
For (at least implicit) egalitarians like Egan, this should be damning. If his methods cannot help the worst performing students, his methods are worthless. If he bit the bullet and said that race differences are mostly inherent but my methods will help everyone, that might be alright. But he doesn't.
Say what you want about the Chinese educational system, but students in China test well and have the obvious proof in the pudding of being smart enough to industrialize a giant country in a matter of decades. And OBVIOUSLY, there's nothing in the Chinese education system that clearly corresponds to anything Egan is saying, which points to the fact that intelligence explains most of the variance in educational outcomes, and it's absolutely not clear that a representative sample of black americans would do any better at Chinese schools that American ones (ignoring the issue of language differences). Maybe Egan's methods would create happier, more complete Chinese workers who are better able to yadda yadda yadda....but most people in the developing world would kill for China's economic growth, and whatever China is doing with their education if enough (for Chinese students, at least) for this growth to be achieved. Let's work on the 'being like socrates' part once we solve the more foundational civilizational problems around education and intelligence first.
And let me just restate this for the dorks who think that any mention of race at any time is completely weird and unwarranted: White and Asian American students are amongst the best in the world. Most of the "flaws" in American education, at least in comparison to the rest of the world, are explained by America's racial diversity. If you believe all races share an identical distribution of intelligence potential, then you are epistemically obligated to demonstrate (not just claim, not just recite a narrative) what part of the current American educational system is causing black and hispanic academic underperformance. If you have no idea of the cause (and are nonetheless convinced of inherent racial equality), then why the HELL should anyone listen to what you have to say about education reform? This is the biggest problem with American education, so if you have no insight here (other than falsely claiming that 'school funding' or 'racism' are the cause), why should anyone give your loftier educational ideals the time of day?
I enjoyed this review a lot, though it is very long. I will say the review makes Egan's book seem very curriculum focused. Perhaps this is just the nature of the work but I was left wondering about things like:
- How do teachers and students interact in this framework?
- Are students tested and graded? Are they held back?
- What happens when half of the class progresses quickly while the other half progresses slowly?
Linguist and former teacher of 5th- and 6th-grade Latin here (I taught for the last year and a half at a private school where it was mandatory).
The 'abstraction problem' is a big one for foreign languages unless you're doing it immersively. Learning to *read* a language like Latin in a non-immersive environment relies heavily on the abstraction abilities of students who don't speak something typologically similar--I had a *lot* of kids for whom the concept that an -a could be a neuter plural or a feminine singular simply didn't click. My best students fell into at least one of two categories:
--Native speakers of a foreign language with more inflection. Two of my fifth-graders were native speakers of Slavic languages and might as well have slept through class. The Persian speakers took to SOV word order and verb agreement like ducks to water and then crashed on the cases. And so forth.
--Also very good at math.
Obviously, L1 acquisition doesn't work this way--native speakers of Cree doesn't have to think about the utterly baroque direct-inverse system of verb agreement; they simply absorb it. I got a few kids into linguistics (we had a lot of fun towards the end of the year doing a bit of Greek, Sanskrit and the Romance languages, and one of my favorite students had a lot of questions about native American languages), but the abstraction problem is a big one. It's also one I have some personal experience with--at the age of nine my parents had the Latin teacher at the school my dad taught history at try to tutor me in Latin; we tried three or four sessions and then concluded it wasn't going to go much of anywhere. (To be fair, we used Wheelock's, which was maybe a bit too dense--I'd personally have used Lingua Latina per se Illustrata.)
Then, at the age of 12, I signed up to take ancient Greek at CTY--and fell head-over-heels in love with it (Hansen and Quinn this time--worse than Wheelock's!) Basic conceptual difficulties like case that I'd struggled so much with at the age of 9 now came much more easily, although woolier stuff like optatives and participles was still mostly bouncing off my brain.
All of the kids I taught Latin to last year were between those two ages, and one of the reasons I left (classroom management and workload being the main one) was that I eventually realized the system in place simply wasn't working--kids were convincing themselves they were dumb as a box of rocks when the actual problem at hand was the random walk of brain development; *plenty* of students would have done just fine had they waited until 8th grade to start the language. And, in my late 20s, I've found that I've gotten much better at learning to read foreign languages and absorbing vocabulary than I've ever been before--Tocharian B and Akkadian are the main summer projects. I think exposing kids to Cantonese, Sanskrit or--Middle Egyptian is an utterly miserable morass, so let's go for Arabic, Turkish or Swahili--would be a fabulous idea in high school, but I have my doubts about middle school.
On the other hand, Orthodox Jewish boys seem to do just fine learning Hebrew and Aramaic from a fairly early age. What do the yeshivas do?
I’ve said this about prior reviews, this guy - correction I’m guessing this was a gal - can write like a pro.
The presentation of the material, above all, held my curious attention in it’s review of a topic that isn’t of immediate concern to me. That is no mean trick for any writer.
It’s going to be really tough to pick a favorite when there have so far been several high quality essays.
Bottom line: Great job. Thanks for a fine contribution to competitor X!
"But — could a new kind of school make the world rational?"
No. Do I have to read the rest of this review, now?
Okay, I already read it back before it was a finalist, and I haven't changed my mind: there is no magic fix-it educational solution. Unless you have from the moment the child is born an individual education plan where they are put on the best track for their 'learning style' or whatever the hell new snazzy theoretical name is being used, with an individual set of tutors and a place of educating the nippers that is individually tailored to them, you're not going to get "and this is how we get smart, sensitive, informed, interested, curious, inventive and productive citizens".
Even if you do all the above (which is impossible until or unless we get the Magic Post-Scarcity AI Future), you're still not likely to get that, because you're rowing against human nature. "But if we just cradle little Johnny in the best and finest cotton wool we will make him sensitive and empathetic and wanting to be a good member of society who cares about his fellow persons and non-human animals and the insects and the climate and the environment and the heat death of the universe!"
Good luck with that, we have one member of our community looking for a way to bilk the creditors for his daughter's student loans, and they're not any sort of remarkable criminal type or hard-hearted sociopath who wants to free-ride off society and burn the rest of us suckers.
Wow! Just finished reading. I hope to write a longer response, but for now, I just want to thank you (the author) and tell you that I expect that reading this review will have a major impact on my life and the life of my child.
I loved this review. Despite it's length it was engaging throughout, and the Q-and-A format could have been lame but was done well enough to make this whole thing feel like a conversation about the ideas. I'm left half convinced, fervently wishing that pilot schools had been started a decade ago so I could have better evidence, and thinking that the author of this review would be a really cool person to get to know.
This was a really enjoyable read; excellent prose and flow etc. The only issue I had was that I'm like 99.9% sure that a chimpanzee "can play the games other [chimps] play, she can figure out her group’s social organization, act out her social role, and learn toolmaking." In fact I'd argue the average chimp is better at these than the most autistic .1% of humans. So that was a weird tangent in the review, but of course it's not central at all.
I think there is a deep conflation of the ideas of human learning and education/schooling as a formal institution. I see the same thing with a lot of capitalists who think all markets or trade or other a activity are somehow about capitalism. Humans have always learned, animals before humans evolved also learned, other animals even have the passage of knowledge between individuals and generations even into having cultures. The root of human learning and the root of education or schooling are not the same thing.
It is ironic that the author cites chesteron’s fence and talks about how we must use and uphold and propagate rationality as a set of ideal end point values to aim towards. Could it be education and schools are doing just fine as they are for their actual purposes? Does the thresher care about all the failed parts that fall off when sorting the wheat from the chaff? We have a neo-feudal society which requires the peasants to be smart enough to work, but dumb enough not to rebel, at least in the aggregate.
Improving the lives of commoners is not the purpose or goal of a feudal or neo feudal society. The goal is always to enrich the wealthy and maintain their power and control. Can anyone argue this isn’t happening as billionaires flourish and power is ever more centralised into fewer executives and larger companies?
And this is going very very well. The elite/aristocracy don’t have issues with commoner schools, so there is no issue. They can read, write, work, and follow orders to do low level intellectual work, service work, and keep the ranks of blue collar jobs filled to keep our human environment working with electricity, food, roads, planes, and luxury goods for them.
Before you go educating the masses, have you considered how they might revolt or demand better wages? Why do you think we have mass scams like central banks and ‘free markets’ where the borrow rates are set by decree? It is to keep wages down and asset prices high in useful cycles for elites.
We’re only just getting into the 1984 utopia of a controlled and propagandised population of stupid ideology driven ignorance of compliant commoners who don’t do things like unionise or resist fighting wars we tell them to die in so we can secure colonial or egotistic goals of aristocratic competition.
Egan still really sounds like a humanities major who never passed a math or science course and is trying to sell this as a sign of his superiority to those unsophisticated nerds who only know true things.
The elementary school curriculum of unorganized observation sounds like a reasonable place to start. But then the middle school centers history, meaning the actual subjects will get short shrift. There's also developing a sense of awe, which is nice, but unless done carefully can clash with actual understanding. In any case, it's enough that a student who learned the human interest stories and expressed their awe eloquently could "do well" in the course without learning anything about the actual subject. Then he wants to cover controversies in high school. No one has any business having an opinion on the nature of dark energy if they don't thoroughly understand how movement, force, mass and energy interact under normal circumstances!
Similarly, he doesn't give the enlightenment a fair showing. He centers it on Plato, ignoring Bacon and Galileo, much less Newton and Bayes (and all the people after Bayes who built modern Bayesianism; I don't know their names). And he treats irony as some sort of more advanced state. Irony is where you don't try to solve any hard problem, but sneer at those who do using attitude, politics and word-games.
The review kind of addresses this by quoting:
> “Ironic understanders remain open to the possibility that the Enlightenment project might not be exhausted, that rationality might not be the deliverer only of nightmares, that knowledge, truth, and objectivity might not be confined only to contingent agreements, that Western science and rationality might be discourses more privileged than some others in terms of access to reality.”
"Rationality **might** not be the deliverer only of nightmares". There he sits in industrial-made clothing, well fed by green-revolution food, protected from disease by vaccines and antibiotics, and he has the chutzpah to say rationality "might" have done some good things for him. Would he rather be dead?
And "science and rationality" ("Western" is just a fnord) **might** have more access **than some** to reality. The styles of thought entirely based around identifying reality, which regularly test themselves in harsh ways, might be better than **some** others, such as the style of thought that answers every question with "banana". Not necessarily better than Eddic Literalism. Let's not get extremist about anything.
I suppose this all comes back to what we hope schools will achieve, a question we never really answered. There may be some goals toward which Egan's approaches have value. But if one of the goals is understanding the physical world well enough to interact with it responsibly, let the blind not follow the blind. Especially not the proudly blind.
There are lots of useful practical ideas here. (I am less interested in what any of this has to do with Plato - also I could not read this whole thing). Broadly I like the direction of this approach, but I would caution that different kinds of material call for different tools, and I'm skeptical about grand theories.
One of the ideas proposed for high school science class is to focus on the debates. Sometimes that works very well. But I just listened to a lecture series on debates on human paleontology, and it was often boring. It requires a lot of extraneous information to set up a debate, and not all valuable topics are hotly debated. The question is: how do you get people to think about the heart of a matter? Often the best way is just to give the crucial, well-established info and ask good questions about it. (They've found with highschool math people learn better if you just straight up teach the skills, and then practice).
For example, if the topic is whether Neanderthals could talk, skip the debate and just give the very strong evidence that yes, they could. Then ask the hard question: at what level do you think they could talk? Consider what info you would need? What is most plausible? What would it even mean to have an intermediary level of speech?
I once filled in for a friend for a university stats class on mean vs mode vs median. I taught each by telling stories about how each are used by real people to mislead the public. Then compared that to what they are best used for. It was a fun strategy to get people into the meat of it -- some said it was the first time they really got it -- but it's not a strategy that would work for many other subjects. Gotta use different strategies for different topics.
What I would like to see is a menu of evidence-based, tested strategies for how best to get people to sink their teeth into subjects, so that teachers could adapt those to the needs of each subject at hand. I'm skeptical of grand theories rather than a bunch of smaller approaches that work for specific domains.
Having slogged through these interesting ideas, I'm left with two questions:
1. How do the Montessori schools fit (or not fit) into these paradigms? I can't say I know much about them, but they tend to come up in such discussions and they are mentioned in the review with
"Where would, say, unschooling, and classical education, and vocational ed, and Montessori go? The first three seem obvious. ..."
before being forgotten. I found that frustrating -- it's hard to read "The first three seem obvious" and not expect a Montessori discussion to follow at some point -- and in comparison to Egan schools they at least exist.
2. With two young kids in public school (one starting third grade, one starting kindergarten), how can we best support their development in view of the better of these ideas? (Obviously others may have similar questions with respect to their own kids.)
The reviewer clearly put a lot of effort into this, but it still falls pretty flat for me. I wish the conclusion was much shorter, and something that might be actionable at a school level.
Say I'm starting a charter or private school, and am sold on it being a good model. What would it look like? I sort of know what Waldorf and Montessori schools look like, and both have aspects I like. If you're looking at St John's College (which I also like), they will present you with a Book List. These are the books we read.
What is the Erganian equivalent of the Book List or basket activities or kids needle felting gnomes?
2. Egan's theory seems far too elaborate and complex for something that seems driven by speculation rather than empiricism. Basically no chance of being broadly right (though plausibly better for some students, some of the time).
This is really long. The Substack app estimates 108 mins which is the longest I’ve seen by a lot. I think the author does have an engaging writing style. I also can’t think of anything really worth cutting.
> I’ll admit, here, that I have tremendously fond memories of my elementary school years — committed teachers, good friends, and interesting activities.
> What was middle school like for you?
> In math, I recall a jumble of barely-related topics. In literature, I remember reading great literature — Frankenstein, Romeo and Juliet — only in their dumbed-down summary formats. In social studies, I remember teachers proclaiming on the first day of class that unlike all of our previous history classes, this class wouldn’t be about names and dates… and then going on to memorize names and dates. And in science, I remember being forced to dissect a frog only to discover that frogs are — you guessed it — made of slimy frog parts.
> I’ll confess — I loved parts of high school… and among nerdy folks, I suspect I’m not alone. For some of us, this was a golden time. Even at my local public high school, I had access to academically thrilling classes — especially, in my last two years, advanced literature and history. I felt like I was finally understanding the ideas that mattered.
These quotes were really interesting to me. As someone who really hated school, these are nice to read. A little bit of insight into the mind of someone who actually liked it. They seems very earnest too.
Im not yet sure how I’d feel about reforming the current system to be like the on Egan proposes. I think I will have to re-read parts of the review as it is a lot to take-in in one reading. But I think would have enjoyed it more than the current school system.
The author’s intellectual history certainly reminds me of mine. I remember in eighth grade science our teacher had us write a short paper for or against the hypothesis of global warming. It was fun and transgressive and educational to write the against paper! The whole illustration of how students might best learn does seem to have the ring of truth to it.
Maybe I'm too much of a STEMlord, but I'm highly skeptical that abstract/general logic is a weakness of children and that it should be pushed off until high school. I attribute a lot of my academic success to getting a really early appreciation for picking out patterns and connections in things. You could probably weave this kind of stuff into an Eganian story-centric approach - science is filled with people who made discoveries by drawing on their other experiences and domains. But I think it's much more efficient to teach kids things they can use, to give them immediate sensory evidence that they have something they didn't before. This is why the part about favoring "affective experiences" over "doing stuff" especially sticks out to me - kids love doing stuff! I was an atypical kid, but that I think is damn near universal.
A lot of the Eganian lessons you depict do sound like they would have been more fun and engaging to me than normal school, but it's much less clear to me that I'd have retained them any better or that I'd end up any smarter, especially without having that pre-existing scientist mentality to tie it all together.
> 'There are some reforms that seem to work at the margin: raising teacher pay'
Raising teacher pay has been demonstrated quite comprehensively to not work. See 'Double for Nothing? Experimental Evidence on an Unconditional Teacher Salary Increase in Indonesia' by Ree et al
Abstract
How does a large unconditional increase in salary affect the performance of incumbent employees in the public sector? We present experimental evidence on this question in the context of a policy change in Indonesia that led to a permanent doubling of teacher base salaries. Using a large-scale randomized experiment across a representative sample of Indonesian schools that accelerated this pay increase for teachers in treated schools, we find that the large pay increase significantly improved teachers' satisfaction with their income, reduced the incidence of teachers holding outside jobs, and reduced self-reported financial stress. Nevertheless, after two and three years, the increase in pay led to no improvement in student learning outcomes. The effects are precisely estimated, and we can rule out even modest positive impacts on test scores. Our results suggest that unconditional pay increases are unlikely to be an effective policy option for improving the effort and productivity of incumbent employees in public-sector settings.
> Bryan Caplan, in his book Against Education, cites surveys of what Americans know about basic scientific concepts. Here’s what they find:
> of the hundred adults, 76 know that the center of the Earth is hot (this is good!)
> only 54 know that the Earth goes around the Sun
> only 50 know that not all radioactivity is man-made
> only 29 know that ordinary (as opposed to GMO) tomatoes have genes
> Q: Well, those are facts, not understanding
I don't understand what our hypothetical questioner is supposed to be thinking. "Those are facts, not understanding" is a way to explain why people can answer factual questions _correctly_ without being able to apply their knowledge. It's possible to know certain (correct!) facts without understanding what they mean.
But the reverse situation is what's being hypothetically appealed to here, and that's impossible. No one can understand what genes are without also knowing that non-GMO tomatoes have genes. If someone doesn't know the facts, then they also don't understand the knowledge that the facts depend on.
Haha, I agree with all of this, therefore it is clear that Egan and our reviewer are jolly smart people!
More seriously, thank you - this is the educational theory I have been looking for. I read John Holt (a proponent of homeschooling) a long time ago and was very influenced by him, but he didn't write anything as systematic as what Egan seems to have done. With my own kids, and in my own teaching, I've been doing lots of these things (lots of mythology at a young age, and I use jokes in my ESL classes as soon as the kids can understand them). But I haven't seen anything like this, with all the themes and progressions worked out. I'll go and read Egan, and I'm hoping he will give me lots of inspiration.
Incidentally, the length didn't bother me, because this is one of my pet subjects. The level of interest and enthusiasm is impressive, and I always assume that someone writes long because they didn't have the time to write shorter. Thank you, thank you, thank you!
I realize that this is a review of a book on education, and not simply a review of Western educational systems. Be that as it may, I have had a feeling in the back of my mind since near the start of the essay that wasn't ever addressed. It is top of mind not just for me but for several of my friends, coworkers, family members, etc.
Schools have a fourth job beyond socialization, academics, and development, which is tangential at best to education but required in order for society to function: Occupation. Our children have to be occupied during the working hours of the day, so that parents can earn a living to maintain the household.
I think it's only really nagging at me because it wasn't ever addressed, except in referencing why educators sometimes leave the profession, in itself a perfectly fair response to interacting with the education system. It is the grease that keeps the wheels of society turning, but never touched on directly in the essay.
I spent my time reading this essay, which took quite some time and led me to look up a few things, asking when the first role that a teacher has would actually be referenced. The depth and brightness that an education can bring to a child are both vast and immensely important, along numerous quantifiable vectors and innumerable internal changes.
That has to be arm-in-arm with occupation, not seemingly ignorant of it except as a way of explaining self-dismissal from the role.
My own response would be to say that the long process of education, over twelve years, does the job of occupation. It's implied, but not spoken. I think it's vital to directly address that important role that teachers have.
I have to admit and should be clear that I think this nagging feeling comes from insecurity. I know one couple in my social circles that is fortunate enough to have one of the two in a work-from-home position that lets her spend time with her adorable son during the work day's hours. All of the rest are reliant on schools, pre-schools, daycares, or family and friends.
I would not call this a biting critique of the author's essay or of the book behind it. As I've said, this took time to mill through, but I did quite enjoy it. More, I think I largely agree with what Egan says, as presented. I look back on my own youth in education and feel the impoverishment more acutely.
The essay, and possibly the book, lacks some awareness that schools have four jobs, not three, and that missing job that goes barely remarked on is the most important one of them all.
It's important enough that we have schools, pre-schools, daycares, or family and friends caring for our children. This long string of institutions and alternative options exists because of its primacy. A teacher is a developer, a socializer, an academic, and an occupier. A babysitter bearing technical knowledge, who has an interest in providing education and sparking young minds into the wildfire of expertise. It does no one any good to demote the job of babysitter solely because a teacher provides so much more.
I really hate the "extremes" approach in teaching biology, for example. Oooh, the fastest-running mammal! Oooh, the smallest flowering plant! It doesn't give you a sense of how the mammals use movement to their advantage or how the flowering plants conserve resources to their advantage. These factoids are never put in context. They remain... I guess Sherlock Holmes would say "parlour tricks".
And don't forget, people often get wrong ideas this way. Useless ideas. For example, people in Ukraine think rare and protected animals are things like tigers. True! Tigers are rare, very generally speaking. Not rare in Ukraine, though, for two reasons: 1) they don't live here in the wild, and 2) a lot of them are here dying slowly in captivity. It's just that tigers are flashy, attractive. Extreme. And it makes some people feel good about vaguely knowing of their plight (it's like praying to help the survivors of a volcanic eruption) and other people feel proud for having them in cells. At home. (A friend of mine who works in animal rehab says this is psychiatric - it's about Power, Love, Death, and all that shit.)
What about the less-flashy animals which are actually present, rare, and officially protected in Ukraine? Why, they are for the nerds.
So this "education in extremes" has real consequences beyond school. And nobody in school cares about these things. You see, it's not their business.
Egan probably would've benefitted from Henri Corbin's term 'imaginal.' The notion is that we equivocate on the term 'imagination,' meaning sometimes 'imaginary' (imagination that takes us away from perception) and sometimes 'imaginal' (imagination for the sake of perception). Great article!
The review (pamphlet) is written in very persuasive way, but some of the ideas sound like they should be questioned more:
First of all, I don't think teaching of math or any science can be made better by attaching gossip-py tales of mathematicians and scientists. The evidence I cite is that my middle - high school textbooks did exactly that: the books had these small "boxes" containing short textual vignettes of Galileo or Newton or Ada Lovelace. It made nobody more interested nor better at manipulating algebraic symbols or solving mechanics problems or solving short problems in base 2. Vignettes themselves were so short and lacking of detail (often quite propagandist) that nobody got any deep insight character studies of those people either: at best the kids-become-adults (if they paid attention) may be able to drop those names while sounding intellectual yet say nothing of interest of them.
What is needed for developing deep knowledge and skill is learning the skill of staying still and focused on your tasks and doing reps again and again, at the level that is challenging )not too easy or not so difficult it is impossible). If the task is intellectually stimulating, one can derive sense of joy and accomplishment out of it.
Likewise, the 15-minute episodic teaching sounds like wonderful of you want to nurture propensity to attention span of goldfish. For small children, it is understandable that there are limits. But it would be still very much useful to start building ability for deep concentration. Many kinds of learning and problem solving can't be done in 15 minute segments, so it would be a good thing to start practicing skill to do so.
I have a feeling that many aspects of the proposed curricula / educational theory suit very well extroverted sort of "well-grounded" person who knows considerable amount of many things and loves talking about them: a curriculum that would produce an ideal generalist teacher, in the eye of a teacher like Egan himself (and reviewer, I suspect). Yet very few kids would want or are suited or should start a career of teacher, themselves. The society needs plumbers and cooks and mid-tier office administrators and engineers and scientists and businessmen and artists and historians and politicians (and telephone sanitizers), too, and these are the sort of people who won't become generalist teachers. To enjoy their lives, they should be able to do their chosen job well enough. Which ties to the next point:
>I always thought this was stupid — of the huge lecture hall of students in my Geology 100 class, how many went on to take even a second course?
Not many. Same for math. But those who realize they want to enter the second course and beyond need that solid 100-level ground. It is physically impossible to make a school where everyone is master of everything, but it is good for the society and the individuals themselves that an individual who has the ability and willingness to master something are given the chance to do so.
The question about the relationship between rationality and irony seems like an incredibly rich and interesting one, to the point that it made it a little hard to care about the (hugely voluminous) rest of this review. (This is meant to be a positive comment!)
"There’s a moment at the end of my favorite Bollywood movie that’s become stuck in my head. The protagonists have made the arduous journey to a beachside rural school. In the sun outside, flocks of children are experimenting with art and playing with inventions; inside, the walls are covered with books and the tables are covered with models. The kids are learning joyously and deeply."
Pretty sure the author is referencing Three Idiots, for anyone wondering. It's an excellent film, and not in a "haha look at this crazy Bollywood movie" way.
>Egan suggests one simple question might be “what’s society”?And a functionalist might compare it to a body, a Marxist might compare it to a battlefield, a symbolic interactionist might compare it to a theater. Again, students can read famous studies and argue about which of these paradigms are supported (or not) by the evidence.<
My Sociology 101 class led by telling us how the three theories differed from each other, and the impression it left on me was "Sociology is baseless crap that can't even figure out a theory for itself." I guess Egan's take is supposed to come after years of buildup, not up-front, but I'm highly skeptical that this approach would build any interest in a topic.
The rest of it seems worth trying. I don't know how much of my math growth came from starting with Number Crunchers and Quotient Quest while my dad was at work, but it wouldn't surprise me if it was non-zero. And of course Schoolhouse Rock is the greatest educational tool in history. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=koZFca8AkT0
Might I distill some of these ideas into a plausible schema?
Elementary school: socialization
Middle school: developmental
High school: academics
Now combine that general scheme with IQ/aptitude tests that sort out students into streams that will benefit best from progress to each stage. The mentally handicapped (IQ<70) need not go on to middle school. Kids who seem best suited to the developmental stage might exit school and progress to trade schools rather than high schools. And those who will benefit from academic teaching can go on to high school and if they thrive there, go on to higher (university) education.
I am aware that this suggestion will be offensive to some. But there is cruelty in making non-academic children suffer through grade 12, and then leave with a dumbed down diploma and no interest in learning anything. It is surely better to sort out those who would do well at trade schools and let them go there at the age of 15-16. There's a good and well-paid life open to them in a trade and we do need such people as valued members of our communities. The fact is that "school" should mean different things to differently-abled people. I barely survived an English "comprehensive" school, and thus have first hand knowledge of why the old 11-plus system was better fitted for purpose.
I don't remember being in the primary school age range well enough (or know any young children well enough) to be able to judge well for that section, but my impression of the middle school section at least is that I would have hated that style. Presumably some people would like it, this is just my personal feeling. The focus on individual people in history rather than general trends (why societies were the way they were, and by extension, why they are the way they are) was part of the reason I didn't enjoy history in school even though I later developed some interest in it as an adult. For STEM subjects, the personal anecdotes would just be annoying and totally irrelevant. It's meant to cultivate an interest in the subject but instead it's putting the focus on something vaguely adjacent to the subject and distracting from it. As for studying a third language, if the goal is to broaden the student's understanding by teaching a dissimilar language, why on earth would Sanskrit and ancient Egyptian be chosen rather than, say, modern Hindi and Arabic? (I'm assuming these are very dissimilar to English but I don't actually know much about either of them. It should certainly be possible to find at least two major modern languages very different from whatever first language you're starting from.) The goal may be less focused on the possibility of them actually getting the language to a level where they can actually use it to communicate, but if you can teach them some linguistics while also giving a bit of a basis in something that might actually come in handy later, why throw away that free advantage?
One of the points Caplan makes in his book is that most Americans who learn another language in school can't speak it once they're done with school. His owns sons are fluent in Spanish, but that's because they continued to immerse themselves in the language outside of the school/homeschool environment.
> Who first discovered the concepts students learn in math? The answer, of course, is a wide diversity of curious men and women living across the world over the last few thousand years.
I didn't notice any women in your subsequent list. Or anyone outside the Western + Islamic world.
Making Socrates the ideal rather than Aristotle seems odd to me. Socrates could only undermine rather than build up a system of knowledge posterity could rely and build on.
> See, that’s maybe the strongest evidence for the theory, as janky as it still appears to me — that the educational practices it recommends are so danged appealing to so many people.
This is a giant red flag that to me says to distrust it. Thought I should acknowledge I was distrustful earlier, and thought the review was too long and below the usual standard of quality for guest-reviews here.
At least one person has: Socrates. Egan points to him as an exemplar of Ironic understanding done well."
Socrates, the man whose true beliefs we know nothing about, because if he ever wrote a single word in his life, it has not survived. So Egan's best example that Ironic understanding is possible is not a real person, but Socrates the fictional character from Plato's dialogues (or maybe from Xenophon's).
And that nicely encapsulates one of the major problems with this educational theory: real children and real teachers are not Plato's idealized character. Starting with the teachers, this is what Egan is asking *elementary school teachers* to do, in addition to the standard curriculum (not in its stead!):
1. Know stories from cultures all around the world, from the Epic of Gilgamesh to the Inca legend of the Sun and the Moon. Fine, they can just read from a book for this one.
2. Tell jokes
3. Teach "Beethoven, yes, but also the Beatles; Tchaikovsky, yes, but also Tuvan throat singers, and also John Cage, whale song, and bird song"
4. "the stories of the war of the Greek city-states against the Persian empire, and the slave uprising of Spartacus against the Romans. We can tell them about the plight of Jews in medieval Europe, and of the unsuccessful Sepoy Rebellion in India against the British"
5. "they should get a sense of Big History. They should get some simple stories about the ice age, the Cenozoic, the age of dinosaurs, the Paleozoic, the origins of our solar system, and the Big Bang"
6. Translate all of the above into metaphors and vivid visual imagery
Middle school teachers have to:
1. Know not just math, but the history of how it was discovered and the biographies of the people who discovered it
2. Know not just science, but how to teach it in a "heroic" way: "what’s a tooth? Bone, wrapped in rock, surrounding tiny cells that your body feeds with blood."
3. Understand not just what happened in history, but also the ideas that drove it and the personalities behind those ideas: "Here, we’d focus less on the details of the person’s life, and use it as a backdrop to showing how meaningful some of history’s most important ideas could be. Think Aristotle and syllogisms, Edward Said and orientalism, Confucius and propriety, Cornel West and race, Buddha on the four noble truths, Muhammad and the five pillars, Karl Marx and communism, Adam Smith and the invisible hand, Thomas Hobbes and the state of nature, John Locke and natural rights, Jeremy Bentham and utilitarianism, Thomas Aquinas on the sacraments, Martin Luther on faith, Voltaire on the freedom of speech… you get the idea."
4. Come up with amusing anecdotes about etymology, for some reason
5. Be familiar with humor--not just jokes, but comedy at its finest
6. Wrap up all of the above in gossip, idealism, extremes, and stories of heroism
High school teachers have to be familiar with:
1. Interdisciplinary metaknowledge, such as "game theory, cognitive biases, systems thinking, Bayesian reasoning, epistemology, ethics, logic, cultural evolution, and so on."
2. Both the traditional Western cannon and a multicultural cannon, along with the arguments of those who favor one or the another: "Bell hooks, Edward Said, and China Achebe should be on the syllabus, as should Allan Bloom, Mortimer Adler, and Diane Ravitch."
3. Both sides of dueling historical narratives: "We might help kids read chapters from Howard Zinn’s socialist history of America alongside the corresponding chapters from Paul Johnson’s conservative history of America"
4. The big questions of human history: "We can have them compare Steven Pinker’s theory of civilization’s progress (Better Angels of our Nature) with Yuvah Noah Harari’s theory of civilization’s woes (Sapiens). We could have them compare so-and-so’s account of human history as an ever-expanding unlatching of energy sources with Robert Wright’s account of human history as unlatching more and more positive-sum games (Nonzero). "
5. An in-depth understanding of the cutting edge of science, adequate to follow the scholarly conversation around dark matter, dark energy, the origin of life, and the process of natural selection (e.g. punctuated equilibrium vs. gradualism), the different paradigms of psychology (cognitivism vs. Freud vs. biopsychologism...)
How many people in the entire world are capable of teaching even a fraction of this? To take one example, how many practicing astrophysicists can understand the scholarly conversation around dark energy, let alone explain it to a 17 year old? (I asked an astrophysicist friend of mine, one who's done research on cosmology, and he has only a vague idea what the controversies are in dark energy.)
There's a reason that "those who can't do, teach" is a common saying. New teachers score at the 48th percentile on the SAT and ACT (https://hechingerreport.org/debunking-one-myth-about-u-s-teachers/). So imagine taking one of those people who don't know tomatoes have genes or that Earth goes around the Sun, and expecting him to be a Renaissance man familiar with the big questions of human history and the cutting edge of astrophysics. Imagine expecting him to teach his newfound Renaissance man wisdom to a classroom of kids who hate learning, are high on drugs, look at their phones constantly, disrupt him every 2 minutes, swear at him, and get physically aggressive when he tries to stop their behavior. Needless to say, I don't think he'll get very far.
> Did you learn anything that wasn’t obviously useful? Did you read Hamlet, say, or master the Pythagorean theorem?
That is a bit of a funny example, I think the Pythagorean theorem might be the most useful thing I've learned in all my years in school, second only to basic arithmetic.
On the one hand, now I really want to read Egan. It feels like he incorporates a lot of my thoughts about what's missing in education (a sense of discovery and adventure, and connection to anything meaningful in the child's actual life). On the other hand, I do feel like the review overstays its welcome and a lot of sections could have been summarized.
Excellent book and review. Probably the best content I read on children education, ever.
I found that it has a lot of overlaps with the ideas in Keith Johnstone's Improv. Keith used to teach elementary a very similar approach. He describes a situation where a school inspector had to jump over a "black hole" in the classroom that the kids constructed somewhere between painting the walls and drawing whatever they want given a topic.
We need to be honest about the downsides of education. When people become more intelligent, well-informed, creative, critical, curious, and abstract thinkers, their demand for autonomy generally increases.
But most jobs — historically and currently — want workers who follow proscribed policies with minimal divergence.
The rise of white collar roles that require college degrees hasn’t changed this substantially. No sane CEO wants a brilliant and independent-minded HR coordinator. Even in roles like nursing, in which smarter and wiser people perform better, hospitals as institutions do not benefit from the level of disruption that comes from people with minds filled with thoughts much more complex than their tasks demand.
Furthermore, high intelligence makes simple repetitive tasks boring. Not only does Starbucks have little interest in baristas who know calculus, knowing calculus makes being a barista feel indignant, and more likely to agitate for unionization.
Finally, mainstream American culture has a major undercurrent of anti-intellectualism. Asian and Jewish cultures valorize education, educators, intellectuals. Middle America idolizes athletes and celebrities. Black American culture even more so; use a big word and you may be said to be “acting white”.
In the Antebellum South, everyone knew that you shouldn’t educate slaves. In more brutal slave societies, such as San Domingue (Haiti before independence), slaves were kept malnourished in attempt to limit their ability to fight back.
A real study of world history, which seems to be the major upshot of this approach, would suggest that the upper classes do not wish to empower the lower classes with a rich, balanced, wholistic education.
Maybe things will change once AI and robotics takes all the jobs.
Personally I'd have hated having stories about mathematicians in maths class. It's the maths itself that's interesting - who came up with it is contingent and arbitrary.
I remember as a young teen wanting to learn philosophy and picking up an introductory book on it, and being very disappointed that it was about philosophERS, not philosophY. I wanted mind-expanding ideas like "what is consciousness?" and "what is morality?" and "what if I'm just a brain in a jar?", not biographies of philosophers and where they were born and where they studied.
Absolutely fantastic! Best content of the year for me.
The "bears are white" experiment explains the entire thing for me. The villagers in the story are not willing to speculate. Their minds are firmly anchored in their physical reality, "one-track mind". Reading, by comparison, involves surrendering to flights of fancy - seeing a landscape that does not exist, believing a theory some guy made up, feeling the heartbreak of people who do not exist.
Seems like Egan is trying to do the same for belief systems. Overload students with 1000 perspectives and stories, and they will treat beliefs as the reader treats thoughts, and put them on like clothes or masks.
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One more thing - you (and him?) are shitting on the murky triangle of values at the start, but that strikes me as pretty much the whole purpose of the enterprise. Conflicting priorities means nothing really gets done, which means nothing bad happens! A holding pattern is not a bad default.
This may be my favorite review so far, but that may be because I can always enjoy seeing conventional education getting bashed. I believe a great deal of it is about forcing children to endure boredom.
This being said, some of it reminds me of those annoying youtube videos which spend a lot of time telling why a thing is interesting or hooking it to other possibly interesting things rather than telling me about the subject.
What happens if a kid is actually fascinated by something and they don't want to do the curriculem?
When I was a kid, I really didn't like history. It's possible that those stories would have hooked me, or it might have been just that boring people stuff.
Well, like others, I think a lot of this sounds great, but much of it is not exactly new or revolutionary. That said, I would pay money for mini-segment lesson plans. Give me a few hundred of those, please! (Seriously, has someone made this yet?)
The author clearly put a lot of time and effort into this, but ultimately just succeeded in replacing "socialization", "academics" and "development" with a clearly honors emphasis "academics" focus with lesser "development".
The book and/or reviewer also missed the entire point of universal schooling: it was about development. It was apparently far harder to insert completely uneducated people into Industrial Age tasks than it is someone with a basic smattering of math and reading - therefore let's give everyone a bit of reading and 'rithmetic.
The "socialization" bit is pure modern nonsense; the "academics" bit is the meritocracy nonsense extended down.
What both the reviewer and apparently, Mr. Egan, fail to recognize is that there are roles for all manner of people in society: PMCs are one (minority), but there are plenty of people needed for vocations, for teaching, for bureaucracies, for police work, etc etc. The reality is that the present system is entirely focused on the theoretical identification of the potential PMC when in reality, the system should be sorting for all societal needs. And no, the present system does not do that as evidenced by the percentage of Ivy League school graduates who do vocations (probably not zero but certainly near zero). I am 100% certain that 99.5% of all schooling at whatever levels lays zero emphasis on anything but the "academics" track which is really just a euphemism for future PMC-dom, and the amount of "development" for someone to be a plumber or electrician = near zero.
Nor is the notion that academic excellence translates into vocational capability a valid one either. The San Francisco Bay Area - the reality is that it is full of academically smart people but is populated by a large number of extremely well paid vocational types like said plumbers and electricians - because these excellent academic types can't do plumbing or electrical work (or fix a car or grow food etc etc).
And finally, given the above, a key barrier to progress is precisely the failure to recognize that education fulfilling all of society's needs *requires* discrimination. The vocational types are different than the academics; trying to make everyone an academic is foolish and a waste of time as much as there should be the equal opportunity to start or change to different tracks.
Thus the problem Egan wants to solve is the wrong one, and so is the objective of modern K-12 education, equally muddled. Any wonder then that the outcomes are bad?
Maybe I'm the odd one out, but I felt like my schooling had a lot of the components Egan describes. Kindergarden-grade 3 was filled with listening to/reading children's stories and poems, doing things like looking out of the window or going to see a tree and then writing about it, learning about the history of the earth (early earth to dinosaurs) and building lots of craft projects to illustrate this history (lots of fun!)
Middle school was dryer, but I feel like I remember science textbooks describing things by way of which scientists discovered them, and what they were like, which I found pretty interesting. Wish they'd have done the same for math. And in high school- helped by the fact that by this point I was in the IB program - we had a combination of 'classic' and modern literature from a variety of cultures.
Not that improvements can't still be made, and I recognise that I probably had a better schooling than many people. But I felt that this review was very confident in its assertions that schooling currently is terrible, and the Egan's ideas are completely novel. This doesn't match up to my experiences.
Edit: Looking through the comments many people are saying the same things! I'll add that it put my off the review a little bit that the reviewer seemed to want you to believe these were new and revolutionary ideas. A more sober interpretation would have helped me appreciate Egan's '5 revolutions' better.
Does Egan explain how the Somatic stage ties in with the others at all, especially Irony? I found the majority of the framework interesting, but Somatic and bodily feelings seem to get mentioned then dropped.
An interesting review, but I wish the structure was changed completely. Having to read through virtually all of it before hearing what the author is actually proposing is interesting in terms of dialectics but it’s really annoying as a reader.
> Did you learn anything that wasn’t obviously useful? Did you read Hamlet, say, or master the Pythagorean theorem, or learn that the planets orbit the Sun (and not the other way around)? That’s the fingerprints of the academic goal.
First off, reading Hamlet is socialization, not knowledge. The Truth, as described above, will remain the same regardless of whether you've read Hamlet, and reading Hamlet won't teach you any of it.
Second off, more amusingly, the Pythagorean theorem has been a cornerstone of practical, applied mathematics for several thousand years; it is used for the highly pragmatic purpose of constructing right angles out of floppy ropes.
> Did your kindergarten have tiny, child-sized chairs?
> [This], Egan says, [is] the fruit of developmentalism.
This is just absurd. If we declared that developmentalism was anathema and practitioners were to be shot on sight, chairs for small children would still be small.
This essay had, in retrospect, a very appropriate if major flaw- it's deeply concerned with the presentation of its material, often to the point of incuriosity about the topic for its own sake. That is, I think, a lot of what contributes to the length; the reviewer clearly thought very very hard about the pedagogical structure of this information presentation, and built a gradual progressive structure towards its introduction, but spends rather fewer inches on actual critical analysis. It's not *absent*, but we got whole pages effusively praising this method that are also by design *hiding* its details, rather than *discussing* the plan at the object level.
In a classroom, strict control over the slow rollout of information for maximum emotional impact can be justified; but in this context, I just felt managed and handled. Helping me understand the topic is welcome in the abstract, but not at the cost of thinking clearly about it on my own terms.
I feel somewhat irritated by the the usage of the word "ironic". It implies some sort of subversion or irreverence to earlier stages that does not seem inherent to the fifth stage of thinking. I think I remember the moment back when I was 17, when my fourth-level understanding of the world gave place to the fifth-level, and it felt dramatic, like a shattering of something profound, but it was not ironic, it was not a smug rebellion against a constraining philosophical dogma, it was a natural consequence of learning science, and hence learning the limitations of science.
The review spent so long building up to the idea of the SAD triangle and the doesn’t contrast or frame Understanding-led Education against it at all
Going by the end saying that Understand-led Education mostly works with existing school structures & curriculum, it seems like a tool set that can just be layered on top of the SAD triangle
But that doesn’t match with SAD being the three goals of education & Egan introducing a fourth goal, turning everyone into Socrates as a separate thing entirely especially when the SAD section says mixing goals is bad
This is way too long to read on a screen. Printed out it is 76 pages. It is way too long to function as a review that might get me interested in reading a book. Maybe somebody can write a review of this review.
Without hard data to back up what he's saying, Egan is just another asshole with an opinion. I get having some big sexy theory of things is what helps you sell books and get eyeballs on your ideas to begin with, but nobody should treat what he says seriously until we have data to justify doing so.
We should have a profound skepticism of ALL educational theories until they are scientifically tested (including controlling for unrepresentative samples of students, which most educational studies simply do not do). There have been countless educational theories and interventions over the past 60 years, and virtually all of them have failed to radically improve school performance. There's no reason to be especially optimisitic that any new theory that comes along is going to be right.
In fact, we should assign significant creedance to the possibilty that education in the US cannot be meaningfully improved on the margin. Short of embryo selection, gene therapy, cybernetics, mass immigration of high IQ people etc., it's extremely unlikely anything is going to significantly improve average educational performance in the US, and all of those things listed are obvious extraneous to the education system itself.
Great review. I read it twice. I'm glad it made it to the second round. Mostly I'm glad because I couldn't remember anything at all about it from the first time and reading it the second time allowed me to figure out why. This is all stuff that sounds true, but I was unable to commit any of it to long term memory because I apparently have close to zero faith that education can or will be improved. There is something beautiful about believing that it can, but it is a doomed and alien kind of beauty.
I’m not intimately familiar with Piaget, but hearing his work summarised as "young children can’t follow stories" (the Star Wars example) makes me wonder if there is more to it. Perhaps they _can_ follow the story of a farm boy saving a princess from a space wizard, but not the story of factions and alliances and jockeying for power that we call the Wars of the Roses?
Would appreciate a comment from someone familiar with the subject.
Point 3, "his system describes a lot of us Rationalists oddly well", really landed for me. I vividly remember at primary school reading a book about the lives of great inventors (including Tesla, natch). I was just inside Egan's "middle school" range when I started to study my first foreign language (French), but the second one (Latin) came almost immediately afterwards. I read "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" at the age of 13, sparking an interest in philosophy; I talked myself into and out of evangelical Christianity as a teenager. I learned a first cut of the history of maths from E.T. Bell's "Men of Mathematics" (some of whom were women - the title was forced on him by an editor). I learned Christian, Greek and Norse mythology (the child-appropriate versions, at least) as a young child, and History lessons from 9-13 were mostly stories of great struggles (many of them now unacceptably imperialist - we were taught about the Sepoy Mutiny and the American War of Independence, but not primarily as stories about freedom versus oppression). I learned (and continue to learn) poems by heart.
And yet what I'm describing isn't a cutting-edge postmodernist Eganian school; until the age of nine I attended a series of ordinary British state-run primary schools, and after that I attended two English private boarding schools. All, of course, would say that they were trying to move with the times and prepare their students for the world of tomorrow (and they wouldn't be lying), but the history and in particular the languages were very much part of the traditional curriculum. Even that book about inventors was given to me by a teacher. Reading "Men of Mathematics" was unusual, but I was interested in maths long before I read it - in fact, I think I may have read it in preparation for my Oxford interview, for a degree in mathematics and philosophy. What I'm saying is, lots of kids got an education much like mine, and very few of them end up reading rationalist blogs and caring about metarationality. So I think this is the Forer effect at work: we all recognise the Eganian parts of our educations, but they were neither necessary nor sufficient for us ending up here.
I absolutely loved this review! If it was written by an AI, I'll update my mental model to "we're doomed"; if it was a human, if you've got a substack, when your name is revealed you've just got yourself a new subscriber.
I'm both interested in the topic (being in the teaching trade myself) and I thought the rewiew was brilliantly written, emulating very closely the style and humour of Scott Alexander.
Implementing any model in schools will hit the barrier that, at least in some jurisdictions, "the state" wants a spreadsheet of easily digestible metrics at the end of each year to publicly rank schools. You can teach children any way you like, and outside of a few points like that teaching phonics is probably good and beating up children is probably bad, under the metrics model every schooling system will end up terrible, and those schools that can game the system by cherry-picking the children with biological and/or social advantages will do so. But if you want a model for schooling outside of these constraints, or an ideal of which you squeeze in as much as possible in between the district inspectors' visits, then I certainly like the Egan one.
> I began to systematically experiment with it — using it to teach science, math, history, world religions, philosophy, to students from elementary school to college. I was astounded by how easy it made it for me to communicate the most important ideas to kids of different ability levels. This, I realized, was what I had gotten into teaching for.
This paragraph led me to think this would conclude with the author’s experience applying the ideas. I was disappointed not to find that. Perhaps a follow up?
I haven't read the whole thing yet, but I wanted to say a few things in defence of academic and socialisation education before I forget (but not development, because Rousseau sucks):
<i>And again, Egan feels obliged to point out that we’ve tried this approach for thousands of years, and it hasn’t worked. In fact, Plato’s original vision so obviously doesn’t work that people hawking academic schools have modified their pitch: no longer is the goal for students to understand the Truth, but to cultivate inquiring, skeptical minds who are perpetually dissatisfied with old answers. Can we imagine taxpayers paying for this?</i>
Isn't that more to do wit a change in society's values than with a failure of academic education? Most people nowadays are sceptical of objecive truth and don't see the nead to learn things when they have Google, so schools have adapted their pitches to suit. But it's an adaptation driven by wider society, not by a failure on the part of the school. I guess you could say that the fact wider society doesn't believe in academic education any more represents a failure of academic schools, but then as the review says a bit later on, most people don't want to be academics in the first place. I see no contradiction in saying that academic schools are/were successful at educating people who want to understand the truth but not at educating people who don't, and since the latter are more numerous and consequently call the shots, schools (in general; obviously there are a few niche exceptions) aren't really allowed to teach a traditional academic curriculum any more.
<i>Do you know where you could get a pure socialization education in the 20th century West, Egan asks? The Hitler Youth!</i>
I'm not generally a fan of Godwin's Law, but this seems like the sort of thing it was made to combat. Yes, the Hitler Youth were into education as socialisation, but they were wrong because they were socialising children into a particularly murderous and destructive system, not because they were socialising children per se! There's no reason (or, at least, Egan, as quoted here, doesn't give us any reason) to think that an education system which socialises children into a more reasonable way of acting would be inherently bad.
" He was devoted to the dream that (as his obituary put it) “schooling could enrich the lives of children, enabling them to reach their full potential”."
The trouble is, for some people (and let's knock on the head straight away the notion that I am trying to Darkly Hint at any ethnic group or race, this applies universally) their "full potential" isn't a great amount.
Once you've taught them basic literacy and numeracy and how to stop getting into drunken bar fights and getting arrested by the cops, that's about it as far as "full potential". It doesn't mean they can't have decent lives, but the glowing dream of the budding Renaissance Child interested in everything and being a junior Newton and Shakespeare and Raphael all wrapped into one advanced package isn't going to happen for them.
And then people will feel cheated, because you sold them the glowing package of "full potential" based around "hungry to tell us all about what they were learning, and what they were learning was High Academics".
I much prefer something that promises "I'll teach them to spell their name and not get in drunken fights" rather than "every babby will reach their full human to the stars potential", because you're much more likely to succeed with the first one.
Oh God. There's multiple strong contenders for the best essay, but this is definitely a runaway first for the worst essay. I'm pretty shocked it made it to being a finalist, this was just an unending pile of meaningless blather and prehistorical references .
This was really interesting to read, because it made me think about my own education and subsequent life, from a somewhat new perspective.
It occurs to me that Egan is an educator and he sees the goal of education from an educator's perspective, he sees what the child is supposed to become from an educator's perspective. (In fact, I could say, it seems the ideal is to become someone like him.) Apparently the highest ideal is to become like Socrates, being able to discuss and examine ideas. That is wonderful, I don't exactly disagree. But is that -- I don't know exactly what the right question is here -- is that the right preparation for adult life?
Schools are institutions with values of their own, and to some degree they institutionalize people. Especially intelligent students are promised a lot ("you will ascend these five levels of development and achieve your full potential!") and basically taught that if they follow the path sent out by the institution there will be rewards at the end. So for example there are brilliant people who go to graduate school because they don't really know what else to do, and don't really know what to do after graduate school, and end up feeling like failures, because they weren't the brilliant scientist or whatever they thought they might be.
There are already hundreds of comments, and I can't read them all, so I don't know if anyone already said what I'm about to say.
But if the goal of school is to make people learn things, isn't the obvious answer to the problem, to keep testing students on the same things year after year?
My experience with education, for the most part, was that we would only study something so we could get a good grade for it, and then once we were sure we wouldn't be tested again on the same stuff we'd forget it. That was what the system encouraged us to do. And from what I read on the internet, and please correct me if I'm wrong, it seems that the same happens in other countries, such as the US. It's so absurd, it can only be explained if the true goal of education is not to make us learn anything, but what Bryan Caplan says it is.
So why bother doing the bold and revolutionary things that the author of this book suggests, when we don't even bother testing students on what they're supposed to have learned one year ago?
This is the best piece I’ve read on SSC/ACX in years. I’m a Joseph Henrich fan, nerdy child turned engineer, mother to a 5 year old. I agonize over this topic. Egan’s analysis as you present it is an excellent organization of the floating observations and intuitions I’ve collected over forty years, plus some astounding insights. Thank you for the write up! I’m going to get Egan’s book right after posting this comment.
So basically, the way Carl Sagan teached and explained.
When I was between 4 to 9 years old, I used to learn about all those topics from Carl Sagan documentaries and "youth encyclopedias" from the 80's, which explained topics in exactly all those ways.
This was far, far too long. Over twenty three thousand words! Scott is known for verbosity, but even "Ivermectin: Much more than you wanted to know" comes in at around fifteen thousand. This essay takes longer than that just to get to the buried lede! I skipped the five thousand word "summary".
It's a shame, because I was reasonably engaged for the first ten thousand words or so. But the Q&A style became grating and patronising, especially when the author agrees with the questions the "reader" has asked. But, of course, the author wrote both! "Oh yes very insightful of me!"... what?
Upon giving up on reading this essay, I felt angry and duped. Angry enough to paste chunks into an editor to get word counts as a sanity check, which I don't think I have ever done before.
Egan's emphasis on historical context is great. Now that I think about it, the most memorable times in school was when the teacher made it clear that an _actual person_ had to figure all this out. 2 examples:
- My favorite assignement ever was when my E&M professor made us read James Maxwell's original paper (https://archive.org/details/dynamicaltheoryo00maxw/page/504/mode/2up) about the laws of Electromagnetism from 1865. The assignment was to simply "find Gauss's law", which is supprisingly hard since the original has 26 equations (not the 4 vector equation we saw in class) and was part of a long, chaotic exposition.
- There was also a memorable lecture in my Differential Geometry class where the prof explained how Eintein accidentally broke the differential law of energy-momentum conservation in his first crack at General Relativity (https://arxiv.org/pdf/physics/9703023.pdf) This is way more interesting way to reflect on nature of covariance, which apparently confused Einstein too.
There is an urge to just give the modern versions of concepts for some reason, as if students would stop trusting us if they saw how confused everybody actually is. The essence of Egan's proposal is to actually talk to the Giants as we climb their shoulders, which makes the climb a lot less monotonous.
Very nice review, if overlong as others have commented. One bone to pick: Socrates and his 'Greek moment' wasn't so unique. Independently in China you had these guys going through some intense philosophical and ironic turns https://terebess.hu/english/Chuang-Tzu-Graham.pdf
To be frank, I think this is a terrible review. Way too long, very low information density & very uncritical of the book it is talking about.
On Egan's theory itself, I think he is right that this kind of learning is very appealing to the great majority of people. It's very good for learning in our ancestral environment, teaching your children the self-conception of your tribe, how your tribes relates to other beings around it, what skills are important in your local environment, and so on.
The problem is that this approach is just very bad at teaching the things you need in the modern world. In fact I would argue that if it were, schools simply would never have been developed; Before schools, learning was much closer to Egan's ideal, but it simply wasn't capable of teaching the large majority of the population basic modern skills like literacy and numeracy, let alone advanced modern skills.
Despite the assurances to the contrary, this is just yet another progressive education theory that tries to get around unpopular and unpleasant learning approaches such as rote learning. Unfortunately, these still exist for the simple reason that they are most likely necessary in the modern environment, and since we didn't evolve for the modern environment, we don't like them. This makes these theories so appealing - they tell us exactly what we wish were true.
"Imagine students reading their Ibram X. Kendi books in the morning, then pledging allegiance to the American flag after lunch." - somehow, very easy to imagine.
"why do American schools typically wait until kids lose the ability to naturally absorb languages to start teaching languages?" - whoa
"We can see it if we ask, what can a hunter-gatherer deaf-mute child who’s not yet learned to sign do… that a chimpanzee can’t?" - nice insight
Kids are good at getting lost in reverie? I don't personally recall being better at reverie or daydreaming as a kid compared to today. I do recall, however, having many more opportunities to get lost in a daydream as a kid. Life became busier.
My default position is that reverie is merely a symptom of boredom. If that's the case, using reverie in an educational setting may not be all that useful.
That was then.
Now, kids no longer have the incentive nor opportunity to get lost in reverie, what with tablets, phones, and tv shows maximizing engagement through colorful action and catchy sound. If reverie was once a child's superpower, it's gone now.
"They seemed just about as rational as the average person of their community — which was to say, quite irrational!"
I'm not going to stop reading this but man, this made me pause and question the author's credibility a little bit. What chutzpah it takes to say "I'm more rational than the average student." Even by implication. How could one possibly know that? Our own irrationalities tend to be invisible to ourselves.
This seems a far too theoretical approach about schooling, which forget about how things are organized. Especially in secondary school: You have a very hierarchical structure in place, with professors as authority figure and students supposed to obey implicit (school regulations) or direct orders.
This structure is not natural though, as professors have not earned their leader position fairly in the group, nor do they have a pre-agreed medium exchange as basis for their authority (money in your professional life).
Elementary school is a little bit better, but there the professor takes the natural place of parents and this leads to big problems every time prof and parents goals conflicts. University/College is different, it's a transition to profesional life and professors there often have at least some genuine cred for backing up their authority, which is anyway more limited (in time and scope) than what typically happen in highschool.
So yeah, highschool in particular have too much in common with prisons to hope to do any nice teaching, being academic or self development. As indoctrination (makes people comply with societal norms), it kind of work...although often in a nasty way and with side effects (like prison or army with conscripts does)
When I saw the title and the diagram I thought this was going to be about how some people are simply incapable of moving to the last few developmental stages for many or most ideas. And that a proper approach to didactics (more general than childhood education) should work with this limitation rather than fighting against it.
This was still interesting and I think that the best teachers I had independently came up with a similar idea. For instance the best history teachers started off by introducing historical events as colorful stories from the point of view of the people living at the time. Not a series of dates, events and facts.
Okay, I liked this review a lot, because I like reading about any novel education system reforms. Like many other proposals, this one suffers from lack of evidence that it will work and a huge cost to actually test it, but this is a problem with any education reform, simply because experimenting on human children is costly and dangerous. Surprisingly, I do not have much to say about the content of reform itself: I have a feeling I wouldn't like to be taught in an Egan school, but I might be wrong, and anyway, maybe I'm just an outlier (for one, I was never concerned with gossip and heroes - I had exactly zero posters on my wall, and zero interest in personal lives and struggles of great mathematicians, and my interest in Guinness World Records was only occasional).
However, I find that Egan's proposal is missing a key explanation, which is also an usual feature of education reform proposals. Namely, how are your new school is going to scale? It's not that hard to create one new school with super-motivated teachers who all are in love with that new idea, and teaching in general. Now, I'd like to hear how your proposed system will work with demotivated, overworked burned-out teacher burdened with ever-increasing bureaucracy. Because this is the kind of teacher you're going to get when you begin to scale up. 20th century education was industrial education. It turned schools into assembly lines where even a bad teacher could probably manage to get enough knowledge into students for them to pass tests or exams. Not pretty, not very good, but very scalable, like Chinese cheap plastic toy factory. So. How will YOUR system scale? Unfortunately, there is no answer here, and I don't think Egan had one.
At the least, this needs to be parsed out more carefully. Consider
> A science is any discipline in which the fool of this generation can go beyond the point reached by the genius of the last generation. -- Max Gluckman
You can likely engage students to interact with nature, to give them wonder ... if they're a historical-level genius, they'll be able to learn everything that Aristotle knew, much of which has since been proven to be false. Actual, useful science involves inserting into the student's mind the database of everything that has been learned heretofore, teaching them how to utilize that knowledge to interact with nature in ways more useful than anyone has done heretofore, and how to update that database and pass it to the next generation. The practical goal is the second item, which absolutely requires the first item.
And I've seen reports that there actually is a popular Egan-style system for teaching mathematics that centers on the students rediscovering the math that is already known. Presumably, world-level geniuses might reinvent algebra and calculus by the time they're 40.
The discussion of history and social studies seems to be similar, though I know a lot less about those fields. Telling stories likely makes it a lot more interesting, but if the goal is to get the students e.g. to know what the countries of the world are, their general political and social situations, how they interact, and how they got that way, you're going to need a lot more data than can be presented in a bunch of interesting stories.
The deeper problem seems to be what Pinker mentioned: Humans learn spoken language because we've got a bunch of instincts that drive children to learn spoken language; it takes a lot of work to prevent a child from doing so. But children have no instincts that drive them to learn written language, and we have a practical need to get them to, so we apply explicit "educational" effort to them. And not surprisingly, they'd rather not do so.
Now there is the question of to what degree the students remember *anything* that they're taught about most subjects. I mean, why are we bothering to teach them mathematics, science, and history when most students for most of history have managed to forget *all* of that?
Regarding this comment on Piaget "This notion of “developmentally appropriate” took on a scientific sheen with the work of Jean Piaget, the famous Swiss psychologist. Before age 12, he “proved”, children aren’t able to form hypotheses, draw conclusions, or think abstractly." Yes, this is how much of the educational world interpreted Piaget but consider Seymour Papert's contrary view. Seymour worked with Piaget for years before becoming co-director of the MIT AI Lab. Here's a short piece he wrote about Piaget: https://dailypapert.com/papert-on-piaget/ As he says "Piaget was the first to explore a kind of epistemological relativism in which multiple ways of knowing are acknowledged and examined nonjudgmentally, yet with a philosopher’s analytic rigor" And Papert's views of Piaget led to his theory of learning - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructionism_(learning_theory)
Papert saw Piaget's stages of development as contingent and can be changed by giving children different experiences (such as his work on Logo). Similar to what the Reviewer wrote "Our genes don’t make us develop Romantic understanding around age 8 — our culture does. The fact that these come in a certain order in both individual kids and cultural history — Mythic, then Romantic, then Philosophic — stems from certain constraints..."
The great thing about a Pet Idea like this....you can actually BUILD it from scratch, as a charter or private school. Real life.
Honestly, I would love to see a K-12 school like this. I wonder what would happen?
I created one back in 1998 as a grad student....what became a K-12 charter school. Different ideas than Egan, for sure, but a few of the same critiques. Many of my plans didn't work so well in real life (Mike Tyson and all), but some did.
As I read Astral threads about K-12, seems like there's enough support here to crowdsource a few different ideas. Just need 1 or more founders who want a 10+ year startup adventure.
> Who first discovered the concepts students learn in math? The answer, of course, is a wide diversity of curious men and women living across the world over the last few thousand years. Egan says: bring those people into how we teach math.
I don't think I buy that this has much to do with math. The beauty of subjects like math and science is that the history of math is not the same thing as math.
We do teach math in a bad, postmodern way by throwing away the plot, but the plot is not the people! It's silly that we would introduce conic sections and make students spend almost a year with them without mentioning any of the crises in orbital mechanics or optimization problems that led to so much interest in them, but it's equally silly to think that the human story is the same story. PhDs in math seldom go read the original work of the mathematicians that discovered things because it doesn't matter--it's not about the people! It's about the ideas. Teach those ideas, rather than the smattering of isolated facts you do now.
I think making math history into math mirrors current math education, which makes the same sort of error that Egan identifies for the social studies curricula: the idea that you have some sort of concentric circles to build upon, rather than looking at the topic in terms of students' strengths and interests at the time.
Took me 10 days to finish this one. Not just due to Word count: 23.5 k . Say it again: 23,465 words - last years winner by Erik Hoel was 9.5 k words, only. I am 2/3 fascinated and 1/2 convinced, and though ACX-readers are not identical with less-wrongers - I do kinda hope this text wins - but I also hope the others will be shorter. B) The foreign language part is kinda ignorant rubbish (me FL-teacher): Sure, there seems to be a "window of opportunity" to learn another language perfectly - but that is relevant ONLY if one learns it as a new first language: Every day, all day, usu. with your new peers in a new country. NOT with 2 or 6 lessons a week in school in a classroom between recesses. In school (even if Egan-styled), students make faster progress at learning/acquiring Spanish/French/Japanese at 16 years than at 12. And faster at 10 than at 6. - the rational thing would be to put ALL fl-lessons in ONE year, and - to put sugar on top - have a trip to the country at the end + even some other courses taught in the target language (math in Spanish, at least partly - history could focus on the relevant region(s), too) . In the US and UK it would also make sense to drop foreign languages at school completely. Would be an improvement to the status-quo.
This review took the scenic route. I can see why it is polarising the comments. On the one hand, I loved the survey of educational theory and the naming of large faceless feelings I’ve had swirling in my head for a long time. As a history buff his passages on history made me fantasise about teaching it. On the other hand, it is a highly uncritical review and does not have much/any evidence for its polemic. It also does not convincingly sweeten the bitter pill that some of our greatest social technologies (e.g. calculus, statistics) are counter-intuitive and traumatic to learn.
On a more general note, the book reviews are the most fun I have had on this blog in ages. Bringing in a procession of intelligent sensitive people who are passionate about a topic and are desperate to make you love it too. Just as Egan would have wanted it...
Ironic isn't the final stage, detachment from social expectations is.
When you can evaluate something separate from what your social identities are (easiest example: political party) then you can understand it more accurately. With true rationality coming with detachment even from intuition.
If you've gotten this far, congratulations — you've found the portal! 🤔
I'm the author of the book review... and I apologize that I'm not actually able to give you the last three hours of your life back. BUT, if you'd like to spend some MORE time diving into these ideas (and seeing how they mesh with some bigger topics — expertise, culture, intelligence...), I've kicked off my own substack, "The Lost Tools of Learning" (https://losttools.substack.com).
Must have missed this when it came out, now found it based on it winning the book review contest. Some very interesting stuff here - I love the idea of spending more time telling little kids historical stories and less time making them do busywork.
One critique that soured it a little for me though was that the whole section on Greece starting with the quote below is based on misconceptions:
"Greece was a backwater on the periphery of the Persian Empire — but in a historical instant it was transformed into an intellectual and cultural powerhouse: philosophers like Plato, and Aristotle revolutionized Western thought; mathematicians like Pythagoras and Euclid revolutionized math; playwrights like Aeschylus and Sophocles revolutionized drama. "
There was no "western thought" to revolutionize - instead the west is defined as the cultural tradition descending from the Greeks. That Greek miracle saw writing and sophisticated culture arrive in Greece from outside and revolutionize Greek society, but it did not involve Greek becoming a cultural and intellectual powerhouse relative to traditional centers of civilization farther east - that didn't happen until after the Greeks conquered those traditional centers. We have a somewhat distorted view of all this because Greek writing continued to be copied down and thus survived for us to read it while all the older written traditions in the area died out.
Is there a living index anywhere of all the reviews so far?
The 5 kinds of understanding seem to map almost perfectly onto Kegan (not Egan) stages of development, an idea that floats around the rationalist/postrationalist scene thanks mainly to promotion by David Chapman.
In this framework, "Stage 3" corresponds to someone who sees the world and their obligations mainly in terms of social roles and relationships; "Stage 4" is someone who can think in terms of formal systems, legally-bound institutions, and concrete, explicit obligations; and "Stage 5" is someone who understands how to shift between different formal systems depending on which is most appropriate.
These were inspired by Kohlberg's stages applied to ethical reasoning. Kegan's stages are not widely known, I don't think, but Kohlberg's stages of ethical development are popular so probably Egan had heard about them. But if not it's interesting to independently come up with a scheme like this.
A mermaid, "half in the mythic water, half in the philosophic air" is one of the most poetic phrases I have seen in a long time.
The sheer length of this review still made it hard to get through, for me.
> I remember my surprise when I realized that they couldn’t all be true — because you can’t follow “look before you leap” and “he who hesitates is lost” at the same time! I’m embarrassed to say that I think I only realized this when I was in college.
My wife's favorite example of this: do opposites attract, or do birds of a feather flock together? (She says she's seen studies claiming to demonstrate that the latter is much more true than the former.)
Slightly off topic, but the survey results bring to mind Scott's "I can tolerate anything except the outgroup post", that my bubble is so all encompassing at filtering out certain viewpoints that I don't know anyone who would answer those questions wrong. Who are the 46% of Americans that don't believe the Earth orbits around the Sun, or the 71% who don't believe that tomatoes have genes?
I’m going to have to admit that it’s hard for me to read something where the lede is buried; I scrolled through, read the conclusions so I had some context for what I was reading, and then went back and read the explanations/set-up. I did appreciate the dialogue explanations and the feeling of excitement expressed by the reviewer throughout.
I don’t have a singular reaction to Egan’s theory, I’m going to have to let this percolate for awhile to to have a real reaction.
While admittedly anecdotal, the two things that stuck in my mind throughout the entire read were:
1. The idea that rote learning is bad (or something not good) smacks up against how so often, rote learning really helped me get a grasp of something - only by seeing the pattern again, and again, and again, and again, did it become predictive for me. (And btw kids do this repetitive thing naturally too, it’s just we hate it because for us it’s watching Frozen for the 10 millionth time.)
2. When you are a person who is naturally intellectually inclined, it’s really hard to put yourself into the shoes of someone who isn’t and to not fall prey to thinking, if they aren’t getting it/don’t care, it must be the method, not the person on the receiving end of the method. Day in and day out, I see evidence of people who are incurious at best, and I don’t think they are that way because they never were enlightened to the value of curiosity.
> An Ironist thinks we build beliefs the way that you’d wrestle a trans-dimensional octopus: carefully. A catchy idea isn’t an object that will just let you put it down, it’s a slippery, multi-tentacled monster that wants nothing more than to crawl in your brain, grab the levels of motivation and speech, and use you to spread itself to others. Anyone entering the octopus-wrestling arena needs to take proper care.
Honestly, if I for some strange reason found myself in the position of having to fight an octopus, I'd look for some way to smuggle a hand grenade or two into the arena, or failing that, a sword. (And yes, I did just rewrite it from an wrestling match into violent combat. Animals generally aren't particularly good at the whole "tap out" concept.)
That's a very important aspect of "what it is to be human:" when faced with difficult tasks, we don't just take them at face value. We find ways to use tools to make the tasks less difficult and tilt the odds in our favor.
Any evaluation of the American education system that doesn't control for race is worthless.
Without non-asian minorities, America produces extremely capable highschool graduates compared to the rest of the world.
And importantly, no factor in our education system per se can be shown to be the cause of minority underperformance (nor can family wealth or education). No reform or intervention has ever reliably and durably worked, and there's nothing left to try but increasingly absurd crap about 'eliminating bias' from how arithmetic is taught or something.
If there were some way of getting black and hispanic achievement up to the level of white or asian achievement, this would be revolutionary and the impact what dwarf anything about making schools "better prepare students for society" or "cultivating every student's uniqueness". But nobody knows how to do this, especially not Egan.
(It's worth pointing out that if an Egan-style charter school is established and black students attend, it is only possible to judge the effectiveness of this school by measuring and controlling for the intellectual ability of the students ENTERING the school, not just leaving. We should expect that any black kids who got sent to this school are likely smarter than average, because smarter parents are more interested in stuff like charter schools in the first place, but the smartness of these students needs to be controlled for or else it's all worthless. And I say this from having experienced people using black student performance at charter schools as 'proof' that black underachievement is caused by flaws in the public school system, and yet they predictably did not measure the ability of students upon admission to even demonstrate they were dealing with a representative sample of the black community, which they almost certainly weren't).
For (at least implicit) egalitarians like Egan, this should be damning. If his methods cannot help the worst performing students, his methods are worthless. If he bit the bullet and said that race differences are mostly inherent but my methods will help everyone, that might be alright. But he doesn't.
Say what you want about the Chinese educational system, but students in China test well and have the obvious proof in the pudding of being smart enough to industrialize a giant country in a matter of decades. And OBVIOUSLY, there's nothing in the Chinese education system that clearly corresponds to anything Egan is saying, which points to the fact that intelligence explains most of the variance in educational outcomes, and it's absolutely not clear that a representative sample of black americans would do any better at Chinese schools that American ones (ignoring the issue of language differences). Maybe Egan's methods would create happier, more complete Chinese workers who are better able to yadda yadda yadda....but most people in the developing world would kill for China's economic growth, and whatever China is doing with their education if enough (for Chinese students, at least) for this growth to be achieved. Let's work on the 'being like socrates' part once we solve the more foundational civilizational problems around education and intelligence first.
And let me just restate this for the dorks who think that any mention of race at any time is completely weird and unwarranted: White and Asian American students are amongst the best in the world. Most of the "flaws" in American education, at least in comparison to the rest of the world, are explained by America's racial diversity. If you believe all races share an identical distribution of intelligence potential, then you are epistemically obligated to demonstrate (not just claim, not just recite a narrative) what part of the current American educational system is causing black and hispanic academic underperformance. If you have no idea of the cause (and are nonetheless convinced of inherent racial equality), then why the HELL should anyone listen to what you have to say about education reform? This is the biggest problem with American education, so if you have no insight here (other than falsely claiming that 'school funding' or 'racism' are the cause), why should anyone give your loftier educational ideals the time of day?
I felt that the lede was buried too deeply in this book review and lost interest. Scrolled to the bottom to leave this comment.
I enjoyed this review a lot, though it is very long. I will say the review makes Egan's book seem very curriculum focused. Perhaps this is just the nature of the work but I was left wondering about things like:
- How do teachers and students interact in this framework?
- Are students tested and graded? Are they held back?
- What happens when half of the class progresses quickly while the other half progresses slowly?
Linguist and former teacher of 5th- and 6th-grade Latin here (I taught for the last year and a half at a private school where it was mandatory).
The 'abstraction problem' is a big one for foreign languages unless you're doing it immersively. Learning to *read* a language like Latin in a non-immersive environment relies heavily on the abstraction abilities of students who don't speak something typologically similar--I had a *lot* of kids for whom the concept that an -a could be a neuter plural or a feminine singular simply didn't click. My best students fell into at least one of two categories:
--Native speakers of a foreign language with more inflection. Two of my fifth-graders were native speakers of Slavic languages and might as well have slept through class. The Persian speakers took to SOV word order and verb agreement like ducks to water and then crashed on the cases. And so forth.
--Also very good at math.
Obviously, L1 acquisition doesn't work this way--native speakers of Cree doesn't have to think about the utterly baroque direct-inverse system of verb agreement; they simply absorb it. I got a few kids into linguistics (we had a lot of fun towards the end of the year doing a bit of Greek, Sanskrit and the Romance languages, and one of my favorite students had a lot of questions about native American languages), but the abstraction problem is a big one. It's also one I have some personal experience with--at the age of nine my parents had the Latin teacher at the school my dad taught history at try to tutor me in Latin; we tried three or four sessions and then concluded it wasn't going to go much of anywhere. (To be fair, we used Wheelock's, which was maybe a bit too dense--I'd personally have used Lingua Latina per se Illustrata.)
Then, at the age of 12, I signed up to take ancient Greek at CTY--and fell head-over-heels in love with it (Hansen and Quinn this time--worse than Wheelock's!) Basic conceptual difficulties like case that I'd struggled so much with at the age of 9 now came much more easily, although woolier stuff like optatives and participles was still mostly bouncing off my brain.
All of the kids I taught Latin to last year were between those two ages, and one of the reasons I left (classroom management and workload being the main one) was that I eventually realized the system in place simply wasn't working--kids were convincing themselves they were dumb as a box of rocks when the actual problem at hand was the random walk of brain development; *plenty* of students would have done just fine had they waited until 8th grade to start the language. And, in my late 20s, I've found that I've gotten much better at learning to read foreign languages and absorbing vocabulary than I've ever been before--Tocharian B and Akkadian are the main summer projects. I think exposing kids to Cantonese, Sanskrit or--Middle Egyptian is an utterly miserable morass, so let's go for Arabic, Turkish or Swahili--would be a fabulous idea in high school, but I have my doubts about middle school.
On the other hand, Orthodox Jewish boys seem to do just fine learning Hebrew and Aramaic from a fairly early age. What do the yeshivas do?
Seriously this community needs to learn how to write concisely. Holy shit
I’ve said this about prior reviews, this guy - correction I’m guessing this was a gal - can write like a pro.
The presentation of the material, above all, held my curious attention in it’s review of a topic that isn’t of immediate concern to me. That is no mean trick for any writer.
It’s going to be really tough to pick a favorite when there have so far been several high quality essays.
Bottom line: Great job. Thanks for a fine contribution to competitor X!
"But — could a new kind of school make the world rational?"
No. Do I have to read the rest of this review, now?
Okay, I already read it back before it was a finalist, and I haven't changed my mind: there is no magic fix-it educational solution. Unless you have from the moment the child is born an individual education plan where they are put on the best track for their 'learning style' or whatever the hell new snazzy theoretical name is being used, with an individual set of tutors and a place of educating the nippers that is individually tailored to them, you're not going to get "and this is how we get smart, sensitive, informed, interested, curious, inventive and productive citizens".
Even if you do all the above (which is impossible until or unless we get the Magic Post-Scarcity AI Future), you're still not likely to get that, because you're rowing against human nature. "But if we just cradle little Johnny in the best and finest cotton wool we will make him sensitive and empathetic and wanting to be a good member of society who cares about his fellow persons and non-human animals and the insects and the climate and the environment and the heat death of the universe!"
Good luck with that, we have one member of our community looking for a way to bilk the creditors for his daughter's student loans, and they're not any sort of remarkable criminal type or hard-hearted sociopath who wants to free-ride off society and burn the rest of us suckers.
Wow! Just finished reading. I hope to write a longer response, but for now, I just want to thank you (the author) and tell you that I expect that reading this review will have a major impact on my life and the life of my child.
I loved this review. Despite it's length it was engaging throughout, and the Q-and-A format could have been lame but was done well enough to make this whole thing feel like a conversation about the ideas. I'm left half convinced, fervently wishing that pilot schools had been started a decade ago so I could have better evidence, and thinking that the author of this review would be a really cool person to get to know.
> I wrote that you could assume that you should probably assume that Kieran isn’t in favor of junking the curriculum
> Egan doesn’t spend much time obsessing over the practicalities of…
Typos here I think?
This seems like, at the least, a useful lense to look at education through and thank you for writing it.
But I think that "Irony" is a terrible way to view tolerance for ambiguity and conveys a lot of unwanted connotations.
This review could be edited. Even the summation was too long! However it was still an excellent review of the life work of a very interesting man.
This was a really enjoyable read; excellent prose and flow etc. The only issue I had was that I'm like 99.9% sure that a chimpanzee "can play the games other [chimps] play, she can figure out her group’s social organization, act out her social role, and learn toolmaking." In fact I'd argue the average chimp is better at these than the most autistic .1% of humans. So that was a weird tangent in the review, but of course it's not central at all.
Great Q&A and dialogue form. Definitely made the length not an issue. Thanks for posting.
I think there is a deep conflation of the ideas of human learning and education/schooling as a formal institution. I see the same thing with a lot of capitalists who think all markets or trade or other a activity are somehow about capitalism. Humans have always learned, animals before humans evolved also learned, other animals even have the passage of knowledge between individuals and generations even into having cultures. The root of human learning and the root of education or schooling are not the same thing.
It is ironic that the author cites chesteron’s fence and talks about how we must use and uphold and propagate rationality as a set of ideal end point values to aim towards. Could it be education and schools are doing just fine as they are for their actual purposes? Does the thresher care about all the failed parts that fall off when sorting the wheat from the chaff? We have a neo-feudal society which requires the peasants to be smart enough to work, but dumb enough not to rebel, at least in the aggregate.
Improving the lives of commoners is not the purpose or goal of a feudal or neo feudal society. The goal is always to enrich the wealthy and maintain their power and control. Can anyone argue this isn’t happening as billionaires flourish and power is ever more centralised into fewer executives and larger companies?
And this is going very very well. The elite/aristocracy don’t have issues with commoner schools, so there is no issue. They can read, write, work, and follow orders to do low level intellectual work, service work, and keep the ranks of blue collar jobs filled to keep our human environment working with electricity, food, roads, planes, and luxury goods for them.
Before you go educating the masses, have you considered how they might revolt or demand better wages? Why do you think we have mass scams like central banks and ‘free markets’ where the borrow rates are set by decree? It is to keep wages down and asset prices high in useful cycles for elites.
We’re only just getting into the 1984 utopia of a controlled and propagandised population of stupid ideology driven ignorance of compliant commoners who don’t do things like unionise or resist fighting wars we tell them to die in so we can secure colonial or egotistic goals of aristocratic competition.
Schools are working perfectly well.
Egan still really sounds like a humanities major who never passed a math or science course and is trying to sell this as a sign of his superiority to those unsophisticated nerds who only know true things.
The elementary school curriculum of unorganized observation sounds like a reasonable place to start. But then the middle school centers history, meaning the actual subjects will get short shrift. There's also developing a sense of awe, which is nice, but unless done carefully can clash with actual understanding. In any case, it's enough that a student who learned the human interest stories and expressed their awe eloquently could "do well" in the course without learning anything about the actual subject. Then he wants to cover controversies in high school. No one has any business having an opinion on the nature of dark energy if they don't thoroughly understand how movement, force, mass and energy interact under normal circumstances!
Similarly, he doesn't give the enlightenment a fair showing. He centers it on Plato, ignoring Bacon and Galileo, much less Newton and Bayes (and all the people after Bayes who built modern Bayesianism; I don't know their names). And he treats irony as some sort of more advanced state. Irony is where you don't try to solve any hard problem, but sneer at those who do using attitude, politics and word-games.
The review kind of addresses this by quoting:
> “Ironic understanders remain open to the possibility that the Enlightenment project might not be exhausted, that rationality might not be the deliverer only of nightmares, that knowledge, truth, and objectivity might not be confined only to contingent agreements, that Western science and rationality might be discourses more privileged than some others in terms of access to reality.”
"Rationality **might** not be the deliverer only of nightmares". There he sits in industrial-made clothing, well fed by green-revolution food, protected from disease by vaccines and antibiotics, and he has the chutzpah to say rationality "might" have done some good things for him. Would he rather be dead?
And "science and rationality" ("Western" is just a fnord) **might** have more access **than some** to reality. The styles of thought entirely based around identifying reality, which regularly test themselves in harsh ways, might be better than **some** others, such as the style of thought that answers every question with "banana". Not necessarily better than Eddic Literalism. Let's not get extremist about anything.
I suppose this all comes back to what we hope schools will achieve, a question we never really answered. There may be some goals toward which Egan's approaches have value. But if one of the goals is understanding the physical world well enough to interact with it responsibly, let the blind not follow the blind. Especially not the proudly blind.
What is the relationship between Kieran Egan and Kier Egan, founder of the company/religion at the heart of the Apple TV smash hit Severance?
There are lots of useful practical ideas here. (I am less interested in what any of this has to do with Plato - also I could not read this whole thing). Broadly I like the direction of this approach, but I would caution that different kinds of material call for different tools, and I'm skeptical about grand theories.
One of the ideas proposed for high school science class is to focus on the debates. Sometimes that works very well. But I just listened to a lecture series on debates on human paleontology, and it was often boring. It requires a lot of extraneous information to set up a debate, and not all valuable topics are hotly debated. The question is: how do you get people to think about the heart of a matter? Often the best way is just to give the crucial, well-established info and ask good questions about it. (They've found with highschool math people learn better if you just straight up teach the skills, and then practice).
For example, if the topic is whether Neanderthals could talk, skip the debate and just give the very strong evidence that yes, they could. Then ask the hard question: at what level do you think they could talk? Consider what info you would need? What is most plausible? What would it even mean to have an intermediary level of speech?
I once filled in for a friend for a university stats class on mean vs mode vs median. I taught each by telling stories about how each are used by real people to mislead the public. Then compared that to what they are best used for. It was a fun strategy to get people into the meat of it -- some said it was the first time they really got it -- but it's not a strategy that would work for many other subjects. Gotta use different strategies for different topics.
What I would like to see is a menu of evidence-based, tested strategies for how best to get people to sink their teeth into subjects, so that teachers could adapt those to the needs of each subject at hand. I'm skeptical of grand theories rather than a bunch of smaller approaches that work for specific domains.
I’m running an education company and would like to connect with the author.
Having slogged through these interesting ideas, I'm left with two questions:
1. How do the Montessori schools fit (or not fit) into these paradigms? I can't say I know much about them, but they tend to come up in such discussions and they are mentioned in the review with
"Where would, say, unschooling, and classical education, and vocational ed, and Montessori go? The first three seem obvious. ..."
before being forgotten. I found that frustrating -- it's hard to read "The first three seem obvious" and not expect a Montessori discussion to follow at some point -- and in comparison to Egan schools they at least exist.
2. With two young kids in public school (one starting third grade, one starting kindergarten), how can we best support their development in view of the better of these ideas? (Obviously others may have similar questions with respect to their own kids.)
The reviewer clearly put a lot of effort into this, but it still falls pretty flat for me. I wish the conclusion was much shorter, and something that might be actionable at a school level.
Say I'm starting a charter or private school, and am sold on it being a good model. What would it look like? I sort of know what Waldorf and Montessori schools look like, and both have aspects I like. If you're looking at St John's College (which I also like), they will present you with a Book List. These are the books we read.
What is the Erganian equivalent of the Book List or basket activities or kids needle felting gnomes?
1. This was at least twice too long.
2. Egan's theory seems far too elaborate and complex for something that seems driven by speculation rather than empiricism. Basically no chance of being broadly right (though plausibly better for some students, some of the time).
This inspired me to write a post, thanks! https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WLerqzTwtCwhgeE5B/rationality-pedagogy-and-vibes-quick-thoughts
This is really long. The Substack app estimates 108 mins which is the longest I’ve seen by a lot. I think the author does have an engaging writing style. I also can’t think of anything really worth cutting.
> I’ll admit, here, that I have tremendously fond memories of my elementary school years — committed teachers, good friends, and interesting activities.
> What was middle school like for you?
> In math, I recall a jumble of barely-related topics. In literature, I remember reading great literature — Frankenstein, Romeo and Juliet — only in their dumbed-down summary formats. In social studies, I remember teachers proclaiming on the first day of class that unlike all of our previous history classes, this class wouldn’t be about names and dates… and then going on to memorize names and dates. And in science, I remember being forced to dissect a frog only to discover that frogs are — you guessed it — made of slimy frog parts.
> I’ll confess — I loved parts of high school… and among nerdy folks, I suspect I’m not alone. For some of us, this was a golden time. Even at my local public high school, I had access to academically thrilling classes — especially, in my last two years, advanced literature and history. I felt like I was finally understanding the ideas that mattered.
These quotes were really interesting to me. As someone who really hated school, these are nice to read. A little bit of insight into the mind of someone who actually liked it. They seems very earnest too.
Im not yet sure how I’d feel about reforming the current system to be like the on Egan proposes. I think I will have to re-read parts of the review as it is a lot to take-in in one reading. But I think would have enjoyed it more than the current school system.
Is there a summary that’s actually summary?
The author’s intellectual history certainly reminds me of mine. I remember in eighth grade science our teacher had us write a short paper for or against the hypothesis of global warming. It was fun and transgressive and educational to write the against paper! The whole illustration of how students might best learn does seem to have the ring of truth to it.
Maybe I'm too much of a STEMlord, but I'm highly skeptical that abstract/general logic is a weakness of children and that it should be pushed off until high school. I attribute a lot of my academic success to getting a really early appreciation for picking out patterns and connections in things. You could probably weave this kind of stuff into an Eganian story-centric approach - science is filled with people who made discoveries by drawing on their other experiences and domains. But I think it's much more efficient to teach kids things they can use, to give them immediate sensory evidence that they have something they didn't before. This is why the part about favoring "affective experiences" over "doing stuff" especially sticks out to me - kids love doing stuff! I was an atypical kid, but that I think is damn near universal.
A lot of the Eganian lessons you depict do sound like they would have been more fun and engaging to me than normal school, but it's much less clear to me that I'd have retained them any better or that I'd end up any smarter, especially without having that pre-existing scientist mentality to tie it all together.
> 'There are some reforms that seem to work at the margin: raising teacher pay'
Raising teacher pay has been demonstrated quite comprehensively to not work. See 'Double for Nothing? Experimental Evidence on an Unconditional Teacher Salary Increase in Indonesia' by Ree et al
Abstract
How does a large unconditional increase in salary affect the performance of incumbent employees in the public sector? We present experimental evidence on this question in the context of a policy change in Indonesia that led to a permanent doubling of teacher base salaries. Using a large-scale randomized experiment across a representative sample of Indonesian schools that accelerated this pay increase for teachers in treated schools, we find that the large pay increase significantly improved teachers' satisfaction with their income, reduced the incidence of teachers holding outside jobs, and reduced self-reported financial stress. Nevertheless, after two and three years, the increase in pay led to no improvement in student learning outcomes. The effects are precisely estimated, and we can rule out even modest positive impacts on test scores. Our results suggest that unconditional pay increases are unlikely to be an effective policy option for improving the effort and productivity of incumbent employees in public-sector settings.
> Bryan Caplan, in his book Against Education, cites surveys of what Americans know about basic scientific concepts. Here’s what they find:
> of the hundred adults, 76 know that the center of the Earth is hot (this is good!)
> only 54 know that the Earth goes around the Sun
> only 50 know that not all radioactivity is man-made
> only 29 know that ordinary (as opposed to GMO) tomatoes have genes
> Q: Well, those are facts, not understanding
I don't understand what our hypothetical questioner is supposed to be thinking. "Those are facts, not understanding" is a way to explain why people can answer factual questions _correctly_ without being able to apply their knowledge. It's possible to know certain (correct!) facts without understanding what they mean.
But the reverse situation is what's being hypothetically appealed to here, and that's impossible. No one can understand what genes are without also knowing that non-GMO tomatoes have genes. If someone doesn't know the facts, then they also don't understand the knowledge that the facts depend on.
Haha, I agree with all of this, therefore it is clear that Egan and our reviewer are jolly smart people!
More seriously, thank you - this is the educational theory I have been looking for. I read John Holt (a proponent of homeschooling) a long time ago and was very influenced by him, but he didn't write anything as systematic as what Egan seems to have done. With my own kids, and in my own teaching, I've been doing lots of these things (lots of mythology at a young age, and I use jokes in my ESL classes as soon as the kids can understand them). But I haven't seen anything like this, with all the themes and progressions worked out. I'll go and read Egan, and I'm hoping he will give me lots of inspiration.
Incidentally, the length didn't bother me, because this is one of my pet subjects. The level of interest and enthusiasm is impressive, and I always assume that someone writes long because they didn't have the time to write shorter. Thank you, thank you, thank you!
I realize that this is a review of a book on education, and not simply a review of Western educational systems. Be that as it may, I have had a feeling in the back of my mind since near the start of the essay that wasn't ever addressed. It is top of mind not just for me but for several of my friends, coworkers, family members, etc.
Schools have a fourth job beyond socialization, academics, and development, which is tangential at best to education but required in order for society to function: Occupation. Our children have to be occupied during the working hours of the day, so that parents can earn a living to maintain the household.
I think it's only really nagging at me because it wasn't ever addressed, except in referencing why educators sometimes leave the profession, in itself a perfectly fair response to interacting with the education system. It is the grease that keeps the wheels of society turning, but never touched on directly in the essay.
I spent my time reading this essay, which took quite some time and led me to look up a few things, asking when the first role that a teacher has would actually be referenced. The depth and brightness that an education can bring to a child are both vast and immensely important, along numerous quantifiable vectors and innumerable internal changes.
That has to be arm-in-arm with occupation, not seemingly ignorant of it except as a way of explaining self-dismissal from the role.
My own response would be to say that the long process of education, over twelve years, does the job of occupation. It's implied, but not spoken. I think it's vital to directly address that important role that teachers have.
I have to admit and should be clear that I think this nagging feeling comes from insecurity. I know one couple in my social circles that is fortunate enough to have one of the two in a work-from-home position that lets her spend time with her adorable son during the work day's hours. All of the rest are reliant on schools, pre-schools, daycares, or family and friends.
I would not call this a biting critique of the author's essay or of the book behind it. As I've said, this took time to mill through, but I did quite enjoy it. More, I think I largely agree with what Egan says, as presented. I look back on my own youth in education and feel the impoverishment more acutely.
The essay, and possibly the book, lacks some awareness that schools have four jobs, not three, and that missing job that goes barely remarked on is the most important one of them all.
It's important enough that we have schools, pre-schools, daycares, or family and friends caring for our children. This long string of institutions and alternative options exists because of its primacy. A teacher is a developer, a socializer, an academic, and an occupier. A babysitter bearing technical knowledge, who has an interest in providing education and sparking young minds into the wildfire of expertise. It does no one any good to demote the job of babysitter solely because a teacher provides so much more.
This just over the transom
https://twitter.com/george__mack/status/1659217629469609984
I really hate the "extremes" approach in teaching biology, for example. Oooh, the fastest-running mammal! Oooh, the smallest flowering plant! It doesn't give you a sense of how the mammals use movement to their advantage or how the flowering plants conserve resources to their advantage. These factoids are never put in context. They remain... I guess Sherlock Holmes would say "parlour tricks".
And don't forget, people often get wrong ideas this way. Useless ideas. For example, people in Ukraine think rare and protected animals are things like tigers. True! Tigers are rare, very generally speaking. Not rare in Ukraine, though, for two reasons: 1) they don't live here in the wild, and 2) a lot of them are here dying slowly in captivity. It's just that tigers are flashy, attractive. Extreme. And it makes some people feel good about vaguely knowing of their plight (it's like praying to help the survivors of a volcanic eruption) and other people feel proud for having them in cells. At home. (A friend of mine who works in animal rehab says this is psychiatric - it's about Power, Love, Death, and all that shit.)
What about the less-flashy animals which are actually present, rare, and officially protected in Ukraine? Why, they are for the nerds.
So this "education in extremes" has real consequences beyond school. And nobody in school cares about these things. You see, it's not their business.
Best so far for me (though it is more about style than substance)
Egan probably would've benefitted from Henri Corbin's term 'imaginal.' The notion is that we equivocate on the term 'imagination,' meaning sometimes 'imaginary' (imagination that takes us away from perception) and sometimes 'imaginal' (imagination for the sake of perception). Great article!
The review (pamphlet) is written in very persuasive way, but some of the ideas sound like they should be questioned more:
First of all, I don't think teaching of math or any science can be made better by attaching gossip-py tales of mathematicians and scientists. The evidence I cite is that my middle - high school textbooks did exactly that: the books had these small "boxes" containing short textual vignettes of Galileo or Newton or Ada Lovelace. It made nobody more interested nor better at manipulating algebraic symbols or solving mechanics problems or solving short problems in base 2. Vignettes themselves were so short and lacking of detail (often quite propagandist) that nobody got any deep insight character studies of those people either: at best the kids-become-adults (if they paid attention) may be able to drop those names while sounding intellectual yet say nothing of interest of them.
What is needed for developing deep knowledge and skill is learning the skill of staying still and focused on your tasks and doing reps again and again, at the level that is challenging )not too easy or not so difficult it is impossible). If the task is intellectually stimulating, one can derive sense of joy and accomplishment out of it.
Likewise, the 15-minute episodic teaching sounds like wonderful of you want to nurture propensity to attention span of goldfish. For small children, it is understandable that there are limits. But it would be still very much useful to start building ability for deep concentration. Many kinds of learning and problem solving can't be done in 15 minute segments, so it would be a good thing to start practicing skill to do so.
I have a feeling that many aspects of the proposed curricula / educational theory suit very well extroverted sort of "well-grounded" person who knows considerable amount of many things and loves talking about them: a curriculum that would produce an ideal generalist teacher, in the eye of a teacher like Egan himself (and reviewer, I suspect). Yet very few kids would want or are suited or should start a career of teacher, themselves. The society needs plumbers and cooks and mid-tier office administrators and engineers and scientists and businessmen and artists and historians and politicians (and telephone sanitizers), too, and these are the sort of people who won't become generalist teachers. To enjoy their lives, they should be able to do their chosen job well enough. Which ties to the next point:
>I always thought this was stupid — of the huge lecture hall of students in my Geology 100 class, how many went on to take even a second course?
Not many. Same for math. But those who realize they want to enter the second course and beyond need that solid 100-level ground. It is physically impossible to make a school where everyone is master of everything, but it is good for the society and the individuals themselves that an individual who has the ability and willingness to master something are given the chance to do so.
Reminded me a lot of Dr John Seniors ideas about education in the poetic mode as articulated in this book by James Taylor.
https://books.google.com/books/about/Poetic_Knowledge.html?id=_5418OyH8IYC
I really enjoyed the switch to a Socratic dialog near the end. My fondest memories of education are of reading Peter Kreefts books using that style.
The question about the relationship between rationality and irony seems like an incredibly rich and interesting one, to the point that it made it a little hard to care about the (hugely voluminous) rest of this review. (This is meant to be a positive comment!)
"There’s a moment at the end of my favorite Bollywood movie that’s become stuck in my head. The protagonists have made the arduous journey to a beachside rural school. In the sun outside, flocks of children are experimenting with art and playing with inventions; inside, the walls are covered with books and the tables are covered with models. The kids are learning joyously and deeply."
Pretty sure the author is referencing Three Idiots, for anyone wondering. It's an excellent film, and not in a "haha look at this crazy Bollywood movie" way.
>Egan suggests one simple question might be “what’s society”?And a functionalist might compare it to a body, a Marxist might compare it to a battlefield, a symbolic interactionist might compare it to a theater. Again, students can read famous studies and argue about which of these paradigms are supported (or not) by the evidence.<
My Sociology 101 class led by telling us how the three theories differed from each other, and the impression it left on me was "Sociology is baseless crap that can't even figure out a theory for itself." I guess Egan's take is supposed to come after years of buildup, not up-front, but I'm highly skeptical that this approach would build any interest in a topic.
The rest of it seems worth trying. I don't know how much of my math growth came from starting with Number Crunchers and Quotient Quest while my dad was at work, but it wouldn't surprise me if it was non-zero. And of course Schoolhouse Rock is the greatest educational tool in history. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=koZFca8AkT0
Might I distill some of these ideas into a plausible schema?
Elementary school: socialization
Middle school: developmental
High school: academics
Now combine that general scheme with IQ/aptitude tests that sort out students into streams that will benefit best from progress to each stage. The mentally handicapped (IQ<70) need not go on to middle school. Kids who seem best suited to the developmental stage might exit school and progress to trade schools rather than high schools. And those who will benefit from academic teaching can go on to high school and if they thrive there, go on to higher (university) education.
I am aware that this suggestion will be offensive to some. But there is cruelty in making non-academic children suffer through grade 12, and then leave with a dumbed down diploma and no interest in learning anything. It is surely better to sort out those who would do well at trade schools and let them go there at the age of 15-16. There's a good and well-paid life open to them in a trade and we do need such people as valued members of our communities. The fact is that "school" should mean different things to differently-abled people. I barely survived an English "comprehensive" school, and thus have first hand knowledge of why the old 11-plus system was better fitted for purpose.
I don't remember being in the primary school age range well enough (or know any young children well enough) to be able to judge well for that section, but my impression of the middle school section at least is that I would have hated that style. Presumably some people would like it, this is just my personal feeling. The focus on individual people in history rather than general trends (why societies were the way they were, and by extension, why they are the way they are) was part of the reason I didn't enjoy history in school even though I later developed some interest in it as an adult. For STEM subjects, the personal anecdotes would just be annoying and totally irrelevant. It's meant to cultivate an interest in the subject but instead it's putting the focus on something vaguely adjacent to the subject and distracting from it. As for studying a third language, if the goal is to broaden the student's understanding by teaching a dissimilar language, why on earth would Sanskrit and ancient Egyptian be chosen rather than, say, modern Hindi and Arabic? (I'm assuming these are very dissimilar to English but I don't actually know much about either of them. It should certainly be possible to find at least two major modern languages very different from whatever first language you're starting from.) The goal may be less focused on the possibility of them actually getting the language to a level where they can actually use it to communicate, but if you can teach them some linguistics while also giving a bit of a basis in something that might actually come in handy later, why throw away that free advantage?
One of the points Caplan makes in his book is that most Americans who learn another language in school can't speak it once they're done with school. His owns sons are fluent in Spanish, but that's because they continued to immerse themselves in the language outside of the school/homeschool environment.
> Who first discovered the concepts students learn in math? The answer, of course, is a wide diversity of curious men and women living across the world over the last few thousand years.
I didn't notice any women in your subsequent list. Or anyone outside the Western + Islamic world.
Making Socrates the ideal rather than Aristotle seems odd to me. Socrates could only undermine rather than build up a system of knowledge posterity could rely and build on.
> See, that’s maybe the strongest evidence for the theory, as janky as it still appears to me — that the educational practices it recommends are so danged appealing to so many people.
This is a giant red flag that to me says to distrust it. Thought I should acknowledge I was distrustful earlier, and thought the review was too long and below the usual standard of quality for guest-reviews here.
"Q: Goodness — has anyone really achieved this?
At least one person has: Socrates. Egan points to him as an exemplar of Ironic understanding done well."
Socrates, the man whose true beliefs we know nothing about, because if he ever wrote a single word in his life, it has not survived. So Egan's best example that Ironic understanding is possible is not a real person, but Socrates the fictional character from Plato's dialogues (or maybe from Xenophon's).
And that nicely encapsulates one of the major problems with this educational theory: real children and real teachers are not Plato's idealized character. Starting with the teachers, this is what Egan is asking *elementary school teachers* to do, in addition to the standard curriculum (not in its stead!):
1. Know stories from cultures all around the world, from the Epic of Gilgamesh to the Inca legend of the Sun and the Moon. Fine, they can just read from a book for this one.
2. Tell jokes
3. Teach "Beethoven, yes, but also the Beatles; Tchaikovsky, yes, but also Tuvan throat singers, and also John Cage, whale song, and bird song"
4. "the stories of the war of the Greek city-states against the Persian empire, and the slave uprising of Spartacus against the Romans. We can tell them about the plight of Jews in medieval Europe, and of the unsuccessful Sepoy Rebellion in India against the British"
5. "they should get a sense of Big History. They should get some simple stories about the ice age, the Cenozoic, the age of dinosaurs, the Paleozoic, the origins of our solar system, and the Big Bang"
6. Translate all of the above into metaphors and vivid visual imagery
Middle school teachers have to:
1. Know not just math, but the history of how it was discovered and the biographies of the people who discovered it
2. Know not just science, but how to teach it in a "heroic" way: "what’s a tooth? Bone, wrapped in rock, surrounding tiny cells that your body feeds with blood."
3. Understand not just what happened in history, but also the ideas that drove it and the personalities behind those ideas: "Here, we’d focus less on the details of the person’s life, and use it as a backdrop to showing how meaningful some of history’s most important ideas could be. Think Aristotle and syllogisms, Edward Said and orientalism, Confucius and propriety, Cornel West and race, Buddha on the four noble truths, Muhammad and the five pillars, Karl Marx and communism, Adam Smith and the invisible hand, Thomas Hobbes and the state of nature, John Locke and natural rights, Jeremy Bentham and utilitarianism, Thomas Aquinas on the sacraments, Martin Luther on faith, Voltaire on the freedom of speech… you get the idea."
4. Come up with amusing anecdotes about etymology, for some reason
5. Be familiar with humor--not just jokes, but comedy at its finest
6. Wrap up all of the above in gossip, idealism, extremes, and stories of heroism
High school teachers have to be familiar with:
1. Interdisciplinary metaknowledge, such as "game theory, cognitive biases, systems thinking, Bayesian reasoning, epistemology, ethics, logic, cultural evolution, and so on."
2. Both the traditional Western cannon and a multicultural cannon, along with the arguments of those who favor one or the another: "Bell hooks, Edward Said, and China Achebe should be on the syllabus, as should Allan Bloom, Mortimer Adler, and Diane Ravitch."
3. Both sides of dueling historical narratives: "We might help kids read chapters from Howard Zinn’s socialist history of America alongside the corresponding chapters from Paul Johnson’s conservative history of America"
4. The big questions of human history: "We can have them compare Steven Pinker’s theory of civilization’s progress (Better Angels of our Nature) with Yuvah Noah Harari’s theory of civilization’s woes (Sapiens). We could have them compare so-and-so’s account of human history as an ever-expanding unlatching of energy sources with Robert Wright’s account of human history as unlatching more and more positive-sum games (Nonzero). "
5. An in-depth understanding of the cutting edge of science, adequate to follow the scholarly conversation around dark matter, dark energy, the origin of life, and the process of natural selection (e.g. punctuated equilibrium vs. gradualism), the different paradigms of psychology (cognitivism vs. Freud vs. biopsychologism...)
How many people in the entire world are capable of teaching even a fraction of this? To take one example, how many practicing astrophysicists can understand the scholarly conversation around dark energy, let alone explain it to a 17 year old? (I asked an astrophysicist friend of mine, one who's done research on cosmology, and he has only a vague idea what the controversies are in dark energy.)
There's a reason that "those who can't do, teach" is a common saying. New teachers score at the 48th percentile on the SAT and ACT (https://hechingerreport.org/debunking-one-myth-about-u-s-teachers/). So imagine taking one of those people who don't know tomatoes have genes or that Earth goes around the Sun, and expecting him to be a Renaissance man familiar with the big questions of human history and the cutting edge of astrophysics. Imagine expecting him to teach his newfound Renaissance man wisdom to a classroom of kids who hate learning, are high on drugs, look at their phones constantly, disrupt him every 2 minutes, swear at him, and get physically aggressive when he tries to stop their behavior. Needless to say, I don't think he'll get very far.
> Did you learn anything that wasn’t obviously useful? Did you read Hamlet, say, or master the Pythagorean theorem?
That is a bit of a funny example, I think the Pythagorean theorem might be the most useful thing I've learned in all my years in school, second only to basic arithmetic.
I'm mixed on this one.
On the one hand, now I really want to read Egan. It feels like he incorporates a lot of my thoughts about what's missing in education (a sense of discovery and adventure, and connection to anything meaningful in the child's actual life). On the other hand, I do feel like the review overstays its welcome and a lot of sections could have been summarized.
Excellent book and review. Probably the best content I read on children education, ever.
I found that it has a lot of overlaps with the ideas in Keith Johnstone's Improv. Keith used to teach elementary a very similar approach. He describes a situation where a school inspector had to jump over a "black hole" in the classroom that the kids constructed somewhere between painting the walls and drawing whatever they want given a topic.
We need to be honest about the downsides of education. When people become more intelligent, well-informed, creative, critical, curious, and abstract thinkers, their demand for autonomy generally increases.
But most jobs — historically and currently — want workers who follow proscribed policies with minimal divergence.
The rise of white collar roles that require college degrees hasn’t changed this substantially. No sane CEO wants a brilliant and independent-minded HR coordinator. Even in roles like nursing, in which smarter and wiser people perform better, hospitals as institutions do not benefit from the level of disruption that comes from people with minds filled with thoughts much more complex than their tasks demand.
Furthermore, high intelligence makes simple repetitive tasks boring. Not only does Starbucks have little interest in baristas who know calculus, knowing calculus makes being a barista feel indignant, and more likely to agitate for unionization.
Finally, mainstream American culture has a major undercurrent of anti-intellectualism. Asian and Jewish cultures valorize education, educators, intellectuals. Middle America idolizes athletes and celebrities. Black American culture even more so; use a big word and you may be said to be “acting white”.
In the Antebellum South, everyone knew that you shouldn’t educate slaves. In more brutal slave societies, such as San Domingue (Haiti before independence), slaves were kept malnourished in attempt to limit their ability to fight back.
A real study of world history, which seems to be the major upshot of this approach, would suggest that the upper classes do not wish to empower the lower classes with a rich, balanced, wholistic education.
Maybe things will change once AI and robotics takes all the jobs.
Personally I'd have hated having stories about mathematicians in maths class. It's the maths itself that's interesting - who came up with it is contingent and arbitrary.
I remember as a young teen wanting to learn philosophy and picking up an introductory book on it, and being very disappointed that it was about philosophERS, not philosophY. I wanted mind-expanding ideas like "what is consciousness?" and "what is morality?" and "what if I'm just a brain in a jar?", not biographies of philosophers and where they were born and where they studied.
Absolutely fantastic! Best content of the year for me.
The "bears are white" experiment explains the entire thing for me. The villagers in the story are not willing to speculate. Their minds are firmly anchored in their physical reality, "one-track mind". Reading, by comparison, involves surrendering to flights of fancy - seeing a landscape that does not exist, believing a theory some guy made up, feeling the heartbreak of people who do not exist.
Seems like Egan is trying to do the same for belief systems. Overload students with 1000 perspectives and stories, and they will treat beliefs as the reader treats thoughts, and put them on like clothes or masks.
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One more thing - you (and him?) are shitting on the murky triangle of values at the start, but that strikes me as pretty much the whole purpose of the enterprise. Conflicting priorities means nothing really gets done, which means nothing bad happens! A holding pattern is not a bad default.
This may be my favorite review so far, but that may be because I can always enjoy seeing conventional education getting bashed. I believe a great deal of it is about forcing children to endure boredom.
This being said, some of it reminds me of those annoying youtube videos which spend a lot of time telling why a thing is interesting or hooking it to other possibly interesting things rather than telling me about the subject.
What happens if a kid is actually fascinated by something and they don't want to do the curriculem?
When I was a kid, I really didn't like history. It's possible that those stories would have hooked me, or it might have been just that boring people stuff.
Well, like others, I think a lot of this sounds great, but much of it is not exactly new or revolutionary. That said, I would pay money for mini-segment lesson plans. Give me a few hundred of those, please! (Seriously, has someone made this yet?)
The author clearly put a lot of time and effort into this, but ultimately just succeeded in replacing "socialization", "academics" and "development" with a clearly honors emphasis "academics" focus with lesser "development".
The book and/or reviewer also missed the entire point of universal schooling: it was about development. It was apparently far harder to insert completely uneducated people into Industrial Age tasks than it is someone with a basic smattering of math and reading - therefore let's give everyone a bit of reading and 'rithmetic.
The "socialization" bit is pure modern nonsense; the "academics" bit is the meritocracy nonsense extended down.
What both the reviewer and apparently, Mr. Egan, fail to recognize is that there are roles for all manner of people in society: PMCs are one (minority), but there are plenty of people needed for vocations, for teaching, for bureaucracies, for police work, etc etc. The reality is that the present system is entirely focused on the theoretical identification of the potential PMC when in reality, the system should be sorting for all societal needs. And no, the present system does not do that as evidenced by the percentage of Ivy League school graduates who do vocations (probably not zero but certainly near zero). I am 100% certain that 99.5% of all schooling at whatever levels lays zero emphasis on anything but the "academics" track which is really just a euphemism for future PMC-dom, and the amount of "development" for someone to be a plumber or electrician = near zero.
Nor is the notion that academic excellence translates into vocational capability a valid one either. The San Francisco Bay Area - the reality is that it is full of academically smart people but is populated by a large number of extremely well paid vocational types like said plumbers and electricians - because these excellent academic types can't do plumbing or electrical work (or fix a car or grow food etc etc).
And finally, given the above, a key barrier to progress is precisely the failure to recognize that education fulfilling all of society's needs *requires* discrimination. The vocational types are different than the academics; trying to make everyone an academic is foolish and a waste of time as much as there should be the equal opportunity to start or change to different tracks.
Thus the problem Egan wants to solve is the wrong one, and so is the objective of modern K-12 education, equally muddled. Any wonder then that the outcomes are bad?
A very interesting review!
Maybe I'm the odd one out, but I felt like my schooling had a lot of the components Egan describes. Kindergarden-grade 3 was filled with listening to/reading children's stories and poems, doing things like looking out of the window or going to see a tree and then writing about it, learning about the history of the earth (early earth to dinosaurs) and building lots of craft projects to illustrate this history (lots of fun!)
Middle school was dryer, but I feel like I remember science textbooks describing things by way of which scientists discovered them, and what they were like, which I found pretty interesting. Wish they'd have done the same for math. And in high school- helped by the fact that by this point I was in the IB program - we had a combination of 'classic' and modern literature from a variety of cultures.
Not that improvements can't still be made, and I recognise that I probably had a better schooling than many people. But I felt that this review was very confident in its assertions that schooling currently is terrible, and the Egan's ideas are completely novel. This doesn't match up to my experiences.
Edit: Looking through the comments many people are saying the same things! I'll add that it put my off the review a little bit that the reviewer seemed to want you to believe these were new and revolutionary ideas. A more sober interpretation would have helped me appreciate Egan's '5 revolutions' better.
Does Egan explain how the Somatic stage ties in with the others at all, especially Irony? I found the majority of the framework interesting, but Somatic and bodily feelings seem to get mentioned then dropped.
An interesting review, but I wish the structure was changed completely. Having to read through virtually all of it before hearing what the author is actually proposing is interesting in terms of dialectics but it’s really annoying as a reader.
> Did you learn anything that wasn’t obviously useful? Did you read Hamlet, say, or master the Pythagorean theorem, or learn that the planets orbit the Sun (and not the other way around)? That’s the fingerprints of the academic goal.
First off, reading Hamlet is socialization, not knowledge. The Truth, as described above, will remain the same regardless of whether you've read Hamlet, and reading Hamlet won't teach you any of it.
Second off, more amusingly, the Pythagorean theorem has been a cornerstone of practical, applied mathematics for several thousand years; it is used for the highly pragmatic purpose of constructing right angles out of floppy ropes.
> Did your kindergarten have tiny, child-sized chairs?
> [This], Egan says, [is] the fruit of developmentalism.
This is just absurd. If we declared that developmentalism was anathema and practitioners were to be shot on sight, chairs for small children would still be small.
This essay had, in retrospect, a very appropriate if major flaw- it's deeply concerned with the presentation of its material, often to the point of incuriosity about the topic for its own sake. That is, I think, a lot of what contributes to the length; the reviewer clearly thought very very hard about the pedagogical structure of this information presentation, and built a gradual progressive structure towards its introduction, but spends rather fewer inches on actual critical analysis. It's not *absent*, but we got whole pages effusively praising this method that are also by design *hiding* its details, rather than *discussing* the plan at the object level.
In a classroom, strict control over the slow rollout of information for maximum emotional impact can be justified; but in this context, I just felt managed and handled. Helping me understand the topic is welcome in the abstract, but not at the cost of thinking clearly about it on my own terms.
I feel somewhat irritated by the the usage of the word "ironic". It implies some sort of subversion or irreverence to earlier stages that does not seem inherent to the fifth stage of thinking. I think I remember the moment back when I was 17, when my fourth-level understanding of the world gave place to the fifth-level, and it felt dramatic, like a shattering of something profound, but it was not ironic, it was not a smug rebellion against a constraining philosophical dogma, it was a natural consequence of learning science, and hence learning the limitations of science.
Did I miss something?
The review spent so long building up to the idea of the SAD triangle and the doesn’t contrast or frame Understanding-led Education against it at all
Going by the end saying that Understand-led Education mostly works with existing school structures & curriculum, it seems like a tool set that can just be layered on top of the SAD triangle
But that doesn’t match with SAD being the three goals of education & Egan introducing a fourth goal, turning everyone into Socrates as a separate thing entirely especially when the SAD section says mixing goals is bad
Good lord that was a long read. Also S-tier. I hope the author keeps a Substack.
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July 15th, 2023, Saturday Morning, Index Number 1957:
This is way too long to read on a screen. Printed out it is 76 pages. It is way too long to function as a review that might get me interested in reading a book. Maybe somebody can write a review of this review.
Without hard data to back up what he's saying, Egan is just another asshole with an opinion. I get having some big sexy theory of things is what helps you sell books and get eyeballs on your ideas to begin with, but nobody should treat what he says seriously until we have data to justify doing so.
We should have a profound skepticism of ALL educational theories until they are scientifically tested (including controlling for unrepresentative samples of students, which most educational studies simply do not do). There have been countless educational theories and interventions over the past 60 years, and virtually all of them have failed to radically improve school performance. There's no reason to be especially optimisitic that any new theory that comes along is going to be right.
In fact, we should assign significant creedance to the possibilty that education in the US cannot be meaningfully improved on the margin. Short of embryo selection, gene therapy, cybernetics, mass immigration of high IQ people etc., it's extremely unlikely anything is going to significantly improve average educational performance in the US, and all of those things listed are obvious extraneous to the education system itself.
The reviewer should listen to this podcast - https://open.substack.com/pub/razib/p/hannah-frankman-unlearning-the-lessons - and see if Hannah Frankman knows someone to help him open schools
Great review. I read it twice. I'm glad it made it to the second round. Mostly I'm glad because I couldn't remember anything at all about it from the first time and reading it the second time allowed me to figure out why. This is all stuff that sounds true, but I was unable to commit any of it to long term memory because I apparently have close to zero faith that education can or will be improved. There is something beautiful about believing that it can, but it is a doomed and alien kind of beauty.
I’m not intimately familiar with Piaget, but hearing his work summarised as "young children can’t follow stories" (the Star Wars example) makes me wonder if there is more to it. Perhaps they _can_ follow the story of a farm boy saving a princess from a space wizard, but not the story of factions and alliances and jockeying for power that we call the Wars of the Roses?
Would appreciate a comment from someone familiar with the subject.
Point 3, "his system describes a lot of us Rationalists oddly well", really landed for me. I vividly remember at primary school reading a book about the lives of great inventors (including Tesla, natch). I was just inside Egan's "middle school" range when I started to study my first foreign language (French), but the second one (Latin) came almost immediately afterwards. I read "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" at the age of 13, sparking an interest in philosophy; I talked myself into and out of evangelical Christianity as a teenager. I learned a first cut of the history of maths from E.T. Bell's "Men of Mathematics" (some of whom were women - the title was forced on him by an editor). I learned Christian, Greek and Norse mythology (the child-appropriate versions, at least) as a young child, and History lessons from 9-13 were mostly stories of great struggles (many of them now unacceptably imperialist - we were taught about the Sepoy Mutiny and the American War of Independence, but not primarily as stories about freedom versus oppression). I learned (and continue to learn) poems by heart.
And yet what I'm describing isn't a cutting-edge postmodernist Eganian school; until the age of nine I attended a series of ordinary British state-run primary schools, and after that I attended two English private boarding schools. All, of course, would say that they were trying to move with the times and prepare their students for the world of tomorrow (and they wouldn't be lying), but the history and in particular the languages were very much part of the traditional curriculum. Even that book about inventors was given to me by a teacher. Reading "Men of Mathematics" was unusual, but I was interested in maths long before I read it - in fact, I think I may have read it in preparation for my Oxford interview, for a degree in mathematics and philosophy. What I'm saying is, lots of kids got an education much like mine, and very few of them end up reading rationalist blogs and caring about metarationality. So I think this is the Forer effect at work: we all recognise the Eganian parts of our educations, but they were neither necessary nor sufficient for us ending up here.
I absolutely loved this review! If it was written by an AI, I'll update my mental model to "we're doomed"; if it was a human, if you've got a substack, when your name is revealed you've just got yourself a new subscriber.
I'm both interested in the topic (being in the teaching trade myself) and I thought the rewiew was brilliantly written, emulating very closely the style and humour of Scott Alexander.
Implementing any model in schools will hit the barrier that, at least in some jurisdictions, "the state" wants a spreadsheet of easily digestible metrics at the end of each year to publicly rank schools. You can teach children any way you like, and outside of a few points like that teaching phonics is probably good and beating up children is probably bad, under the metrics model every schooling system will end up terrible, and those schools that can game the system by cherry-picking the children with biological and/or social advantages will do so. But if you want a model for schooling outside of these constraints, or an ideal of which you squeeze in as much as possible in between the district inspectors' visits, then I certainly like the Egan one.
> I began to systematically experiment with it — using it to teach science, math, history, world religions, philosophy, to students from elementary school to college. I was astounded by how easy it made it for me to communicate the most important ideas to kids of different ability levels. This, I realized, was what I had gotten into teaching for.
This paragraph led me to think this would conclude with the author’s experience applying the ideas. I was disappointed not to find that. Perhaps a follow up?
I haven't read the whole thing yet, but I wanted to say a few things in defence of academic and socialisation education before I forget (but not development, because Rousseau sucks):
<i>And again, Egan feels obliged to point out that we’ve tried this approach for thousands of years, and it hasn’t worked. In fact, Plato’s original vision so obviously doesn’t work that people hawking academic schools have modified their pitch: no longer is the goal for students to understand the Truth, but to cultivate inquiring, skeptical minds who are perpetually dissatisfied with old answers. Can we imagine taxpayers paying for this?</i>
Isn't that more to do wit a change in society's values than with a failure of academic education? Most people nowadays are sceptical of objecive truth and don't see the nead to learn things when they have Google, so schools have adapted their pitches to suit. But it's an adaptation driven by wider society, not by a failure on the part of the school. I guess you could say that the fact wider society doesn't believe in academic education any more represents a failure of academic schools, but then as the review says a bit later on, most people don't want to be academics in the first place. I see no contradiction in saying that academic schools are/were successful at educating people who want to understand the truth but not at educating people who don't, and since the latter are more numerous and consequently call the shots, schools (in general; obviously there are a few niche exceptions) aren't really allowed to teach a traditional academic curriculum any more.
<i>Do you know where you could get a pure socialization education in the 20th century West, Egan asks? The Hitler Youth!</i>
I'm not generally a fan of Godwin's Law, but this seems like the sort of thing it was made to combat. Yes, the Hitler Youth were into education as socialisation, but they were wrong because they were socialising children into a particularly murderous and destructive system, not because they were socialising children per se! There's no reason (or, at least, Egan, as quoted here, doesn't give us any reason) to think that an education system which socialises children into a more reasonable way of acting would be inherently bad.
Stored rant: I believe part of modern education is that there's no vision of what sort of person they're trying to produce, so it just runs on habit.
" He was devoted to the dream that (as his obituary put it) “schooling could enrich the lives of children, enabling them to reach their full potential”."
The trouble is, for some people (and let's knock on the head straight away the notion that I am trying to Darkly Hint at any ethnic group or race, this applies universally) their "full potential" isn't a great amount.
Once you've taught them basic literacy and numeracy and how to stop getting into drunken bar fights and getting arrested by the cops, that's about it as far as "full potential". It doesn't mean they can't have decent lives, but the glowing dream of the budding Renaissance Child interested in everything and being a junior Newton and Shakespeare and Raphael all wrapped into one advanced package isn't going to happen for them.
And then people will feel cheated, because you sold them the glowing package of "full potential" based around "hungry to tell us all about what they were learning, and what they were learning was High Academics".
I much prefer something that promises "I'll teach them to spell their name and not get in drunken fights" rather than "every babby will reach their full human to the stars potential", because you're much more likely to succeed with the first one.
Oh God. There's multiple strong contenders for the best essay, but this is definitely a runaway first for the worst essay. I'm pretty shocked it made it to being a finalist, this was just an unending pile of meaningless blather and prehistorical references .
This was really interesting to read, because it made me think about my own education and subsequent life, from a somewhat new perspective.
It occurs to me that Egan is an educator and he sees the goal of education from an educator's perspective, he sees what the child is supposed to become from an educator's perspective. (In fact, I could say, it seems the ideal is to become someone like him.) Apparently the highest ideal is to become like Socrates, being able to discuss and examine ideas. That is wonderful, I don't exactly disagree. But is that -- I don't know exactly what the right question is here -- is that the right preparation for adult life?
Schools are institutions with values of their own, and to some degree they institutionalize people. Especially intelligent students are promised a lot ("you will ascend these five levels of development and achieve your full potential!") and basically taught that if they follow the path sent out by the institution there will be rewards at the end. So for example there are brilliant people who go to graduate school because they don't really know what else to do, and don't really know what to do after graduate school, and end up feeling like failures, because they weren't the brilliant scientist or whatever they thought they might be.
There are already hundreds of comments, and I can't read them all, so I don't know if anyone already said what I'm about to say.
But if the goal of school is to make people learn things, isn't the obvious answer to the problem, to keep testing students on the same things year after year?
My experience with education, for the most part, was that we would only study something so we could get a good grade for it, and then once we were sure we wouldn't be tested again on the same stuff we'd forget it. That was what the system encouraged us to do. And from what I read on the internet, and please correct me if I'm wrong, it seems that the same happens in other countries, such as the US. It's so absurd, it can only be explained if the true goal of education is not to make us learn anything, but what Bryan Caplan says it is.
So why bother doing the bold and revolutionary things that the author of this book suggests, when we don't even bother testing students on what they're supposed to have learned one year ago?
> and did you know that you can count up to 1,023 using just your fingers on both hands, and a knowledge of binary?
A common claim that mostly goes to show that people are happy to repeat claims they would have no trouble disproving in less than 5 seconds.
The norm is for people to be unable to move ring fingers independently of the adjacent middle fingers.
This is the best piece I’ve read on SSC/ACX in years. I’m a Joseph Henrich fan, nerdy child turned engineer, mother to a 5 year old. I agonize over this topic. Egan’s analysis as you present it is an excellent organization of the floating observations and intuitions I’ve collected over forty years, plus some astounding insights. Thank you for the write up! I’m going to get Egan’s book right after posting this comment.
So basically, the way Carl Sagan teached and explained.
When I was between 4 to 9 years old, I used to learn about all those topics from Carl Sagan documentaries and "youth encyclopedias" from the 80's, which explained topics in exactly all those ways.
This was far, far too long. Over twenty three thousand words! Scott is known for verbosity, but even "Ivermectin: Much more than you wanted to know" comes in at around fifteen thousand. This essay takes longer than that just to get to the buried lede! I skipped the five thousand word "summary".
It's a shame, because I was reasonably engaged for the first ten thousand words or so. But the Q&A style became grating and patronising, especially when the author agrees with the questions the "reader" has asked. But, of course, the author wrote both! "Oh yes very insightful of me!"... what?
Upon giving up on reading this essay, I felt angry and duped. Angry enough to paste chunks into an editor to get word counts as a sanity check, which I don't think I have ever done before.
This isn't a book review. It's a book.
Egan's emphasis on historical context is great. Now that I think about it, the most memorable times in school was when the teacher made it clear that an _actual person_ had to figure all this out. 2 examples:
- My favorite assignement ever was when my E&M professor made us read James Maxwell's original paper (https://archive.org/details/dynamicaltheoryo00maxw/page/504/mode/2up) about the laws of Electromagnetism from 1865. The assignment was to simply "find Gauss's law", which is supprisingly hard since the original has 26 equations (not the 4 vector equation we saw in class) and was part of a long, chaotic exposition.
- There was also a memorable lecture in my Differential Geometry class where the prof explained how Eintein accidentally broke the differential law of energy-momentum conservation in his first crack at General Relativity (https://arxiv.org/pdf/physics/9703023.pdf) This is way more interesting way to reflect on nature of covariance, which apparently confused Einstein too.
There is an urge to just give the modern versions of concepts for some reason, as if students would stop trusting us if they saw how confused everybody actually is. The essence of Egan's proposal is to actually talk to the Giants as we climb their shoulders, which makes the climb a lot less monotonous.
Phenomenal post.
I suspect it will receive short shrift because of the huge bias of this readership toward being childless.
For those with legacies, its the most meaningful entry in a long time.
Very nice review, if overlong as others have commented. One bone to pick: Socrates and his 'Greek moment' wasn't so unique. Independently in China you had these guys going through some intense philosophical and ironic turns https://terebess.hu/english/Chuang-Tzu-Graham.pdf
To be frank, I think this is a terrible review. Way too long, very low information density & very uncritical of the book it is talking about.
On Egan's theory itself, I think he is right that this kind of learning is very appealing to the great majority of people. It's very good for learning in our ancestral environment, teaching your children the self-conception of your tribe, how your tribes relates to other beings around it, what skills are important in your local environment, and so on.
The problem is that this approach is just very bad at teaching the things you need in the modern world. In fact I would argue that if it were, schools simply would never have been developed; Before schools, learning was much closer to Egan's ideal, but it simply wasn't capable of teaching the large majority of the population basic modern skills like literacy and numeracy, let alone advanced modern skills.
Despite the assurances to the contrary, this is just yet another progressive education theory that tries to get around unpopular and unpleasant learning approaches such as rote learning. Unfortunately, these still exist for the simple reason that they are most likely necessary in the modern environment, and since we didn't evolve for the modern environment, we don't like them. This makes these theories so appealing - they tell us exactly what we wish were true.
"Imagine students reading their Ibram X. Kendi books in the morning, then pledging allegiance to the American flag after lunch." - somehow, very easy to imagine.
"why do American schools typically wait until kids lose the ability to naturally absorb languages to start teaching languages?" - whoa
"We can see it if we ask, what can a hunter-gatherer deaf-mute child who’s not yet learned to sign do… that a chimpanzee can’t?" - nice insight
Kids are good at getting lost in reverie? I don't personally recall being better at reverie or daydreaming as a kid compared to today. I do recall, however, having many more opportunities to get lost in a daydream as a kid. Life became busier.
My default position is that reverie is merely a symptom of boredom. If that's the case, using reverie in an educational setting may not be all that useful.
That was then.
Now, kids no longer have the incentive nor opportunity to get lost in reverie, what with tablets, phones, and tv shows maximizing engagement through colorful action and catchy sound. If reverie was once a child's superpower, it's gone now.
"They seemed just about as rational as the average person of their community — which was to say, quite irrational!"
I'm not going to stop reading this but man, this made me pause and question the author's credibility a little bit. What chutzpah it takes to say "I'm more rational than the average student." Even by implication. How could one possibly know that? Our own irrationalities tend to be invisible to ourselves.
This seems a far too theoretical approach about schooling, which forget about how things are organized. Especially in secondary school: You have a very hierarchical structure in place, with professors as authority figure and students supposed to obey implicit (school regulations) or direct orders.
This structure is not natural though, as professors have not earned their leader position fairly in the group, nor do they have a pre-agreed medium exchange as basis for their authority (money in your professional life).
Elementary school is a little bit better, but there the professor takes the natural place of parents and this leads to big problems every time prof and parents goals conflicts. University/College is different, it's a transition to profesional life and professors there often have at least some genuine cred for backing up their authority, which is anyway more limited (in time and scope) than what typically happen in highschool.
So yeah, highschool in particular have too much in common with prisons to hope to do any nice teaching, being academic or self development. As indoctrination (makes people comply with societal norms), it kind of work...although often in a nasty way and with side effects (like prison or army with conscripts does)
When I saw the title and the diagram I thought this was going to be about how some people are simply incapable of moving to the last few developmental stages for many or most ideas. And that a proper approach to didactics (more general than childhood education) should work with this limitation rather than fighting against it.
This was still interesting and I think that the best teachers I had independently came up with a similar idea. For instance the best history teachers started off by introducing historical events as colorful stories from the point of view of the people living at the time. Not a series of dates, events and facts.
> Were you forced to [...] pledge your allegiance to your nation-state?
What? No! What kind of totalitarian bureaucracy would make its children do that?
(Kidding. Love you, america.)
Okay, I liked this review a lot, because I like reading about any novel education system reforms. Like many other proposals, this one suffers from lack of evidence that it will work and a huge cost to actually test it, but this is a problem with any education reform, simply because experimenting on human children is costly and dangerous. Surprisingly, I do not have much to say about the content of reform itself: I have a feeling I wouldn't like to be taught in an Egan school, but I might be wrong, and anyway, maybe I'm just an outlier (for one, I was never concerned with gossip and heroes - I had exactly zero posters on my wall, and zero interest in personal lives and struggles of great mathematicians, and my interest in Guinness World Records was only occasional).
However, I find that Egan's proposal is missing a key explanation, which is also an usual feature of education reform proposals. Namely, how are your new school is going to scale? It's not that hard to create one new school with super-motivated teachers who all are in love with that new idea, and teaching in general. Now, I'd like to hear how your proposed system will work with demotivated, overworked burned-out teacher burdened with ever-increasing bureaucracy. Because this is the kind of teacher you're going to get when you begin to scale up. 20th century education was industrial education. It turned schools into assembly lines where even a bad teacher could probably manage to get enough knowledge into students for them to pass tests or exams. Not pretty, not very good, but very scalable, like Chinese cheap plastic toy factory. So. How will YOUR system scale? Unfortunately, there is no answer here, and I don't think Egan had one.
-"did you know that you can count up to 1,023 using just your fingers on both hands, and a knowledge of binary?"
Not without difficulty. It's pretty hard to raise your ring finger while your pinky is lowered, without the aid of your thumb.
Been trying to find the time to read the whole review for 3 days, ultimately decided it would be quicker to just read the book.
At the least, this needs to be parsed out more carefully. Consider
> A science is any discipline in which the fool of this generation can go beyond the point reached by the genius of the last generation. -- Max Gluckman
You can likely engage students to interact with nature, to give them wonder ... if they're a historical-level genius, they'll be able to learn everything that Aristotle knew, much of which has since been proven to be false. Actual, useful science involves inserting into the student's mind the database of everything that has been learned heretofore, teaching them how to utilize that knowledge to interact with nature in ways more useful than anyone has done heretofore, and how to update that database and pass it to the next generation. The practical goal is the second item, which absolutely requires the first item.
And I've seen reports that there actually is a popular Egan-style system for teaching mathematics that centers on the students rediscovering the math that is already known. Presumably, world-level geniuses might reinvent algebra and calculus by the time they're 40.
The discussion of history and social studies seems to be similar, though I know a lot less about those fields. Telling stories likely makes it a lot more interesting, but if the goal is to get the students e.g. to know what the countries of the world are, their general political and social situations, how they interact, and how they got that way, you're going to need a lot more data than can be presented in a bunch of interesting stories.
The deeper problem seems to be what Pinker mentioned: Humans learn spoken language because we've got a bunch of instincts that drive children to learn spoken language; it takes a lot of work to prevent a child from doing so. But children have no instincts that drive them to learn written language, and we have a practical need to get them to, so we apply explicit "educational" effort to them. And not surprisingly, they'd rather not do so.
Now there is the question of to what degree the students remember *anything* that they're taught about most subjects. I mean, why are we bothering to teach them mathematics, science, and history when most students for most of history have managed to forget *all* of that?
Regarding this comment on Piaget "This notion of “developmentally appropriate” took on a scientific sheen with the work of Jean Piaget, the famous Swiss psychologist. Before age 12, he “proved”, children aren’t able to form hypotheses, draw conclusions, or think abstractly." Yes, this is how much of the educational world interpreted Piaget but consider Seymour Papert's contrary view. Seymour worked with Piaget for years before becoming co-director of the MIT AI Lab. Here's a short piece he wrote about Piaget: https://dailypapert.com/papert-on-piaget/ As he says "Piaget was the first to explore a kind of epistemological relativism in which multiple ways of knowing are acknowledged and examined nonjudgmentally, yet with a philosopher’s analytic rigor" And Papert's views of Piaget led to his theory of learning - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructionism_(learning_theory)
Papert saw Piaget's stages of development as contingent and can be changed by giving children different experiences (such as his work on Logo). Similar to what the Reviewer wrote "Our genes don’t make us develop Romantic understanding around age 8 — our culture does. The fact that these come in a certain order in both individual kids and cultural history — Mythic, then Romantic, then Philosophic — stems from certain constraints..."
I really enjoyed this review.
The great thing about a Pet Idea like this....you can actually BUILD it from scratch, as a charter or private school. Real life.
Honestly, I would love to see a K-12 school like this. I wonder what would happen?
I created one back in 1998 as a grad student....what became a K-12 charter school. Different ideas than Egan, for sure, but a few of the same critiques. Many of my plans didn't work so well in real life (Mike Tyson and all), but some did.
As I read Astral threads about K-12, seems like there's enough support here to crowdsource a few different ideas. Just need 1 or more founders who want a 10+ year startup adventure.
I spread reading this over a week, that was long and excellent. Thank you!
As we’re sending our son to a democratic elementary school next year, that gave me quite a bit to think about.
> Who first discovered the concepts students learn in math? The answer, of course, is a wide diversity of curious men and women living across the world over the last few thousand years. Egan says: bring those people into how we teach math.
I don't think I buy that this has much to do with math. The beauty of subjects like math and science is that the history of math is not the same thing as math.
We do teach math in a bad, postmodern way by throwing away the plot, but the plot is not the people! It's silly that we would introduce conic sections and make students spend almost a year with them without mentioning any of the crises in orbital mechanics or optimization problems that led to so much interest in them, but it's equally silly to think that the human story is the same story. PhDs in math seldom go read the original work of the mathematicians that discovered things because it doesn't matter--it's not about the people! It's about the ideas. Teach those ideas, rather than the smattering of isolated facts you do now.
I think making math history into math mirrors current math education, which makes the same sort of error that Egan identifies for the social studies curricula: the idea that you have some sort of concentric circles to build upon, rather than looking at the topic in terms of students' strengths and interests at the time.
Took me 10 days to finish this one. Not just due to Word count: 23.5 k . Say it again: 23,465 words - last years winner by Erik Hoel was 9.5 k words, only. I am 2/3 fascinated and 1/2 convinced, and though ACX-readers are not identical with less-wrongers - I do kinda hope this text wins - but I also hope the others will be shorter. B) The foreign language part is kinda ignorant rubbish (me FL-teacher): Sure, there seems to be a "window of opportunity" to learn another language perfectly - but that is relevant ONLY if one learns it as a new first language: Every day, all day, usu. with your new peers in a new country. NOT with 2 or 6 lessons a week in school in a classroom between recesses. In school (even if Egan-styled), students make faster progress at learning/acquiring Spanish/French/Japanese at 16 years than at 12. And faster at 10 than at 6. - the rational thing would be to put ALL fl-lessons in ONE year, and - to put sugar on top - have a trip to the country at the end + even some other courses taught in the target language (math in Spanish, at least partly - history could focus on the relevant region(s), too) . In the US and UK it would also make sense to drop foreign languages at school completely. Would be an improvement to the status-quo.
This review took the scenic route. I can see why it is polarising the comments. On the one hand, I loved the survey of educational theory and the naming of large faceless feelings I’ve had swirling in my head for a long time. As a history buff his passages on history made me fantasise about teaching it. On the other hand, it is a highly uncritical review and does not have much/any evidence for its polemic. It also does not convincingly sweeten the bitter pill that some of our greatest social technologies (e.g. calculus, statistics) are counter-intuitive and traumatic to learn.
On a more general note, the book reviews are the most fun I have had on this blog in ages. Bringing in a procession of intelligent sensitive people who are passionate about a topic and are desperate to make you love it too. Just as Egan would have wanted it...
Note: This review is 23,755 words, that would be approximately 80 pages if it were a book.
Ironic isn't the final stage, detachment from social expectations is.
When you can evaluate something separate from what your social identities are (easiest example: political party) then you can understand it more accurately. With true rationality coming with detachment even from intuition.
Review was too long, almost didn't finish.
If you've gotten this far, congratulations — you've found the portal! 🤔
I'm the author of the book review... and I apologize that I'm not actually able to give you the last three hours of your life back. BUT, if you'd like to spend some MORE time diving into these ideas (and seeing how they mesh with some bigger topics — expertise, culture, intelligence...), I've kicked off my own substack, "The Lost Tools of Learning" (https://losttools.substack.com).
Must have missed this when it came out, now found it based on it winning the book review contest. Some very interesting stuff here - I love the idea of spending more time telling little kids historical stories and less time making them do busywork.
One critique that soured it a little for me though was that the whole section on Greece starting with the quote below is based on misconceptions:
"Greece was a backwater on the periphery of the Persian Empire — but in a historical instant it was transformed into an intellectual and cultural powerhouse: philosophers like Plato, and Aristotle revolutionized Western thought; mathematicians like Pythagoras and Euclid revolutionized math; playwrights like Aeschylus and Sophocles revolutionized drama. "
There was no "western thought" to revolutionize - instead the west is defined as the cultural tradition descending from the Greeks. That Greek miracle saw writing and sophisticated culture arrive in Greece from outside and revolutionize Greek society, but it did not involve Greek becoming a cultural and intellectual powerhouse relative to traditional centers of civilization farther east - that didn't happen until after the Greeks conquered those traditional centers. We have a somewhat distorted view of all this because Greek writing continued to be copied down and thus survived for us to read it while all the older written traditions in the area died out.