If you would consider hiring someone to edit these reviews down to a readers digest version, and collecting them in one place, I would pay for it, and I think many others would too. It's some of the best content on the internet -- like a bunch of passion projects from extremely smart people -- but much of that quality is, I think, a bit hidden under verbosity.
That is a very good deed - I did not look for, but appreciate highly. What I do look for: An ACX archive as the one Scott had on Star Slate Codex: Highly scroll-able that is. (The ACX-substack archive has become kinda unusable when I want to find a "some piece he wrote a year ago or so about ... - no unique search word ... " or for newbies trying to start from the beginning.) I may be just dumb - well: I am, for sure - but in my experience: Many are. When you - or other saints - are done: repeat for livejounal :D Jackdaws love my big sphinx of quartz
> but much of that quality is, I think, a bit hidden under verbosity
I don't necessarily mind the verbosity, but most of the reviews seem to be intentionally trying to ape Scott's writing style, and I find it off-putting.
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 thought that, especially with Philosophic and Ironic and 4 and 5, but I'm not sure the fit is as good in the lower stages.
Stage 3's focus on social roles and relationships often happens at a similar time to the Romantic understanding, but I'm not sure it is as intimately connected as the later stages, although the themes of gossip and personal heroes do tie the two together. While they're associated with distinct personalities (stage 3 usually being over-socialised and unwilling to push boundaries, Romantic having an emphasis on boundary-pushing and the extremes), that doesn't seem to be fundamental.
Stage 2 is primarily about a focus on the self's interests and desires, which is sort of like Mythic, but not much. The world is what you can do with it, which shares a local emphasis with Mythic, but is not the same.
Stage 1 is somewhat harder to find information about, but with its identification with its impulses and emotions, it shares more with Somatic than 2 with Mythic or even 3 with Romantic. The fit only gets that good again at 4/Philosophic and up.
In the initial book review submissions, where all the titles were in alphabetical order, there was a review for Kegan's _The Evolving Self_ almost right after this one.
Yep. I read through most of the first part, thinking "When is he going to get to the point?" I then scrolled through the rest of it and...if you can't get to the point faster, I'm not interested in reading your review.
> 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.)
That reminds me of a line from a novel by the late Willie Rushton along the lines of "While it's true that Opposites attract, they don't attract as strongly as Highly Adjacents".
There was an SSC post that pointed out that different people need different advice.
The appendix to The Blank Slate included another scholar's compilation of "phenomena that are universal to every documented human society", which can be interesting reading. "Cliches" are an entry on that list; so are "mutually contradictory cliches".
My Year 5 teacher pointed this out. She said “Absence makes the heart grow fonder” had a continuation, “of another”. More broadly, lots of the specific mythic/romantic/philosophic techniques look familiar from my schooling, while I notice there weren’t any actual suggestions for how to use ironic understanding at all in teaching. That part felt wishful, but much of the rest sounded practical.
Feels like that's a fake continuation, just like the cursed "of the covenant" continuation. It's fascinating that information age totally didn't stop myth building but instead accelerate it even more.
I think I recognised at the time that it was less widespread and younger than the un-continued version. But I don’t think my teacher was lying when she said she heard it from others. I don’t know enough about the provenance of these expressions in general to say that it “wasn’t a real continuation”.
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?
**Anecdata:** I explained to my college roommate that the Sun was a star. It blew her mind. We attended a fairly selective private college.
These people exist; they walk among us. It's fairly easy for the teach-to-test/standards public schooling (in the United States especially, but also in other countries) to miss basic "common knowledge" the year it's "supposed" to be taught and never return to the subject.
I'm personally ignorant about ~1975-2000. Every single history class I was in stopped right around Watergate, assuming (each teacher SAID THIS OUT LOUD) that the previous and/or subsequent classes had/would cover that time period. I've been trying to fill in the gaps on my own.
Addendum: What you consider "common knowledge" is, as you point out by referencing your bubble, based on the people and society around you. I couldn't believe someone could be so wrong about astronomy! ...but I grew up in a Space Town (TM). How many people have the delight and luxury of knowing people who built and designed things that went to the Moon?
We probably need to see the precise wordings of these questions to interpret what these numbers mean. I imagine one could come up with ways of phrasing them that would get a lot of people to give the "wrong" answers.
Agreed. The idea that the questions "the earth goes around the sun" and "not all radioactivity is man-made" were within 4 % of each other was very strange to me.
I wonder if people are misreading that question about "does the Earth go round the Sun?" because it's easy to skim over things and just pick out "Earth" and "Sun" and assume "oh yeah, this is that old thing about the sun goes round the earth, well that's false, I know that" and answer that way?
The "tomatoes have no genes" might be the same sort of misunderstanding; we hear about it only in the context of GMO so people are really answering "ordinary tomatoes are not genetically modified the same way GMO ones are by specific insertion of specific genes" in the short version of "tomatoes don't have genes". We get the idea of "genes" dinned into us as "GMO genes" and not "everything has genes".
Jeans For Tomatoes Now! is a campaign militiant vegans should start. Why neglect the health, comfort and safety of our friends the silent green animals?
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.
I'll take it one step further and say—and this is just my theory—that humans as a species are naturally incurious outside a limited range of personal or culturally-imposed interests. I remember that somebody (I forget who)—on an ACX thread a year or two back—claimed that being extremely curious was contra-survival because it would distract one from important things—like making a living. I was a little shocked. But after considering it a bit, I admitted that—if we believe that our behaviors are probably hardwired by our genes—then we are adapted to extracting resources from relatively static environments. Being more efficient at extracting those resources, and finding new ways to extract those resources, was probably beneficial to to our ancestors' survival. The ones that spent all the time away from the campfires looking up at the stars probably got eaten by nighttime predators (I say that in semi-seriousness). The humans who lived long enough to pass on their genes were probably very practical people. Not stupid but very focused. And that focusedness has been selected for over hundreds of thousands of years. So I suspect there's very little schools can do to train or induce young humans to be voraciously curious.
This may also be why we find television so addictive—Because our Paleolithic ancestors spent their evenings around the safety of a fire—while one of the elders of their group narrated stories to them to keep them entertained (and near the fire). TVs are just modern campfires, and our genus Homo brains can't resist their siren call.
I'm don't remember if Piaget commented on this—but children from ages five until adolescence seem to display much more curiosity than teenagers or adults. At an early age, kids start asking why? why? why? why? driving their parents crazy. Then they develop obsessions and passions—like dinosaurs, astronomy, rock collecting, baseball cards, etc. But by the time the hormones kick in most kids give up those pursuits. And they become boring adults.
It's actually thought that was a major reason homo sapiens survived and homo neanderthalensis did not, is that we're inherently more curious and open to new experience. It led us to branch out and explore more, adapting to more unique climates and geographical regions, and also allowed us to form larger groups beyond immediate family, whereas neanderthals tended to stay in one place and live in small very close kin groups. This led to faster spread of technological innovation in homo sapiens compared to neaderthals, not because we were actually smarter but just because we encountered and talked to more other people, resulting in information sharing and spreading.
Neandertals had very small populations. Bigger populations are subject to more selection vs drift, which is why so many Australian species get outcompeted by intrusive species.
I think that's all speculative hand-waving. It's impossible to tell how large their social units were from the limited skeletal remains available. One paper speculated that *all* Neanderthals were inbred based on the recovered genome of a single individual. That study was hyped in the MSM. Meanwhile, in other individuals' DNA we see evidence of exogamy between their lineage with two of the other lineages of Homo sapiens. (Well, they were inbred except when they weren't! ;-) )
As for far-ranging, they successfully populated Europe and Central Asia. The Wikipedia article on Neanderthals claims that the "generally small and widely dispersed fossil sites suggest that Neanderthals lived in less numerous and socially more isolated groups than contemporary Homo sapiens"—but it doesn't give any links to support that claim. The key phrase in that sentence is "than contemporary Homo sapiens". Most of our data on contemporary hunter-gatherer groups is from the past century. And it's been argued that modern hunter-gatherers are not representative of h-g's before the advent of agriculture. I've never heard of a study that compared the number and density of archaeological sites geographically across time. If you have one, please post a link!
Also, Home erectus the predecessor to H. sapiens neanderthalensis, H. sapiens denisova, and H. sapiens sapiens spread farther than Neanderthals ever did. H. erectus had less cranial capacity, but they didn't need more complex behaviors to spread further across the planet than Neanderthals. So the idea that H. sapiens sapiens are "more curious and open to new experience"—and that "led us to branch out and explore more, adapting to unique climates and geographical regions" is an idea made popular based on Jared Diamond's tendency to be a convincing bullshitter. Actually, Jared Diamond didn't originate the idea—it was just received wisdom when he was in grad school. Diamond just popularized it. Back when I was studying Biobehavioral Sciences in grad school (1980s), the consensus theory was that Neanderthals, because of the shape and position of their hyoid bone, couldn't vocalize well—and therefore weren't capable of language—and thus they were incapable of (complex) symbolic reasoning. Now that we've found cave art and ritual behaviors associated with Neanderthals, none except the old guard of Physical Anthropologists believe that anymore.
I broke my own rule by not providing links. Sorry.
What's interesting to me is how many people on a list devoted to rational thinking just accept the standard wisdom if it sounds reasonable without bothering to check the data. Not trying to put you folks on the spot because this seems to SOP for most humans—but this seems like the perfect example of how incurious we are despite as a group being well-educated and (probably) of higher than average intelligence.
Anyway, I was curious enough to double-check my assumptions (Yay! So pin a rose on my ass!).
The inbreeding article is below. A Neanderthal female was the daughter of two half-siblings. What's so great about their study is that they were the first to sequence the entire genome. They just happen to jump the speculative shark with the suggestion that inbreeding rates across all Neanderthal groups were high. Plus they detected interbreeding events among different hominin groups in the Late Pleistocene. (What interests me is the unknown lineage of Homo that contributed the Denisovan gene pool. Other studies have mentioned them, too.)
It's an old problem, and one Chesterton discusses in his autobiography: what happens between the time a child learns everything with no trouble and devouring interest, and then goes to school and plods his way through it?
"The change from childhood to boyhood, and the mysterious transformation that produces that monster the schoolboy, might be very well summed up in one small fact. To me the ancient capital letters of the Greek alphabet, the great Theta, a sphere barred across the midst like Saturn, or the great Upsilon, standing up like a tall curved chalice, have still a quite unaccountable charm and mystery, as if they were the characters traced in wide welcome over Eden of the dawn. The ordinary small Greek letters, though I am now much more familiar with them, seem to me quite nasty little things like a swarm of gnats. As for Greek accents, I triumphantly succeeded, through a long series of school-terms, in avoiding learning them at all; and I never had a higher moment of gratification than when I afterwards discovered that the Greeks never learnt them either. I felt, with a radiant pride, that I was as ignorant as Plato and Thucydides. At least they were unknown to the Greeks who wrote the prose and poetry that was thought worth studying; and were invented by grammarians, I believe, at the time of the Renaissance. But it is a simple psychological fact; that the sight of a Greek capital still fills me with happiness, the sight of a small letter with indifference tinged with dislike, and the accents with righteous indignation reaching the point of profanity. And I believe that the explanation is that I learnt the large Greek letters, as I learnt the large English letters, at home. I was told about them merely for fun while I was still a child; while the others I learnt during the period of what is commonly called education; that is, the period during which I was being instructed by somebody I did not know, about something I did not want to know.
But I say this merely to show that I was a much wiser and widerminded person at the age of six than at the age of sixteen. I do not base any educational theories upon it, heaven forbid. This work cannot, on some points, avoid being theoretical; but it need not add insult to injury by being educational. I certainly shall not, in the graceful modern manner, turn round and abuse my schoolmasters because I did not choose to learn what they were quite ready to teach. It may be that in the improved schools of today, the child is so taught that he crows aloud with delight at the sight of a Greek accent. But I fear it is much more probable that the new schools have got rid of the Greek accent by getting rid of the Greek. And upon that point, as it happens, I am largely on the side of my schoolmasters against myself. I am very glad that my persistent efforts not to learn Latin were to a certain extent frustrated; and that I was not entirely successful even in escaping the contamination of the language of Aristotle and Demosthenes. At least I know enough Greek to be able to see the joke, when somebody says (as somebody did the other day) that the study of that language is not suited to an age of democracy. I do not know what language he thought democracy came from; and it must be admitted that the word seems now to be a part of the language called journalese. But my only point for the moment is personal or psychological; my own private testimony to the curious fact that, for some reason or other, a boy often does pass, from an early stage when he wants to know nearly everything, to a later stage when he wants to know next to nothing. A very practical and experienced traveller, with nothing of the mystic about him, once remarked to me suddenly: "There must be something rottenly wrong with education itself. So many people have wonderful children and all the grown-up people are such duds." And I know what he meant; though I am in doubt whether my present duddishness is due to education, or to some deeper and more mysterious cause.
...It is time that something should be said about the masters, and especially the High Master. Immensely important as we thought ourselves in comparison with those remote but respectable enemies, after all they did have something to do with the school. The most eccentric and entertaining of them, Mr. Elam, has already been sketched in brilliant black and white by the pen of Mr. Compton Mackenzie. I have forgotten whether Mr. Mackenzie mentioned what always struck me as the most disturbing eccentricity of that eccentric; the open derision with which he spoke of his own profession and position, of those who shared it with him and even of those who were set over him in its exercise. He would explain the difference between satire and the bitterness of the risus sardonicus by the helpful parable, "If I were walking along the street and fell down in the mud, I should laugh a sardonic laugh. But if I were to see the High Master of this school fall down in the mud, I should laugh a sarcastic laugh." I chiefly mention his name here for another reason; because he once vented his scorn for what he called "the trade of an usher" in the form of a rhetorical question addressed to a boy: "Why are boys sent to school, Robinson?" Robinson, with downcast eyes and an air of offensive virtue, replied faintly, "To learn, sir." "No, boy, no," said the old gentleman wagging his head. "It was because one day at breakfast Mr. Robinson said to Mrs. Robinson, 'My dear, we must do something about that boy. He's a nuisance to me and he's a nuisance to you and he's a perfect plague to the servants.'" Then, with an indescribable extreme of grinding and grating contempt: "'So we'll Pay Some Man. . . .'"
I say I introduce this ancient anecdote for another reason; and it is partly because I would suggest another answer. If ever the problem troubled me in my boyhood, it did not force me in the direction of the lofty morality of Robinson. The idea that I had come to school to work was too grotesque to cloud my mind for an instant. It was also in too obvious a contrast with the facts and the result. I was very fond of my friends; though, as is common at such an age, I was much too fond of them to be openly emotional about it. But I do remember coming, almost seriously, to the conclusion that a boy must go to school to study the characters of his schoolmasters. And I still think that there was something in it. After all, the schoolmaster is the first educated grown-up person that the boy comes to see constantly, after having been introduced at an early age to his father and mother. And the masters at St. Paul's were very interesting; even those of them who were not so obviously eccentric as the celebrated Mr. Elam. To one very distinguished individual, my own personal debt is infinite; I mean, the historian of the Indian Mutiny and of the campaigns of Caesar--Mr. T. Rice Holmes. He managed, heaven knows how, to penetrate through my deep and desperately consolidated desire to appear stupid; and discover the horrible secret that I was, after all, endowed with the gift of reason above the brutes. He would suddenly ask me questions a thousand miles away from the subject at hand, and surprise me into admitting that I had heard of the Song of Roland, or even read a play or two of Shakespeare. Nobody who knows anything of the English schoolboy at that date will imagine that there was at the moment any pleasure in such prominence or distinction. We were all hag-ridden with a horror of showing off, which was perhaps the only coherent moral principal we possessed. There was one boy, I remember, who was so insanely sensitive on this point of honour, that he could hardly bear to hear one of his friends answer an ordinary question right. He felt that his comrade really ought to have invented some mistake, in the general interest of comradeship. When my information about the French epic was torn from me, in spite of my efforts, he actually put his head in his desk and dropped the lid on it, groaning in a generous and impersonal shame and faintly and hoarsely exclaiming, "Oh, shut it. ... Oh, shut up!" He was an extreme exponent of the principle; but it was a principle which I fully shared. I can remember running to school in sheer excitement repeating militant lines of "Marmion" with passionate emphasis and exultation; and then going into class and repeating the same lines in the lifeless manner of a hurdy-gurdy, hoping that there was nothing whatever in my intonation to indicate that I distinguished between the sense of one word and another.
...I recall these things, so contrary to the previous course of my school life, because I am not sorry to be an exception to the modern tendency to reproach the old Victorian schoolmaster with stupidity and neglect and to represent the rising generation as a shining band of Shelleys inspired by light and liberty to rise. The truth is that in this case it was I who exhibited the stupidity; though I really think it was largely an affected stupidity. And certainly it was I who rejoiced in the neglect, and who asked for nothing better than to be neglected. It was, if anything, the authorities who dragged me, in my own despite, out of the comfortable and protected atmosphere of obscurity and failure. Personally, I was perfectly happy at the bottom of the class."
I'm pretty sure it's a matter of proportion. You really do need to pay attention to urgent things, but there's plenty of time for thinking about non-urgent things, too.
I've read that the evidence is pretty clear that people learn math better if you just teach it to them and have them practice. Stories might be nice, but no, you cannot get beyond the simple fact that you have to teach the math, and you should be as clear as possible.
Similar thought on teaching languages. I had a French class I enjoyed because the teacher told us lots of cool facts about french history and how the language depends more on vowels. But that did not help me one bit to learn verb conjugatations, and I came out of the class with very little French. I learned conjugations by rote learning and speaking French a lot - and then lots more rote learning.
I feel like a lot of educational theories are motivated by people struggling to accept that straight on rote learning and practice is often the best tool. There's even evidence (tweeted by Steven Pinker recently) that hard-nosed teaching can even lead to *more* creativity, by giving you the skills you need to be creative.
Indeed. Other than the fact that Egan does not seem to be totally against rote learning (according to the reviewer, he believes in the virtue of learning poems by heart), much of his philosophy seems to be yet another flavour of educational progressivism. Educational progressivism is very tempting, especially among those people who were curious children and who felt stifled by what they were forced to work on in school, but the fact is that if the goal of education is to transmit a certain common base of knowledge, more so-called "traditional" methods are simply more efficient. Of course, this depends on what the goal of education is in the first place, so taking into account the philosophy of education is necessary.
I'm not opposed to Egan's idea to talk about well-known mathematicians in the process of teaching mathematics. I try to do it as much as I can when I teach math, and it's certainly common practice: pick up any mathematics textbook, and it will contain biographies of the mathematicians who came up with the concepts discussed in the book (including female and non-white mathematicians, for diversity, equity and inclusion concerns). But I don't think it's absolutely necessary either.
I remember when I became disillusioned with maths. I was in 4th year of high school in the last year of mandatory maths. I was top of my class but it seemed so utterly pointless. If I followed this set of steps I could work out what the standard deviation was. It seemed clear to me then that no one in the real world was actually doing this set of steps to find the standard deviation of things, especially by hand.
It all seemed to be part of some bizarre make work program and I wanted no part of it. I chose all arts subject for my final years, spent a few years after school bumming around. Eventually I took a notion to learn the basics of programming found I was very suited too it and have since had a very productive career.
I do hold it against my high school that they made math (and IT) seem so boring and worthless that even though I was good at them I couldn't get rid of them fast enough.
A little colour and zooming out to discover who invented standard deviations and why might have gone a long way. Or not, who knows.
The giant problem is that if "if the goal of education is to transmit a certain common base of knowledge", everything tried so far fails if the student is not interested, and no matter how hard teachers try, they can rarely get students interested in much of what the students are supposed to learn. So students "learn" enough to pass a test and go on to the next unit, but forget most of it within a few months. The educational jargon for this is that "knowledge decays over time".
I strongly suspect that there is no way to solve this problem. In other words, our educational goals are impossible.
Rote learning was not tried and found wanting. It was found hard and is no longer tried.
We are learning so much about training AIs. Why are we not using that experience to improve our training of children? For example, the knowledge examples appear similar to descriptions of AI fragility. People learn how to respond to questions that are well-represented in their training datasets and suck at generalizing to out-of-distribution problems. But we know how to fix this!
For example, my young daughter is learning math. Change a problem slightly and she can no longer do it. The solution is to give her many, many problems that are all slightly different.
In general, if we are nothing more than stochastic parrots then our educational theories should reflect that unpleasant realization. Rather than being founded on some 18th century view of humanity as exercising our god-given Reason within the bounds of our Knowledge. Like an idealized scholar lived in our heads and teaching was a way of giving him books for his library. Books he would refer to in answering questions about the world.
>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.)
Are you talking about learning a concept by seeing the _same_ example of the pattern many times or by seeing many _different_ examples of the pattern? Because to me, the former is "rote-learning" but the latter is not. But I do also think that rote-learning of the former type does work. The key factor is what is the thing being rote-memorized.
Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman had the example where students memorized the description of some physical law from a book but then when confronted with an example of it in action couldn't apply the law they'd "learned". They'd learned the description of the concept but not the actual concept. I think all learning is actually just memorization of information but the exactly what information you memorize decides whether you now understand something better or not.
Example of rote-learning that works:
- Using flash cards to memorize vocabulary. Each flash card has the same information that you review again and again. A short explanation of the meaning and one example sentence using the word will suffice to adequately learn a word well enough to understand it when later encountered in a new context.
Example of rote-learning that doesn't work:
- Using a flash card describing the structure of adding -ize to a word and how it changes the meaning. Repeatedly reading the description and trying to understand it with the hope that you'd then understand the meaning of an -ize word when you encounter one. Doesn't work very well in my experience for a lot of language learning concepts. Even if I kind of get the concept from a description, when I actually encounter a word with the structure I just don't recognize it.
Not rote-learning that works:
- Learning the meaning of adding -ize to a word by learning multiple words of this type with flash cards. The concept isn't being learned by repeating the same info again again so this isn't rote-learning, in my opinion. Often works better for language structures that the above method.
So to me it seems that sometimes a concept is describable in words but those words can't impart the concept to you. And in that case, rote-learning (as I defined it above) won't work. The Feynman case wouldn't actually be an example of this but rather of only repeating words without understanding their meaning.
I think the issue is, "learning method [X] is good" and "teaching method [X] is good" are not the same things.
I once encountered a programming course that appeared to consist entirely of retyping existing, working pieces of code. I self-learned programming from a relatively young age, I distinctly recall how hard the process was, and having the idea spelled out explicitly it was one of those "eureka!" moments for me.
I'm sure it works, but there's a necessary caveat here - it works for people who want to learn, know what they want to learn, and know what they want to accomplish with what they learned. If, instead, you use it on unsuspecting kids, the result will be a stuff of nightmares. The kids will struggle with what they will (correctly) view as absurd demands, most will learn nothing, a minority will end up with a fraction of their precious brain resources permanently dedicated to something they'll never need, and lucky few will one day discover they have a valuable skill acquired.
Multiply this across all disciplines of human knowledge, and you get... schools for most of history of schooling.
While I agree that rote learning and repetition are essential in places, one also needs to provide the student with the motivation to do them - you need a carrot to entice them, not merely a stick to punish the ones who dare to want to have fun. I read the proposal described here as being about providing that motivation, and while it was barely a line in the review it was said that Egan is not opposed to rote learning.
I read it largely the same way, which is why I think it would fail if the subject matter remained the same as it is today. Stated bluntly, lots of students have little intrinsic interest in much of today's curriculum. Teaching it a different way probably isn't going to get them to develop an interest.
"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."
This is the problem with at least half of the rhetoric (political and academic) about education and school. Which is one reason so little thought is given to the question, "Why do we actually want people to know that?" Because everybody is curious about something.
> 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.
Ditto on the "why the hell would I want to wrestle an octupus? that's dumb, they have the advantage in hand-to-tentacle combat, instead let me use the human tech that can blow that sucker into calamari".
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?
Pretty methods to teach smart kids from involved homes work fine, whether it's Egan or any of the other systems going back decades.
Pretty methods that crash up against less able kids and kids who are able but totally uninterested in what you're trying to teach, including the civic virtues you are trying to smuggle in, and kids who are going to have to go out into the world of work where it's not fun passion jobs but boring, grind jobs where you do the same thing over and over and over again and you say 'yes sir no sir three bags full sir' to the boss who gives you dumb work are not prepared for the same after a schooling that is all "okay kids, let's be DRAMATIC and EMOTIONAL and ENGAGE YOUR NATURAL SENSE OF PLAY".
Oh, I do have Opinions on "you're only going to work in the box factory so Music and Art are not for you and would be wasted on you".
That is what aggravates me about the proposals (mainly on here, sorry lads!) about "I loved STEM but having to write English essays was dumb and boring, drop that shit from the curriculum in the name of improving the education system". Without exposure to a wide range of subjects, you don't know who will find an aptitude or an interest for something that they aren't getting at home.
But even if you love music or art or languages, there is a point where it's no longer enough to be 'this is the fun engaging way to teach', it has to be 'now you practice the same thing over and over until you ingrain it into muscle memory'. And that does involve 'learn to sit still and concentrate and focus, learn to finish a task even if you're bored and tired'.
Because whether it's cooking a meal or doing the laundry, never mind a work job, you can't simply wander off to do something more fun in the middle of it if you expect to have anything at the end. Otherwise you have half-cooked items and dirty clothes piling up, and nothing to eat or wear.
That's why the "do it as long as it's fun" approach to teaching/learning will only work for small kids, because they don't have the capacity to sit still and work on one thing for a long period. As they get older, they need to acquire this ability: being sixteen and still operating on "after ten minutes I'm bored and want to do something else" won't help you learn something.
And also, having parents who judge your ability to persevere by your ability to keep trying to solve a difficult math problem sucks. My parents thought I could "do science" but not work in a shop. Because working in a shop requires Being Responsible with Other People's Money, and also because Science is Interesting. When I discovered that I could feed pigs, too, I won something precious.
"But even if you love music or art or languages, there is a point where it's no longer enough to be 'this is the fun engaging way to teach', it has to be 'now you practice the same thing over and over until you ingrain it into muscle memory'. And that does involve 'learn to sit still and concentrate and focus, learn to finish a task even if you're bored and tired'."
Yes, becoming skilled at anything requires many hours of repetitive, tedious, exhausting practice, and that requires devotion. But cultivating a passion for art or music or literature or science can help fuel that devotion, even for the boring aspects of learning that don't stoke the passions directly. The idea is to make children really *care* about a subject while they're young, enough that they'll be willing to put in the work by the time they reach adolescence.
Judging by this review, Egan would agree that a 16 year old can't simply rely on "do it as long as it's fun" anymore. For one thing, he doesn't reject the traditional academic/philosophic model of education; in fact, he considers it to be an essential stage in the learning process, especially at the high school level. For another, he specifies that all of his ideas are meant to complement traditional education styles, not replace them.
There's a big difference between being groomed for factory work, and being treated as no different than any other kid.
Kids without an IQ of 85 are never, ever going to be capable of any remotely cognitively demanding job. It doesn't matter how much you encourage them, it doesn't matter how much tutoring you give them. They simply lack the raw brain power. Insisting that everyone is taught algebra and how to write essays is not just a waste of resources, you're not optimally preparing them for work they're actually capable of.
And if you want to talk about their spirit, they're going to feel like morons for not understanding algebra or how to write essays. But if you show them how to do trade work from a relatively young age, not only will they be better prepared for the job market they actually have access to, but they'll probably also feel better about themselves because they're doing things they're actually capable of. Most people with an IQ of 85 don't read books at all except when required to by school. As a group, they're never going to be 'intellectually curious' in any meaningful way.
It's easy to identify the diamonds in the rough. There's little risk of the '1 in X thousand' smart but poor black student not being recognized for their intelligence and missing out on their potential (though even if there were, it's weird that they're treated as more important than the thousands of non-bright students getting suboptimal preparation for the world).
And if the school was only made up of smart students and dumb ones, that would be an entirely valid point. But as you just pointed out, there's another group, the largest of all: the average students. And Chris J says nothing about moving the average students closer to the smart ones. Seems to me that that would have an even bigger societal impact, no?
The dumber someone is, the harder life will be for them and the bigger societal drag they will provide (on *average*). The further from smart you are, the bigger the impact of marginal intelligence gains are.
Of course, it's all irrelevant since Egan has no evidence that marginal intelligence (or academic ability) can be improved in the US, and we should assume his theory is as valid as every other failed educational theory of the past century until he has some experiements to prove otherwise.
Cool! Now, do we have any evidence that this translates to 1 SD worth of actual better learning and knowledge retention, as opposed to the charter schools just being good at teaching to the test? It's always important to remember Goodhart's Law in scenarios like this.
I listened to the podcast years ago, but never went and read the primary literature. They did some controlled trials with some students in traditional schools and some with the option of going to charter schools. Some Harvard profs were involved. I really doubt they tried to distinguish 'test scores' from 'actual learning' though
There are plenty of stupid white kids, uninterested white kids, white kids who only want to play games, smoke weed, and watch porn all day. I can tell you that from experience.
And I wonder about the Chinese system; testing well tells you nothing apart from "they use cram schools to tutor kids to do standardised tests". I think standardised tests are very useful, but they're not the be-all and end-all. Cherry pick your best performing students, don't let the dummies sit the tests in order not to drag the results down, and only enter the best performing cities in things like PISA gives you a slanted view of what the system is like.
Financial literacy education is a joke. Nobody is going to remember stuff that isn't relevant for them until years later. The only students who will even be interested are the students who work this stuff out independently.
And good luck teaching meditation to students who can't sit still long enough to even focus on things more stimulating than their own breathing.
[I deleted the wrong post now the thread is messed up...C'est la vie!]
"Nobody is going to remember stuff that isn't relevant for them until years later. "
Agreed, and keeping this in mind you pull them with teacher magic of anecdotes they can relate to and role play of their future selves, for example. And push them in the traditional way with grades. As someone said far easier with the upper-middle, college educated area. Meld 'financial literacy' with math do an age-appropriate version of public company analysis(fav meme stock), business operation(e.g. theme park), real estate(dinosaur ranch?).
Some stuff you teach with all stick if you have to then swerve back to what they're more interested in. The benefits of meditation and a couple basic techniques, 'selling' it to them as a superpower(because it is) or first aid kit for the mind if there is no present interest or whatever teachers do to pull rabbits out of hat.
Re: independent study. Yes, but for K-12 they still must achieve core competencies. It would be neat to have individual or small groups work on a piece of a project they have them assemble the their pieces into a whole class project. Never heard of this being done though.
Speaking for myself, I find scams interesting, and probably would have when I was a teenager.
Recognizing and fending off scams isn't all there is to financial literacy, but I think it would be worth teaching and has a reasonable chance of being remembered.
There's a guy in my group of friends who was born and educated in an Asian country (although not China). We've noticed that whenever we go out to a restaurant and it's time to pick up the bill, he adds up the individual dishes and figures out everyone's share (plus tax plus tip) almost instantly. When we asked him how he does it, he was at first surprised, then said, "It's nothing special, everyone at my school could do it. They'd teach you the mental arithmetic techniques, give you a timed test, and the worst couple students would get to kneel on some dried peas in the corner for an hour. A kid who goes through that a couple times tends to learn math pretty quick afterwards".
I was born and raised in Southeast Asia. Your friend's story reminded me of the thing our math teacher did in elementary school.
Before teaching the session, he'd first line up all the students in front of a poster tacked to the wall on which were 35 cards (5x7 arrangement) each with a simple multiplication question, like 9x8=?. He'd tell the kid at the front of the line to get ready, take out his stopwatch, point the tip of his cane (my school caned everyone for all kinds of reasons) to the first card at the top left, and move rightward zig-zagging down at a speed of slightly over one card per second.
Every time the tip of the cane touched a card, the kid was supposed blurt out the answer (e.g. '72!'). Every time the kid missed an answer, or stayed silent, he'd count out: 'One.' 'Two.' And so on.
At the end -- let's say the kid missed 6 questions out of 35 -- our math teacher would say: 'Palm.' The kid would put his or her non-writing hand's palm out, and the teacher would whack it with his cane 6 times. He'd pause a bit between strikes, so less machine gun and more distinct WHACKS. Then the kid would go to his or her seat, and the next kid in line would do the same thing.
It was all done pretty efficiently, because there was a lot of us in the class and he did want to spare enough time to cover the day's lessons. I don't remember malice or glee from the teacher, just a sense of... duty?
We were all scared shitless of him, so pretty soon nearly all of us did our times tables quickly and perfectly. We could of course Goodhart it, by practicing on that poster in our free time. Our class' math scores topped our cohort, so I suppose from that perspective our teacher achieved his goal?
Chortle! The original Tudor method - "Knowledge that is not willingly sought, must needs with the rod be taught!"
Seriously, that approach if applied generally tends to produce a dogmatic inflexible outlook. But in times past that was exactly what was required, and innovations were a threat to the status quo. That is pretty much the opposite of the aims of education today, certainly in STEM subjects.
I disagree. STEM requires that you know your multiplication tables. How can you expect to innovate if you don't even know the basics of what has already been done?
I think that is how it works: the kid who is figuring out from first principles the answer to the problem is going to be outpaced by the kid who goes "9x8=72" from rote learning memory and moves on to do the rest of the test.
The first kid may understand the maths better, but won't score as high as "second kid completed all the questions in the time allotted".
It's not even clear that the first kid will in fact understand the mathematics better. There is a tendency in mathematics education to push learners to develop personal strategies to solve problems instead of teaching standard methods, based on the idea that teaching these standard methods can lead to learners being able to solve problems but without knowing what they're doing (being "mathematical zombies"), but what evidence there is actually appears to show that procedural and conceptual understanding in fact develop hand in hand. In other words, knowing how to solve a problem helps in understanding why the method works.
Evidence also appears to show that developing fluency in solving problems, which can be helped by learning standard techniques, is good for motivation.
Learning off times tables seems to be something that has been ditched in the name of the 'new maths' and that you want kids to understand from first principles how multiplication works. All I can say is that would never work for me and rote learning is the only way I survived.
I went to school in the days of corporal punishment, too 😁 And we too had a scary maths teacher (who didn't slap us but simply terrorised us by quiet aura of menace) and she dragged us through three years of maths in one year and we all passed our state exam, even me. So fear works!
But understanding is better. But rote learning is not the enemy, either.
Being able to do arithmetic like that used to be a useful and typical skill for shopkeepers. In Britain they even had to deal with a non decimal currency. I once found an old book in the library that explained how to learn it and contained exercises.
>There are plenty of stupid white kids, uninterested white kids, white kids who only want to play games, smoke weed, and watch porn all day. I can tell you that from experience.
So what?
The point is that on average, white american students outperform literally MOST of the world. The point is not that all white students are smart or all black students are dumb. But overall, American whites are better than most of the world and most of the apparent "failings" of american education lie in the underperformance of black and hispanic students.
>And I wonder about the Chinese system; testing well tells you nothing apart from "they use cram schools to tutor kids to do standardised tests".
The point is that whatever the Chinese education is doing, the practical reality is that it works! Not in the standardized test scores, but in the fact that the people educated by this system effected the rapid industrialization of a giant country. The practical outcomes of Chinese education are people capable of great things, and that's all that really matters.
"There are plenty of stupid white kids, uninterested white kids, white kids who only want to play games, smoke weed, and watch porn all day. I can tell you that from experience."
The fact you think this is relevant in any way is astounding.
"White people are taller than Asians on average" does NOT imply the non-existence of short whites or tall asians. But if we assembled basketball teams by randomly selecting from the general population asians for one team and whites for the other team, the white team being taller on average is going to explain much of why the white team does better than the asian team on average. Even IF some of the white players are shorter than some of the Asian players.
Every country has smart and dumb people. The average is the main thing that matters here.
"including the civic virtues you are trying to smuggle in, and kids who are going to have to go out into the world of work where it's not fun passion jobs but boring, grind jobs"
Civic virtues become surprisingly relevant after a few hard life experiences and if embedded in interesting, time-worn stories they'll stick in memory so the encapsulated advice will be readily available. Also helps with abstract thinking and understanding articles written by and for educated persons which are always chuck full of allusions. Then there's Egan's life skill training that few students wouldn't benefit from. The first subjects I'd suggest are financial literacy and meditation.
I've been completely convinced by Kmele Foster that looking at almost _anything_ through the lens of race obscures more than it reveals and whatever patterns you might find are almost definitionally spurious.
But ignoring that for a second, according to this review, Egan thinks that htis method would be beneficial across the intellectual spectrum, which was stated pretty clearly.
This whole comment reads like a screed that you felt like you could slot in seeing that this review was "about education", and so you felt no need to actually engage with what was being said at all. You mentioned Egan a few times, but didn't actually address anything said in this review, including the parts that actually are relevant.
Unfortunately I don't think he has collected his entire argument in a single place. He has had several discussions on the We the Fifth podcase with Coleman Hughes, Glenn Lowrey and others on the topic, so those might be helpful. I'll try to give my (very poor) summary, but there's a reason I'm just a consumer of content and not a generator, so please don't take this as the best version of this argument (or anything close to it).
At the very core, the main thing is that Kmele Foster is an individualist who believes that individual characteristics and differences are always going to be more important than _any_ group characteristics (race or otherwise). That, while someone may be a member of a multitude of groups, none of them come anywhere close to enclosing the totality of who a person is.
But even aside from that, I think what he would say about race specifically is that the way race is defined and used in actual cultural context, it _can not_ be the causal factor for _any_ of the things that people like to look at through the lens of race. Imagine some hypothetical "criminality" gene. It might be true that this gene is present in a higher percentage of one race than another. But the definition of race actually has nothing to do with this gene, and so there will be lots of members of a given race who _don't_ have it, and lots of members of the other that _do_. So when you start talking about how crime is higher in race x as if that is an explanation, you are actually hiding from yourself the underlying truth and preventing yourself from finding it.
This also of course ignores the fact that many of the statistics that show that "race x has more y when you control for z" are all kind of bullshit. How many times has Scott and others written about how _hard_ it is to _actually_ control for z? How many people who espouse these kinds of arguments would also probably talk a big game about the replication crisis, ignoring the fact that those kinds of "I controlled for z" studies are a _huge_ part of what has failed to replicate?
So to try and summarise:
1) The statistics showing that "race" has some differences are questionable and even when not, they ignore things like the fact that Eastern European whites are some of the lowest performing immigrants while Nigerian immigrants are some of the highest (which also shouldn't be taken as causative or that meaningful, just that you can find differences in racial groups/subgroups in almost any direction you want if you cherry pick)
2)Individual characteristics, situations, contexts, and histories are almost always more important
3) The actual definitions of race are such that race _can't_ be the true causal characteristic in any of these things and talking about it like it is prevents you from finding the real underlying reasons
I really wish that he had a centrally located thing I could link you to rather than saying "go listen to the last 5 years of We The Fifth podcasts", since that's a very unhelpful thing. He's talked about it on Twitter some, but that's not a very good venue for deep discussions, and I think it's the place where he usually makes the weakest case, thanks to the constraints of the platform.
You might get a sense of his arguments from these two podcasts, but even those won't be complete and aren't aimed _exactly_ at this idea, but it's probably the best I can give you unfortunately:
>At the very core, the main thing is that Kmele Foster is an individualist who believes that individual characteristics and differences are always going to be more important than _any_ group characteristics (race or otherwise). That, while someone may be a member of a multitude of groups, none of them come anywhere close to enclosing the totality of who a person is.
Nothing encloses the totality, but that's irrelevant! Sex doesn't explain the toality of an individual, but it's obviously absurd to ignore people's sex when analyzing society. This person just wants to treat race differently for ideological reasons.
Either we explain the world better using race, or not. And the data clearly, CLEARLY shows we do explain it better with race.
There's no way of making sense of the world, or even american society, by ignoring race except through an endless series of just so stories.
>It might be true that this gene is present in a higher percentage of one race than another. But the definition of race actually has nothing to do with this gene, and so there will be lots of members of a given race who _don't_ have it, and lots of members of the other that _do_.
It doesn't matter!
We're interested in explaining group differences.
If blacks commit more crime, and this difference can be significantly explained by the higher prevlance of these gene (or really, genes) in the black population, then that's all that matters!
No other individual factor explains why black people commit more crime or do worse in school, so by your own reasoning, all other explanations are necessarily invalid.
If we have to treat people only as individuals, then you do NOT get to complain that black people as a group make less money than whites, go to jail more than whites, get shot by police more than whites, or do worse by almost any socio-economic measure. If you endorse this view, then great. But saying race isn't a valid lens and then caring about race differences is simple having your cake and eating it too.
> So when you start talking about how crime is higher in race x as if that is an explanation, you are actually hiding from yourself the underlying truth and preventing yourself from finding it.
Cool, so let's get rid of separate men's and women's prisions. Sure, SOME of the men are more likely to commit sexual assault, and likely for biological reasons. But certainly not ALL of them. And since this fact is just an average and doesn't describe literally everyone at an individual level, it's completely invalid to treat men differently as a category.
This is the inescapable implication of your logic.
>This also of course ignores the fact that many of the statistics that show that "race x has more y when you control for z" are all kind of bullshit. How many times has Scott and others written about how _hard_ it is to _actually_ control for z?
Ah yes, the one edged sort of radical statistical skepticism. All things by out group belives in are "bullshit", everything my in group believes in is statistically sound.
>How many people who espouse these kinds of arguments would also probably talk a big game about the replication crisis, ignoring the fact that those kinds of "I controlled for z" studies are a
If we're going down this route, then we HAVE to throw out ALL claims about racial and seuxal inequality. You don't get to claim black people are discriminated against by anyone or anything, because statistics showing as such apaprently cannot be trusted. You cannot claim women are treated unfairly by anyone or anything, because 'muh replication crisis'.
Unless you have endorse literally no positive positions on any topic, you're trivially guilty here of making a fully general counterargument that can be turned on literally any and all beliefs that you hold.
>this person wants to treat race differently for ideological reasons
You probably shouldn't speak about people's opinions without knowing them
>We're interested in explaining group differences
No we aren't. _You_ are. I actually don't care what groups commit crime, for the reasons outlined up above. I do care about crime, and I'm interested in decreasing it. _Who_ is commiting that crime is completely irrelevant to me (other than the obvious "the person who commits a crime should be punished, I don't care what groups they were a part of).
You didn't really engage with anything I said (and furthermore assumed a bunch of things I didn't), and have made it clear that you aren't interested in having a good faith discussion about this. And even if you were, _I_ don't really feel like having one. I explained (to the best of my limited ability), the views of another person who has influence me. I don't care if you agree and I'm not interested in convincing you. I've heard all the stuff your spouting before and I find it vacuous.
I think part of the problem here is linguistic. You two are using "explain" in two different ways. Goldman Sachs Occultist is using it in a statistical way, as in, "The month of the year explains 60% of the temperature reading in Boston, Massachusetts. Knowing nothing other than the month, I can predict the temperature with 60% accuracy." DangerouslyUnstable says month doesn't explain anything at all. What actually causes the temperature is the length of the day and the angle of the sun and the temperature of the ocean and what happened in Ohio yesterday and a million other things. Some of those things, e.g. length of day and angle of sun, are correlated with month, but they are causal; month isn't.
Note the lack of overlap between groups - meaning one could achieve near-100% accuracy in predicting race (roughly defined as a genetic background tracing back to a particular historically geographically-isolated subgroup) based on DNA alone, indicating the biological reality of race.
Not just "genetic background" - rather "a genetic background tracing back to a particular historically geographically-isolated subgroup". By your DNA alone, I know the continent your ancestors are from. This means race is biologically real.
Genes are likely very important for all kinds of things such as criminality and educational attainment, and genes are, of course, somewhat correlated with race since race is to an incomplete degree (_very_ incomplete in some cases) tied to genetic background. But I still don't care about race itself. For one, everyone in this thread seems willing to admit (they just won't say the words) that _race_ is not the causal thing. It's merely correlated with the real causal thing. And knowing the correlation isn't helpful. It's not even actionable!
I'm more than willing to admit that race is _correlated_ with all kinds of things _I just don't care_. Knowing that it is correlated doesn't help me _do_ anything, and since I know it's not causal, it also doesn't help me understand the world better than me knowing that the real causal thing is genetic + environmental.
And race being correlated with genes does not mean it is, at it's core, a genetic category, because it's not. Many _many_ people would be socially and culturally labeled as one race or another and yet wouldn't be genetically identified into that group, and that's even completely ignoring how races change over time _much_ faster than genetics can explain (100 years ago Italians and Irish weren't "white" in the US at least). Not to mention the fact that I can almost guarantee you that almost any arbitrarily generated groups will have _some_ degree of genetic differentiation because there are so many genes that it's almost guaranteed to happen by chance for _any_ group. Nitters vs. Non-nitters, stand up comedians vs. dramatic actros, pick two groups, and throw enough genetic analysis at it and you will almost certainly find _some_ degree of imperfect correlation. Race is almost definitely higher than most, but now you've just set an arbitrary limit for what matters and what doesn't.
Probably the most important thing is that no one has _ever_ successfully shown me how knowing the correlational facts with race actually helps us solve any problems without descending into the kind of unconstitutional nation that I have no interest in living in. Some babies are absolutely not worth throwing out, no matter how dirty the bathwater.
The only thing it's ever used for is to argue _against_ certain progressive policies that I mostly already don't agree with for reasons that have nothing to do with race. It's a completely unnecessary piece of information.
My feeling on reading the review was that the author brought up race and the associated progressive talking points unnecessarily, when the ideas he's actually trying to get across are very clearly human universals and there was no need to mention race at all.
If you're going to pepper Tribe A points where they don't belong, it's not surprising that Tribe B should drive by and give you their riposte.
The review would have been better imo if this stuff had been left out, and it just focused on the more interesting human development ideas.
>I've been completely convinced by Kmele Foster that looking at almost _anything_ through the lens of race obscures more than it reveals and whatever patterns you might find are almost definitionally spurious.
That's simply, TRIVIALLY wrong.
NOTHING explains the variance in educational ability in the US as much as race.
Poor white kids do better than rich black kids in school. Black kids raised by white parents don't do radically better in school. Sending black kids to majority white schools or wealthier schools or private or otherwise highly selective schools does not radically improve their performance.
If you treat everyone as a great mass of individuals, you simply cannot explain why people with dark skin and kinky hair do so much worse in school than the pale kids.
Same with ALL race differences.
Black criminality cannot be explained by icnone, education, employment rate or anything else. If you assume that there are no essential differences between populations, black criminality is extremely anomalous and you're forced to rely on dataphobic just-so stories to explain it. Race literally explains more of the variance in criminality in the US than income, education and employment rates. So if it's not right to look at crime through the lens of race, then it's even less right to bring up income, education and employment!
There's simply no valid justification for ignoring race, which is commonly the most statistically relevant factor in these things, for reasons unrelated to egalitarian ideological aversion.
>You mentioned Egan a few times, but didn't actually address anything said in this review, including the parts that actually are relevant.
It's OBVIOUSLY relevant, because Egan thinks there's something wrong with the US education system. But if you control for blacks and hispanics, US students are amongst the best in the world. If he is incapable of accounting for this absolutely foundational fact, or explaining why blacks do so much worse in school than whites or asians, why the heck should we assume his theory has any validity whatsoever?
>But ignoring that for a second, according to this review, Egan thinks that htis method would be beneficial across the intellectual spectrum, which was stated pretty clearly.
If Egan cannot explain why black kids do so poorly in school today relative to other students, there's absolutely no reason to believe that his methods will do what all others have failed to do - improve black performance (regardless of whether it helps everyone else's performance or not).
> Why do you think there is a huge racial disparity if it’s not racism? What should be done to fix it?
Genetics are the cause. There's sadly not much we can do about it right now. Hopefully in the future our gene editing technology will improve. Though, at the rate we're going, we'll get AGI/ASI first. So, all bets are off as to how that will play out
I’m curious why you think it’s genetic. I also am very suspicious of attempts to reduce racial educational disparities to racism in schools, so I’m interested in how you came to your alternative.
Also, your alternative seems to imply that we write off educating non-Asian minorities… is that what you’re suggesting? Because it’s hard for me to imagine an argument for that that isn’t founded in racial supremacism.
First I'll start by noting that all manner of intelligence tests from standard IQ tests to scholastic standardized tests to military aptitude tests and including culture neutral tests like ravens progressive matrices have shown a persistent gap of approximately 1 SD between blacks and whites in the USA. The persistence of the gap across many tests and testing environments suggests that there is a real gap in intelligence and not merely a bias on one test.
Secondly I will note that studies on identical twins have shown a remarkably strong correlation between their IQs, even when adopted apart and raised in different families. And such studies have found weak to non-existent correlations between the IQs of genetically unrelated siblings raised in the same household. This suggests that intelligence is a higly genetic trait and while this alone does not prove that the black-white gap is genetic in origin (the variance between groups does not necessarily have the same cause as the variance within groups) it should set our priors such that this is not an implausible possibility.
Next we will look at transracial adoption studies, the most famous being the minnesota transracial adoption study. Such studies are the best way to equalize envornments. The monnesota transracial adoption study found a 17 point gap between the adopted white and adopted black participants when tested at 17. Not only did being raised in a white household not eliminate the IQ gap, it didn't even shrink it.
Another line of evidence is physiological, Blacks have less brain volume than whites and whites have less than asians. This is the same trend as IQ. Brain volume is not the same as intelligence but it does correlate positively with it.
Admixture studies present another line of evidence. DNA studies can reveal a persons admixture from different races and studies have shown that (with high individual variance of course) as percent black admixture increase, IQ decreases.
I will also point to the relative stabilty of the gap over the decades and the perpetual failure of liberal interventions to change it. Some may argue that racism is still prevalent today but few will argue that it is not greatly improved from 50 years ago and yet the black white IQ gap remains mostly unchanged. This is baffling from an environmental perspective but expected from a genetic perspective.
"This suggests that intelligence is a higly genetic trait and while this alone does not prove that the black-white gap is genetic in origin (the variance between groups does not necessarily have the same cause as the variance within groups) it should set our priors such that this is not an implausible possibility."
I disagree with this line of reasoning. I believe that intelligence is largely (though not wholly) genetic, but saying "some families are inherently smarter than others" is very different from saying "some races are inherently smarter than others," and I don't think the near-certain truth of former makes the latter any more likely.
If intelligence can vary wildly amongst people on the same ancestry with the same evolutionary history, why on earth would you expect this not to be true for people with entirely different evolutionary histories? Why would central Africa and North-East Asia just happen to select for exactly identical distributions of intelligence potential? Suggesting it would is a very extraordinary claim.
Brain volume is a terrible measure; it was often used to 'prove' women were naturally stupider than men because we have smaller brains. Then there was adjustment for relative size which 'proved' men and women have the same size brains.
Brain volume in animals also suffers the same problems. Bigger may indeed mean better, or it may not.
I'm tempted to quote Belloc here again, so here goes:
"All agree that our characters and actions proceed from a cephalic index, and all are agreed upon the relative value of the three main races of Europe.
PS — To my correspondent ‘Tiny,’ who has also given no address, I must reply in this brief postscript. No, the facial angle, as measured from the point of the chin tangentially, the parietal curve of the forehead, and from the cusp of the left nostril to the base of the corresponding ear-lobe, is no longer the criterion of character. I thought I had made that plain. Thirty-five years ago, when I was a boy, all scientists were agreed that the facial angle was the one certain and only test of moral attitude and intellectual power; but that opinion is now universally abandoned, and the facial angle is replaced by the cephalic index."
Brain volume is correlated with intelligence in humans, even within race. Size of brain sub-units are even more strongly with intelligence. You've done nothing to demonstrate otherwise. Calling it "terrible" isn't an argument.
You're literally saying that men and women have the same relative size, which doesn't prove brain size doesn't matter. Asians are smaller on average than Africans and have larger brains in absolute terms, so what (supposedly) happened with men and women cannot possibly be used to explain away racial differences, because it objectively isn't what is happening here.
And brain size isn't used to "prove" that one group is smarter than another. It is used to explain WHY groups are smarter than others. If blacks and whites were equally intelligent on all ways of reliably measuring intelligence, brain size differences wouldn't matter.
Comparisons between species obviously don't work, but they don't need to! There just has to be a relationship between brain size and intelligence within humans, and that's all that matters.
On the issue of male vs female brain size, you're about 30 years behind on the state of intelligence research: it is the well-established scientific consensus that women have *relatively* smaller brains than men, not just smaller brains in absolute terms. Studies doing such 'adjustments' used the flawed adjustment method of simply comparing the average man's brain/body ratio to the average woman's brain/body ratio, but of course men have larger bodies than women, so what they really must compare is the brain/body ratio of men and women at every level of body size:
> Ankney (1992) suggested that the large sex difference in brain size went unnoticed for so long because earlier studies used improper statistical techniques to correct for sex differences in body size and thus incorrectly made a large difference “disappear.” The serious methodological error was the use of brain mass/body size ratios instead of analysis of covariance (see Packard & Boardman, 1988). Ankney (1992) illustrated why this is erroneous by showing that, in both men and women, the ratio of brain mass to body size declines as body size increases. Thus, as can be seen in Figure 2, larger women have a lower ratio than smaller women, and the same holds for larger men compared with smaller men. Therefore, because the average-sized man is larger than the average-sized woman, their brain mass to body size ratios are similar. Consequently, the only meaningful comparison is that of brain mass to body size ratios of men and women of equal size. Such comparisons show that at any given size, the ratio of brain mass to body size is much higher in men than in women (Figure 2).
No, really. But if we're going to pretend that all populations are equally capable of intelligence, the burden falls on people like Egan to explain why education systems so alien to what he's proposing are able to generate real world results that are so incredible compared to most of the world.
> 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
Worth noting here that the Chinese economy is the worst-performing of any majority-Chinese country (Compare Taiwan, HK or Singapore - they all have other advantages like being heavily urbanized, but you at least can't take Chinese economic performance as positive evidence in itself).
> If he bit the bullet and said that race differences are mostly inherent but my methods will help everyone
Seems like he mostly does (except obviously he can't say this explicitly for culture war reasons).
>Worth noting here that the Chinese economy is the worst-performing of any majority-Chinese country
Yes, and this is obviously a result of decades of CCP eocnomic mismanagement. As soon as this was removed, growth was rapid but obviously can't catch up to e.g. Singapore overnight. And these economic changes were accompanied by educational changes, so there's no conceivable way of blaming China's lack of growth pre-Deng on the current educational system. Also worth pointing out Singapore doesn't have a third of their population living in rural areas so of course it's going to be easier to have a modern economy all things being equal.
And in any case, it's irrelevant! None of these countries, or Japan or South Korea, have the kind of educational system that Egan supports. South Korea is known for having an extremely demanding, even crushing, educational system that is anathema to liberal educational therorists. But in all cases, it works. It produces people capable of rapidly building modern economies.
" so there's no conceivable way of blaming China's lack of growth pre-Deng on the current educational system"
I thought your argument was that the educational system didn't matter, it was the inherent superiority of the vastly more intelligent Chinese brain that was - how did you put it? - "able to generate real world results that are so incredible compared to most of the world".
Now somehow it's 'the vastly superior Chinese brains of the leaders somehow stumbled due to Communism and poor previous educational systems".
In other words, the vastly superior Chinese only started catching up when they adopted some at least of the economic system created by the inferior stupid Western whites? That is, emulation rather than origination is behind the Chinese success story?
Yeah....so what? The world doesn't need more Socrates, it needs industrialization and technological development. The problem facing Chad and Sierra Leone are not a lack of Socrates. If Africa could experience even half the development that China has in the past 40 years, this would be one of the most profound improvements in human wellbeing in history. And Socrates wouldn't be able to fix climate change or AI risks or prevent engineered pandemics.
I'll give some credit to Socrates: his academic lineage included both Aristotle & Alexander. But that's him as a starting point rather than an ideal. I don't think an Alexander will be permitted in Africa though, so instead Paul Kagame will just do what he can in Rwanda while the rest of the continent is deprived the cultural group selection which fractious Europe underwent through centuries of warfare.
"The problem facing Chad and Sierra Leone are not a lack of Socrates."
They fucking well are, boo. The problems hobbling Africa are not lack of natural resources, it's endemic tribal warfare and wholesale corruption once the new warlord kicks out the old warlord and gets his grubby mitts on the treasury.
An African Socrates who can break down the traditional "this group are my tribe and I'll do anything for them including doing down that group who are not my tribe, even if they happen to live next door to me" attitudes and get people thinking of themselves first as Sierra Leoneans and not as lining up for a civil war, and get the police to act as the guardians of the public peace and not as "yippee, now I can brutalise the civilian population for fun and profit", there will be a lot more improvement in life rather than "another foreign company bought mineral rights at a knock-down price":
"Sierra Leone's economic development has always been hampered by an overdependence on mineral exploitation. Successive governments and the population as a whole have always believed that "diamonds and gold" are sufficient generators of foreign currency earnings and lure for investment.
As a result, large scale agriculture of commodity products, industrial development and sustainable investments have been neglected by governments. The economy could thus be described as one which is "exploitative" - a rentier state - and based upon the extraction of unsustainable resources or non-reusable assets."
>An African Socrates who can break down the traditional "this group are my tribe and I'll do anything for them including doing down that group who are not my tribe, even if they happen to live next door to me" attitudes and get people thinking of themselves first as Sierra Leoneans and not as lining up for a civil war, and get the police to act as the guardians of the public peace and not as "yippee, now I can brutalise the civilian population for fun and profit"
How would an "African Socrates" help with any of this? I don't think Socrates was ever known for resolving disputes between feuding tribes or reforming corrupt political institutions. Did you mean an African Confucius?
I've read about something important being lost as a result of integrating schools-- segregated schools had black teachers who believed it was urgent and quite possible for black children to be well-educated.
Integration meant that black children were transferred to white teachers who were hostile to them, or who "kindly" believed they couldn't learn.
I grant that all I've got is anecdotes, but it seems rather plausible.
I've heard John McWhorter give this as one of the reasons why many African Americans are hostile to schooling and view it as "acting white". When schools were integrated, many black kids ended up with racist teachers who told them in no uncertain terms that schooling was not for them, and they ended up integrating that idea.
That was a long time ago. If students were taught that then, they're not taught that now, so it can't explain present black underperformance.
And guess what? When surveyed, black parents are more likely than white parents to say that they want their children to go to college. This demonstrates that there hasn't been some kind of 'anti-education' culture formed in the black community.
What parents want and what your peers want are two different things. If you're in a class predominated by a small but troublemaking minority who will kick the shit out of you for "acting white" and being a teacher's pet swot, then all the urging by Mom and Dad that you should go to college won't stand up against "but I don't want to be beaten black and blue for answering a question in class".
And it doesn't explain why Asians have done so well in American education. They didn't have asian teachers for the most part, and nobody assumed they were smart until they had actually demonstrated they were smart. The liberal idea that they were positively stereotyped from day one is ahistorical nonsense, and also contradicts other liberal points about 'racism' being directed as Asians in the past.
If we're going to take this seriously, we need actual studies. You need to show black students do better with black teachers, and you need to control for their initial academic ability to make sure their performance isn't simply explained by being an unrepresentative sample of black american students.
This is about black teachers with a particular goal, not just having black teachers in general.
McWhorter (and, I think Loury and possibly Hughes) argue that social justice has been encouraging black people to give up because their problems are entirely caused by racism.
"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."
But he *did* say that his methods will help everyone. He didn't explicitly bring up race, but he said that his methods would help both high-performing and low-performing students. That's the whole point of the "rising tide lifts all ships" metaphor. If you believe that children from certain demographic groups tend to be lower-performing students, then it logically follows that "it will help everyone, regardless of race" is implicit in his statement. (Surely someone with an intellect as advanced as yours is capable of understanding basic syllogisms! I'm sure you can guess the color of the bears in Novaya Zemlya.)
Your comment adds nothing to this discussion, because even if we took all of your claims at face value, it still wouldn't make a difference here. It seems more like you simply wanted an excuse to bring up your favorite debate topic, regardless of whether it was actually relevant.
Egan points to statistics to claim Americans are dumb and ties this to their education. If you only look at white and asian americans, americans are smarter than the majority of people in the world. Therefore, Egan's claims about America's educational outcomes are extraordinarily misleading.
>but he said that his methods would help both high-performing and low-performing students.
There is zero evidence to support this. No method has been able to reliably improve black educational performance, so we should be extraordinarily skeptical of any claims that some new intervention will.
In the spirit of testing whether "Without non-asian minorities, America produces extremely capable highschool graduates compared to the rest of the world."
I didn't realize there was one, I may go back and look for it.
As a book review, this wasn't particularly useful. I think there is a certain trend among book reviews to try to be entertaining in and of themselves (both here, and in the ACX book review contests) rather than to seek to be good book reviews.
Do I want to read this book? What do I know about it? What was it about? Well, I know it's about this guy's thoughts on education, and he has some kind of thesis about it, which I have now learned from Wikipedia. This reviewer coyly hid the information I needed deep in a very long review. Entertaining, I am sure, for the vast majority of readers, but not useful for me.
It sounds like you already knew whether you wanted to read the book based on the title. If you thought, “Maybe, lots of education books are bad but this one might be good”, this sort of review would have helped a lot in making that judgement.
I get the point you're making. I'm not claiming the review, if read in total, contained no information useful to me. Also, it's true that I did in fact learn whether I wanted to read the book based on reading the wikipedia article, and this review did inspire me to look that up. The very presence of this review means that the book was at least interesting to someone, etc etc. In fact, I did benefit from this review existing, as it inspired me to look into things.
However, it would also be nice if I benefited from the actual content of the review, and it wasn't an incredible slog to read with the thesis/lede buried way down behind thousands of words. In this regard, the book review was quite unuseful. It wasn't of zero use, and it's true that I could have gotten more use out of it by reading it in its entirety, but the structure of the review itself is very bad and time-wasting.
That’s fair in some ways. I thought the main point of the book was the specific techniques it recommended, not its underlying theory. It’s really hard to judge a theory about education by listening to it. I’d rather see whether it advocated for some things I already agreed with, but wasn’t aware of explicitly or hadn’t heard good theoretical arguments for. I thought the underlying framework which the reviewer considered the point of the book was the weakest part of the theory, and I would have dismissed the book much more if I hadn’t already read the advice, which served as evidence.
Long, but also very self-conscious, or self-satisfied, in a way that quickly began to irritate me. I want to say "fourth wall breaking" maybe.
It felt like the author was trying to waste my time in the same way those empty marketing blog posts do, when they have one useful thing to say but make you read through a million "are you prepared to hear this" lines first.
If you're the author reading this then there's your feedback on writing style. But I actually stuck it out and read the whole thing cause I'm very interested in the topic - so thanks for introducing me to Egan's ideas.
> It felt like the author was trying to waste my time in the same way those empty marketing blog posts do
I described this as "gently manipulative" elsewhere and stand by it. It's not terrible, but it compounds over a large article like this, and I eventually resorted to skim-reading. I liked the subject, so I feel a bit bad about the skim-reading, but I've found many of the comments here enlightening, which helped fill in the 'blanks'.
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?
You have hit on something important: There is an emphasis on age cohort continuity in education; I suppose it comes from an emphasis on the socialization aspect of education. It wasn't always quite so pronounced. I remember a mustachioed fifth-grader with whom I had a couple of (losing) playground altercations. The entire grade promotion scheme deserves to be re-examined. Some sort of certification process for basic skills seems somehow more appropriate, rather than stranding creative writers in waters over their heads in mathematic instruction ( and vice-versa). I tend to think that the objective skills and social acclimatization parts of education probably should be at least mostly decoupled. Everybody likes story-time, but calculus is another matter.
Yeah. I went to CTY camps a few times as a kid, and one summer I did the “Individually Paced Math Sequence”. There was a lot of self-study, but they also had group activities where we did different types of math puzzles, learned about fractals, and did various other stuff that wasn’t directly related to the math we were studying (since, even though we were all advanced in math, there was a variety of levels represented in exactly what we were doing).
I often think about that summer and wonder if school in general could be more like that: learning at your own pace and then also coming together for other activities, a sense of community, and that sort of thing.
For a long time I've thought that standardized academic tests ought to be organized more like scout merit badges, rather than grade-level advancement gatekeeping. Prove your competence in a particular specialized skill, gain permission to display the corresponding iconic trinket as part of a larger collection. Centralized list of nationally accredited intellectual achievements could help ignorant or disoriented aspirants understand more clearly what they're missing, where to start. Existing experts designing the test could be set up with intrinsically balanced incentives to make it neither too easy (lest they end up surrounded by fools) nor too difficult (lest they exclude enough worthy contributors to trigger a schism).
Also probably unclog a lot of artificial scarcity, and provide definitive rebuttal to various perennial anti-intellectual talking points:
"Anyone could do that!" Well where's your badge, then? Just walk in and take the test cold (if you're not a liar and/or coward). Easier to find excuses for dodging multi-year commitment than a mere wasted afternoon.
"Buncha ivory-tower bullshit, no practical use!" Any given certification being pass / fail would make it easy to compare side-by-side salary data for arbitrary combinations, rather than getting caught up in blurry issues of scores and correlation. If an employment sector simply refuses to hire anyone lacking some particular set of relevant badges, that's even clearer.
A lot of the issues I had with my schooling, looking back, relate not to what I was taught, but to my feeling now it was too stressful and uselessly so. I went to the kind of high school where students came to school sick because missing anything just made everything harder. Once I was ill for ten days and my grades dropped because I had to make up all the work I missed before the end of the semester and I couldn’t do it as well as I would have ordinarily. Looking back that seems a completely inappropriate way to treat a 15 year old.
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?
Aside from a few technical aspects, young children aren't actually better than adults at learning languages. They just don't have other things that they need to be doing. If you spent 80 hours every week doing nothing but learning Mandarin Chinese for three years, you'd probably be at least as good as a three-year-old native speaker. :P
Speaking as someone who was taught French for ten years, Spanish for three, and can speak a LOT more Spanish, I think you are basically right.
The problem, IMO, is that understanding how to speak a language you don't already speak means you need to know what a verb is and what conjugating is and things like that (bar immersing the kid). And that is stuff that makes a LOT more sense when you're a little bit older (French class became a LOT easier once English class got around to teaching us what verbs and nouns and such were. To be fair, given how shocked our English teacher was, I think someone had been supposed to teach us much earlier).
Learning to think in another language is, I think, something more easily done when you are slightly older but not too old - you have enough abstract understanding you can do it, but you understand things well enough you keep the languages more or less straight and don't accidentally create a creole. I can think in Spanish to some extent, but not in French yet, and I think a lot of that is that I understand how the language actually works, so I know what I'm doing with it, whereas with French I am largely mashing words together in 1:1 correspondence with English.
Of course, it helps that Spanish is to some extent "French, but if someone made it make sense and people were a bit more relaxed about it."
"French class became a LOT easier once English class got around to teaching us what verbs and nouns and such were."
My experience was similar but also the exact opposite. When I started taking French (in 8th grade) I only vaguely knew what nouns, verbs, etc., were. Studying French taught me to understand the grammar part of my English classes better.
I have studied various modern languages with reasonable success but Latin I found very frustrating, because the word order in any classical text seems so convoluted.
I remember some online debate about whether classicists can fluently read classical Latin texts they have never seen before.
My experience has been that Latin is easier to learn but Greek is easier to *read*, for precisely this reason--Greek authors rarely play these sorts of ridiculous syntax games.
I think to the extent that 'nonconfigurationality' actually exists, literary classical Latin is a prime example. The sort of nonsense that produces *saevae memorem Iunonis ob iram* isn't found in most other Old World languages, although it's surprisingly common in North America.
Like attracts like I think. Scott is routinely accused of verbosity, but he's also engaging in a way very few other comparably verbose writers are, which makes reading his posts not feel as drawn-out an experience.
Right, this was a stellar topic and written well, but I just want these book reviews entries overall to be shorter. I think it would be helpful if Scott, next year, reminded entrants that they are under no obligation to try and hit the post lengths he often goes to.
I don't know. I think the longer-form essay is kind of falling out of favor because it's harder to monetize in the Internet era, but there's no reason it's inherently wrong, and it can explore things in more depth.
This essay is about 5 times longer than it should be. It’s inane length and it’s insistence on waiting for what feels like (and possibly is!) 3000 words before telling you the main argument of the book is just sloppy writing. Sloppy writing reflects sloppy thinking. Which is also evident in the summary section whose length leads me to believe that the author does not know what the word “Summary” means...
If you can’t properly summarize the argument of a book you are reviewing, then you don’t understand it well enough to review.
I checked. It's over *Fifteen Thousand* words before we finally find the buried lede. The review is over 23,000 words total, close to five thousand of which is "summary".
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.
"Unless you have from the moment the child is born an individual education plan..."
Interestingly, you have just described my son. He was about 30 minutes old when my wife looked up at me and said, "Oh, honey, by the way, we are home-schooling." I appreciated the warning as it gave me a few years to prepare :-)
The upshot of this, however, was not what I expected. My wife and I are more academic then our son was ... we got a child who REALLY cared about sports, and, specifically, baseball.
Also, our homeschooling wasn't based on test scores. Our child didn't get grades nor did he get assessements ... we just kept working on a given topic until we were happy with it OR decided to put things on hold and return in a few months/years.
On the whole, I think things turned out pretty well -- though NOT as I expected.
Child grew up reading and continued to do so as an adult.
Child grew up with an appreciation of good/okay/acceptable/trash literature and ... maintained it as an adult, though the interest in sports dominated.
Child ... you can fill in the blanks.
Assume we raised a well adjusted to the "real world" child who could get along with lots of different people (what, no 'socialization' issues???), was moderately interested in the world around him, appreciated some bits of learning that most other kids avoid like the plague (e.g. shakespeare) and had a reasonable model for how the world worked (thing economics, physics, etc.).
What I DON'T see is how to SCALE this :-(
And it doesn't necessarily produce savants. My child has strengths, and is okay academically (can, for example, make it through a mid-tier University of California education, though not in math/physics/engineering) but isn't going to change the world. Still, I'm happy with how his education turned out and think it was better than mine. But, again, I don't see how this scales.
Do you wish he turned out a little more academically inclined like you and your wife? I'm at that age where I'm thinking of having children, and this consideration stops me in my tracks. I'm not expecting them to be carbon copies of me, I suppose I'm just concerned they'll turn out so different it'll lead to incomprehension and then suffering.
Note: I'm not using academic as a synonym for "smart," but mean something like, "finds spending time on a computer or in a library (or in a lab) trying to understand something" to be a good use of time. An example would be pulling all the California monthly mortality death counts for the past 20 years to try to get a handle on how severe Covid actually was. I did that. My wife and son would not (and did not).
But to answer this: "Do you wish he turned out a little more academically inclined like you and your wife?"
No.
With, as always, some caveats :-)
With "all things being the same" then the answer is, "Yes, of course." But all things WON'T be the same and if he had been more academically focused then he'd have been less focused on something else. Paul Graham has a good essay titled "Why Nerds are Unpopular" and points out in it that the popular kids *work* hard at being popular and while the nerds would like to be popular they aren't willing to spend less time working on being smart. As always, the tradeoffs matter.
So, if nothing had to be given up I'd prefer my child (and myself!) to be more academic. And better at languages. And more well read. And lots of other things :-)
But that isn't how the world works and I'm very happy how things turned out.
"...I suppose I'm just concerned they'll turn out so different it'll lead to incomprehension and then suffering."
I think it depends on how willing you are to be flexible for your kid. Lots of parents are willing to be quite flexible ... because it is YOUR kid. An example: *I* grew up knowing about baseball and even having a vague sense of how the local Major League team was doing but other than that paid very little attention. My *child* (and this has to be genetic ...) grew up with a MASSIVE fascination in sports. So, starting when he was six, the family went to a LOT of minor league baseball games (20+ per year for a while). It was fun. It didn't have to be fun, but my wife and I tried to make it fun for ourselves and that turned out well [imagine me name dropping a bit about players we met while in the minor leagues who then made it to the major leagues and still remembered us as an example of 'turned out well.' It is fun to see a young kid who you watched in the minor leagues 'make it']
The upshot was that as parents we nudged him to pay attention to what we thought was important and we accepted his interests as valid and tried to support him with those. Which meant that he grew up watching old (1920s - 1960s) movies on the big screen at our local retro-theater and he grew up reading a lot of "literature" and we spent a lot of time at Little League baseball games and at other activities he enjoyed. My life (and my wife's life) is richer because of this widening of experience. Seriously, it is.
It *IS* possible for kids to be so different that you just don't know what to do with them. I expect that this is more likely true for adopted kids (for the obvious reason) and for kids with 'issues' such as extreme autism. But in our case the different-ness of our child from ourselves was wide enough to be massively fun and interesting but not so wide as to be a problem. I'm *guessing* that this is more common than the "incomprehension and suffering" outcome but ... having children is giving hostages to fate.
I think having kids is usually a good idea, but the outcome isn't guaranteed.
Yes, it's so adorably naive that people still have this attitude that we're one weird trick away from finally unlocking humanity's true potential through wonders of public education. What's their evidence, I wonder? I skimmed the (overlong) review, but this question didn't seem to be addressed.
Well, I buy that improving the status quo somewhat on the margin might be feasible, but that's a vastly weaker claim, and even that doesn't have much evidence, as the reviewer pointed out, to his/her credit. I guess there's a thematic continuity with Scott's previous post, about propaganda making grand claims untethered from reality in service of trying to move the needle in a hopefully better direction.
All the new systems seem much better than the existing alternatives, be it Waldorf or Montessori or the 'students run the school' systems.
Until you try scaling them up.
When you have a small group of selected kids with enthusiastic teachers and no outside pressures, then of course it works great to produce the 'hungry to talk to us about what they were learning' kiddies. All teaching of young children generally goes great up till about seven or so, because it's easy (relatively) to teach kids at that stage of development as you're teaching them the basics and nobody expects them to have a deep understanding. They can as easily learn about Ancient Greece as to tie their shoelaces because it's all being learned for the first time then.
As they get older, as you do need depth and learning to work hard and concentrate, as different abilities and interests in the characters of the kids show through, as they start becoming individuals (which includes hitting the sulky, stroppy teenage years) it gets harder. Especially because what do we want schools to do? What is the purpose of modern education?
We have a host of conflicting demands on schools - they have to be babysitters as well as turning out kids who will be the next Steve Jobs because business wants and government wants critical-thinking entrepreneurs who can work in tech and earn high salaries to be highly taxed.
Not every kid is going to be the next Steve Jobs. But schools are supposed to make sure the variable input they get turns out on a particular model of output.
And as the economy gets more stratified into "if you want a good job, you need to work in these areas, and to work in these areas you need these skills or abilities", we are putting pressure on schools to produce that. And nobody can fail. And we must tackle systemic oppression. And nurture creativity. And turn out law-abiding model citizens who will vote and participate in democracy. And whether you're from the hood or Beverley Hills, you must have the same outcome of equity and advance into the ranks of the middle class.
And all that has to be done at scale, on a one-size-fits-all model, with money pumped in but nobody knowing what it's doing or if it's doing anything. Freddie deBoer writes a lot about it.
Give me a couple of million to spend on the project, a picked handful of inner city ghetto youth ages four to six, split them off from their parents and home environment, give me twenty or so hippy-dippy teachers, and let me cocoon them in my purpose built schooling pod, and I'll give you Egan kids.
Try that model on the public school with about 400 students of all ages, abilities, developmental and behavioural problems *not* cut off from home and neighbourhood, and see how well it works out.
So how can we reliably produce "smart, sensitive, informed, interested, curious, inventive and productive citizens," if not through education? Do you think it's simply impossible?
I think that it's very very difficult to scale this up so that *every* child will tick all the boxes of what we want, and that we don't really know what the hell we want out of education.
The basic fundamentals should be "reading, writing, arithmetic" but we also want schools to teach kids to (for one instance) love Pride Month and all that entails. We want social engineering, and to overcome racism and prejudice, and to be a place to park the kids while the parents are at work during the day, and to teach them to be good citizens, and the notion of a what a 'good citizen' is wavers all over the place, and ninety other things.
All must go on to college because college education gives you the middle class life, but (1) production of excess college graduates flattens that 'good salary lifestyle' because now with a wider labour pool of skilled workers, employers don't have to pay as highly as when there is a limited pool and (2) we're being told automation is coming for your job anyway.
"What do we want from education?" is the first question to be decided, long before we get to "and how do we get it?"
I think it is possible within certain limits. For example, producing smart citizens is limited by their IQ.
You can provide great education for the most intelligent ones. You can try to teach the simple facts (such as: the Earth rotates around the Sun) to the average ones. And I suppose you can teach some practical skills to the dumbest ones.
But this already means three different ways of education, and if you try to design one way that fits all, you will fail.
Similarly, some people are curious by nature, and an optimal education for them could be something like "answer all their questions, and occasionally introduce them to new topics". Other people are passive, you need to make a checklist for the knowledge you want to push into them; better make it short.
I guess I am trying to say that we could find good solutions for individual students, the problem is how to make it scale. (Similarly to medicine: we could heal almost every individual human, the question is how to make the system work for millions of humans.)
That felt like a weak point of the thesis to me, but many/most of the specific suggestions about teaching seemed like good ideas being clearly described, and getting plausible justifications.
So you're saying that because there's no educational ideal, there can be no improvements to be found in our methods of education? That seems like a pretty extreme position.
No, I am not saying that. I am saying "Our pilot programme with thirty hand-picked kids from enthusiastically supportive families, guided by twenty freshly-minted teachers and with visits by experts from art to science, in a purpose-built location with no disruptive, poor, or disabled kids, worked beautifully. I see no problems in scaling this up to hundreds of thousands of kids of all abilities, problems, economic backgrounds, in schools all over the nation as presently constituted!" is probably not likely to work.
I trudged through the comments to ensure that someone pointed this out, and here it is.
We have two-hundred odd countries, some of them hosting multiple education systems, that have been running schools for the masses for decades or centuries. Each of them has its boffins coming up with the latest whiz-bang idea that's going to turn every kid into a creative genius. Absurd amounts of money get thrown into these schemes, often when there's a change of government.
To be fair, some of these reforms are good. Some ways of teaching are more effective or promote a more independent mindset.
However, none of these new ideas live up to the hype.
That this review won first prize suggests that Astral readers in general are poor noticers. Smart, sure, but given there's a new story in the media every month about a school that's pioneered some amazing new approach that's going to revolutionize everything and solve all the world's problems, a story that is never followed up on, it seems they only have good pattern recognition for the material that's in the textbook, not that which is in front of their (our?) noses.
The biggest problem with every new theory is - well, let me rephrase, because there is more than one problem.
(1) Scaling up. Proof-of-concept project works great for anything up to 100 kids in the special environment of the testing grounds. Making that work for hundreds to thousands of kids, of all ages and ability range, all over the country/countries, is a horse of a different colour, particularly when you get the government, curriculum experts, teachers unions, parents, and all other stakeholders sticking their oar in about what they want to achieve. Freddie deBoer, because he's been up the sharp end, knows how shiny theories work out in practice and I think he's none too gruntled about the latest paedagogic revolution that comes down the pike on a regular schedule.
(2) Following on from the above - let's be brutally blunt here. This kind of creative learning notion works best in small numbers of self-directed, bright, interested kids who want to learn and would be doing a lot of extra-curricular reading on all topics, where the pressure of exam results and hitting the national goalpost markers for achievement isn't the driver of teaching, and there are supportive, involved parents who have the money and more importantly the ability to help the kids learn and give them a stable, comfortable, dependable home environment where they have access to learning materials if they want or need them.
That part about the parents is vital. Poor parents can be involved, interested and supportive, but when you have a parent who has poor literacy and maybe left school early, there's only so much they can do to help the kid with homework, how to find answers to questions, and general awareness of how the bureaucracy and form-filling of the world works. I'm going to spill the beans on family history here, but my late father was not stupid, was interested in maths, and had no idea how compound interest worked because he had to leave school at twelve to start work to help his family. So here's me at age twelve, having just learned this in school, trying to explain to my own father why there was one more payment left on that loan and that is why the bank was sending reminder letters that he had not, in fact, paid it off in full. That's what I mean about "lack of supportive environment" - not even active abuse, just lack of capacity.
So yeah - the guy may be claiming that this is only a suggestion, isn't the One Weird Trick solution, and is something to run alongside conventional education system, but by God am I fed up with "the new maths/new reading/new teaching" styles that have come along all through the years.
This is not to say that there was no value in them, or that the old ways didn't need to be changed, but in some cases it's like the pendulum has swung too far the other way. I learned to read before ever I started school, and I can only thank God this happened, because if I were one of the experimental animals for the new system of the day, I'd never have learned a thing. EDIT: And I say this because the "new maths" was just in swing at the period I was learning, so the styles switched over, and I hadn't a clue. The teachers hadn't a clue because this was a new system they had to learn instead of how they themselves were taught. I was already bad at maths, and this put the kibosh on any chance I had of learning and understanding, because all the "learn from first principles, let the kids discover themselves the underlying principles, away with rote memorisation!" worked if you had an instinctive grasp of mathematics. I didn't. I needed rote memorisation and to have the entire thing explained to me.
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.
Agreed. It connotes “lol nothing matters and everything is meaningless and if you disagree you’re a dumb idiot lololol” in a way that’s neither helpful nor useful.
I wasn't too pleased with Egan's valorization of Socrates. (I think it was Egan's and not the review author's.) Socrates, or at least the one I found in the dialogues of plato that I've read, was a jerk.
Maybe I'd except the Socrates in the Apology and the one in whatever dialogue where his friends try to convince him to escape.
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.
Stripping branches to use to get termites out to eat? If I'm remembering right? Got to look that one up:
"In Gombe National Park in 1960, Jane Goodall observed a chimpanzee, David Greybeard, poking pieces of grass into a termite mound and then raising the grass to his mouth. After he left, Goodall approached the mound and repeated the behaviour because she was unsure what David was doing. She found that the termites bit onto the grass with their jaws. David had been using the grass as a tool to "fish" or "dip" for termites. Soon after this initial discovery of tool use, Goodall observed David and other chimpanzees picking up leafy twigs, stripping off the leaves, and using the stems to fish for insects. This modification of a leafy twig into a tool was a major discovery: previously, scientists thought that only humans made and used tools, and that this was what separated humans from other animals.
Other studies of the Gombe chimps show that young females and males learn to fish for termites differently. Female chimps learn to fish for termites earlier and better than the young males. Females also spend more time fishing while at the mounds with their mothers—males spend more time playing. When they are adults, females need more termite protein because with young to care for, they cannot hunt the way males can."
I don't know if you'd class that as learning by observation, or as chimpanzee mothers teaching their daughters how to do it?
As far as we know, the mothers don't do any sort of "look at me; now try it yourself; no, you're doing it wrong; watch closely as I do it slowly." They just do it and let the young watch. Young chimps also watch other young chimps.
My bias is to believe that "this is what makes us human as opposed to animals" claims are almost always not central to the main point under discussion, even if the claim is true.
Of course, if the point under discussion is "what makes us human as opposed to animals, then I suppose the claim is central.
Yeah, this was a glaring error. (And an completely unnecessary one, "this is just what all animals do" would make for a much better argument for the point that section was trying to make.)
I expect the author to be reading the comments (I know I would), so the following is directed at him:
As a general rule, "we often imagine that language is the trait that sets us apart from the animals" because it is the sole trait that, empirically, sets us apart from the animals. (And not even in the "no animal ever could" sense. They do represent concepts with symbols in the wild. Upon encountering humans and their languages, some can even learn to string symbols together into meaningful sequences - to a very limited degree that nevertheless requires, and demonstrates, the ability to understand semantic and grammatical relationships between them. But the chasm is obvious - for them, it's an uphill battle to grasp and reproduce even a very small fraction of a fundamentally alien system that all but the most developmentally deprived human use naturally and spontaneously.) For anything else one could think of as exclusively human - complex societies, tool use, planning, coordination, whatever - there's probably already a mountain of evidence somewhere of apes/birds/elephants/octopuses doing it. And this just makes the absence of language use all the more striking.
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.
I don't think that's how Chesterton's Fence works. If the existing institution works the way it does for actual reasons, but they're immoral reasons, then it's right to change it.
> 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.
Is there any evidence that smarter or more educated people are more likely to rebel? The 'educated' are already at the top of society anyway and have no reason to rebel. In Mao's China, the commoners and peasants engaged in mass slaughter of the educated class. Education is also highly correlated with conformity and negatively correlated with things like impulsivity, violence, and tendency to commit crimes, all of which would predispose one to rebellion.
> 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?
This statement is incoherent. A "society" cannot have a "purpose," since it is not an entity in itself, it is an abstraction. Abstractions cannot have intentions; they are not people.
Without your abstractions, the weakness of your argument becomes clear here. What exactly is being claimed - that teachers being bad at teaching arithmetic and basic grammar is due to... "a conspiracy of billionaire elites trying to keep the people precisely smart enough to do basic jobs, but not smart enough to rebel..." ? How would that possibly work in reality? What precise mechanisms are these billionaires using to achieve this?
> keep our human environment working with electricity, food, roads, planes, and luxury goods
The horror! Those evil billionaires providing needs and wants for people!
> Before you go educating the masses, have you considered how they might revolt or demand better wages?
That's not how economics works - people already implicitly "demand" better wages by working for whoever is willing to pay them the most. Companies are then forced to compete with each other for access to the best talent, paying workers higher and higher wages up to the point at which they are no longer net-profitable to the company, i.e. their cost is higher than their value. "Demanding" higher wages in the literal sense - just throwing a temper tantrum and demanding more money despite not providing any more value - could not possibly actually increase people's real wages, because their current market wage is already the most that any company is willing to pay them given the value that they provide. They won't just magically become more productive if they "demand" a higher wage.
> Why do you think we have mass scams like central banks and ‘free markets’ where the borrow rates are set by decree
Socialist government regulation caused by people like you.
> 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
I thought monopolies were bad? Now you support monopolies of labor?
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.
The labels Egan uses for the stages aren’t ideal. I’m interpreting the philosophic stage as the part of research where you construct models of reality and test them empirically. The “ironic” stage is where you are able to notice something from daily life or trained intuition (somatic and mythic?) that reveals your model is imperfect and leads you to new research questions.
The middle school math and science history component doesn’t need to take up much class time in order to show kids heroes. My HS calculus teacher told us briefly about Newton and Leibniz before teaching the actual content, making us all thankful we didn’t have to use Newton’s notation. There’s also no reason students would need to be graded on historical instead of mathematical knowledge.
“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.”
Well in the review you read the author summarises Egan’s ideas on Plato and Galileo which doesn’t mean he doesn’t want the rest taught in a similar way. The review mentions Descartes for instance.
I agree about the idea of focusing on controversies in science. I had about the same thought when reading that section of the review, that students won't be able to actually understand the controversial stuff if they don't have a thorough basis of the settled stuff first, and trying to teach it that way would be counterproductive.
Human knowledge happens to accumulate and refine at a constantly increasing rate, with or without Enlightenment. (E.g., industrial-made clothing precedes it, and so does inoculation. Selective breeding of plants has like tens of thousands of years of history.) Whatever rationality *might* have to do with where we are, the effect was self-evidently much more subtle than the [everything good that you have only happened because of it, so bow before it, peasant] card you're playing.
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 have a hunch but don’t want to say here because it is supposed to be anonymous. Send me an email and I’ll connect you with the author and / or someone cool you’d probably like to talk to regardless. Vicki R Williams at a google email address.
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.)
WRT your question 2... I have no good answers, but I thought I might share what is potentially a cautionary answer about what *not* to do
My situation is very different: I live in China, and have had my kids in both Chinese public school and international schools, and a bit of homeschooling. Their experience has been very mixed, and I wouldn't say they've had easy academic careers, or even as much success as I think they should have (though both are doing OK).
I'm a very mathsy, ready kind of a dad, so they both went into first grade with maths and reading way ahead of the curve. Throughout their schooling they've been recognised by their peers and teachers as clever and knowledgeable. But they never really did well on tests, and indeed failed a bunch of them (China is a test-loving place, so they get tested a lot. I'm not too worried about the tests, but I was worried that their test failures represent an inability to do understand the requirements, and a willingness to do the learning.)
My best guess - and this is only a guess - is that they were both unable to deal with the somewhat contradictory situation where (a) the teacher was teaching stuff they already knew, e.g. basic numeracy; and (b) that despite the fact that they had the skills, the homework might still be challenging and difficult to do right.
So I feel like giving them above-grade-level skills early in their schooling career ended up really hurting them.
Now, it's possible that my interpretation is wrong, and they were just the victims of a messed-up system. My older boy speaks English, and yet in his Chinese public school he could never get top marks in his English (ESL) exams, and even his English teacher was unable to tell me why. It may well be because his English was better than hers, and he was being marked down by idiots.
Also, if you gave me the chance to do it all again, would I read my children fewer books?! Would I put off their numeracy? Would I hell. So... I have no solution to these problems. I'm just saying you're not alone in struggling with it.
Concrete recommendations, though: Rick Riordan. My boys loved those books with an unholy passion! Norse Myths by Neil Gaiman. If you can find accessible versions, Monkey/Journey to the West is also endlessly entertaining.
As someone who passed but did not excel in language classes of my "first" language, language classes usual suck if you speak read write the language. Imagine stripping out the challenges, novelty, nuance, and semblence of value from the material, and what are you left with? Busy work that requires you to stay inside the lines.
Oh, of course! I always tried to give them work to do or books to read, and their teachers were good, not expecting them to actually participate in the ESL classes. But they had to take the tests for administrative reasons, and it was a constant source of bewilderment to us why Older Son couldn’t score 100% in the tests.
Incidentally, giving them separate work to do during the ESL classes never worked: being kids, they preferred to goof off, and never did much productive with that time :-/
"being kids, they preferred to goof off, and never did much productive with that time"
Again, that's a major flaw with most proposals for revamping the education system - "well when I was in school if you gave me free time I'd have done extra work on the more advanced parts of the curriculum!" - yes, but not everyone is like you or me or them or him, and most kids will use the time to goof off instead of self-directed learning.
I think this is something the people who go "I hated school, I was so far ahead in my classes and being held back, I could easily have learned the subject on my own, we should scrap the entire thing" forget.
I don't know! My attitude was, seeing as you can get full marks, you might as well just do it - that will make everyone happy. He agreed and said he'd try. But what the little buggers really think is always a mystery.
My problem was what to do next. If the problem was him not making an effort, I'd need to help him with motivation; if the problem was the test, I'd want to go to the school and say, look, your tests are messed up (definitely a possibility, the school English teachers couldn't speak English worth a damn). But I just didn't know. Anyway, he's back in an international school now, and seems happier at this one.
I think in test-heavy systems, there is a Model Right Answer and you are expected to learn it off, know how to regurgitate it, and if you deviate then you will be marked down.
I don't know the Chinese system, but for instance in the Irish language exams, they used to be *very* strict on marking, such that if you spelled a word without the siniu fada you would lose marks (and I just lost two marks there because it should be "síniú fada").
Now, this isn't just pettiness because it makes a difference if the word is "fear" or "féar" ("man" or "grass"):
But students who had a fluent speaking level were losing marks wholesale because of this, so the marking system was softened in later years. China may well be on the rigid marking system still. This is wholesale speculation on my part, but if your kid was speaking idiomatic English and not Grammatical Formal English Like We Learned, then the school/exam markers might well mark them down for using contractions and slangy terms etc.
Yep, there was definitely some of this. This is primary school level, so it was even a bit more basic than this: he'd get marked down for writing "didn't" instead of "did not" because the kids in his class hadn't learned contractions yet. For that kind of problem, we just giggled at it. Obviously that didn't indicate any kind of underlying problem, just a clash of different levels of knowledge.
On English tests: I recently, as an adult, took competency tests for a language I'm fluent in, and in reading comprehension got tripped up on the exact same ambiguous reading comprehension questions I had trouble with on English comprehension exams-- and I did well in English generally. So the score I got is more reflective of me being bad at that *type of question* than fluency in that language (I'd argue, haha).
2) On math: conceptual knowledge != Fluency. For example, what if these tests require basically instant ability to do easy mental math, not spend time doing it out on paper or in your head. Maybe this is not a skill you care about, but the other students are were drilled in that skill until it's automatic for them, and your kids weren't?
I'm afraid my second question may have given the wrong impression. So far our daughter loves school, and indeed she's sad that it's off for the summer. Our son had some trouble during multiple versions of COVID schooling, but his final preschool seemed like an excellent fit and he's excited about kindergarten. Thus, I don't have any concrete reasons to think that our children are struggling or will find themselves doing so. I was just hoping to be prepared for that eventual possibility, given that I doubt our schools consistently follow the suggestions here.
Sorry, I completely hijacked your comment for my own ranting needs!
In addition to the mythology recommendations at the end of my previous comment, I would also recommend Raymond Smullyan as an amusing intro to maths and logic.
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?
The review answers this. You can’t really tell if a school is implementing Eagan’s ideas, except by talking to the children there. That feels like a “problem” with reality, not with Eagan’s model: the Book List really doesn’t tell you whether a school will teach effectively.
Yeah, that's unfortunate. Problems with reality are worse than problems with models. "Find an Erganian school and talk to the kids (oh wait, the only one closed down...)" is not actionable.
I teach 700 kids, K - 5th grade. I have used some Waldorf content, because it is aesthetic, and concrete. They make videos of teachers instructing on it, or telling stories. I could implement more of it if I wanted to. They also do a lot of narrative in elementary school, which seems like a good idea, and an idea that can be used. There doesn't appear to be anything in particular here that could be used.
Sorry, I misunderstood your complaint. I think I agree: this book review makes the book sound like a manifesto declaring that someone should provide those tools, rather than an actual toolset.
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).
Is the evidence "against progressive education practices" relative to the evidence on Egan's idea or just relative to an ideal a la the nirvana fallacy?
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.
I feel like I had a similar experience to the reviewer when it comes to school, which is why I really resonated with these quotes too. My last year of high school was genuinely fantastic in terms of education (even if the social aspect didn’t go as well), and I have the international baccalaureate program to thank for that. But it often felt in lower grades or worse-taught classes that I could have been getting more out the subjects than I actually was. I hope these ideas can be brought into schools, even if only a little, so that other people can develop the love for learning that I did.
I think an operationalized one-liner would be something like “humans are really good with narrative and story, so education should be more of that especially at younger ages.”
I thought that, actually, but was hardly so concise!
One of the things I noticed is there was a definite masculine edge to a lot of those stories, what with heroes and adventure and such. I feel like one of the effects of chasing out men from education is that tends to disappear, with the expected effects of making boys a lot less interested.
Whether that's intentional is left as an exercise for the reader. ;)
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.
I had that exact assignment too, and hated it. I spent weeks diving into the details and concluded that I couldn't even explain the tiniest fraction of the ongoing debate within my length limit, much less resolve any part of it. The whole exercise of writing the paper felt irredeemably fake, and I submitted nothing in protest, at which point my parents had to stage a dramatic intervention to keep me from failing that term. (And I wasn't against discussion in general -- at the same time I was spending hours a day arguing with young Earth creationists online, because that was a debate I felt I could actually understand.)
I have the same problem with the post author's proposals about high school science. Ask teenagers to think about the nature of dark energy? At this point I've seen thousands of literate, eloquent, non-physicist adults argue on the internet about it, and 99% of the text they generate doesn't make the slightest bit of sense -- like debating how fast a potato can run.
That sounds like it could be a problem in the way that the assignment was worded more than the concept itself. The goal of doing this kind of thing is not to resolve an issue like global warming or dark energy; it’s to understand how debating these concepts works and to give people the feeling that you got when arguing creationism. It’s a shame that it didn’t work out in your assignment, but I feel like your enjoyment of discussion elsewhere shows that it could work out, if done well. It just needs to focus on a smaller scale or a simpler thing to build up the argument foundation, and it needs to be done with care as opposed to being fake to check off a box.
"The goal of doing this kind of thing is not to resolve an issue like global warming or dark energy; it’s to understand how debating these concepts works"
And that's the problem in a nutshell; when you get literal minded or even on the autism spectrum kids who *do* take it at face value that "I must argue for one side or another and produce a convincing case to win". When it's not explicitly stated that "I don't expect you to solve this problem, what I want you to learn are these skills", then frustration results as with knzhou above.
As a very literal minded kid, I understand the frustrations. I was mainly successful when it became clear that it’s about the method and when it was explicitly stated that the topic is a medium for it. Like you said, the problem is when it’s not explicitly stated, so, in an ideal world, it could be stated explicitly!
But isn't that the entire problem? If you scale up from one charismatic teacher to hundreds of thousands, the median implementation of anything is going to be box checking. I was taught "critical thinking" several times in school, and it always boiled down to "never trust Wikipedia, always believe the New York Times." Going the other way, I did have a couple excellent teachers who engaged us the same way Egan advocates. The rest would not have been able to in the intended spirit, even if they read this whole long-ass book review.
You’re very right, unfortunately. The problem with this sort of system is that it’s very dependent on the capability of the teacher to put it into practice, and it often just doesn’t work. I very much like it’s ideas, though, despite knowing that teachers trying to make it work will often just not get anywhere if they can’t do it right. But sometimes it works, and suggest a system that would work if done well is all someone like Egan can do.
Lots of Egan’s advice looks approachable for teachers. Teaching who Pythagoras was or asking if it’s ever okay to betray a secret seems much easier to do well than teaching critical reasoning. I admit the course on conspiracy theories would probably be taught badly by a median teacher. I don’t think teachers would be expected to read this review, but they could work from textbooks/worksheets/curricula designed around them.
It seems that for the "hypothesis of global warming" it would be particularly hard for a layperson to do much other than regurgitate arguments made by others. How can you reason about whether the global average temperature has risen about a degree Celsius compared to the pre-industrial baseline?
If the topic were instead the "hypothesis proposed by The Educated Mind", we'd at least have some hope of coming up with our own arguments.
Somebody elsewhere in the thread said that Egan's ideas seem to them to be those of a humanities person who doesn't know much about science. Egan would like to involve learners into the controversies animating some disciplines instead of just teaching settled, static fact, as part of his storytelling-based education. He's not alone in this; it reminds me of some flavours of progressive education. But while there are disciplines in which a layman can have a valid opinion on current (or past) controversies, this is not the case for all of them. (I'm not even sure they fall neatly along the humanities vs. science distinction.) I, for one, do teach settled fact when I teach mathematics, and I don't feel like there is anything wrong with that.
"It was fun and transgressive and educational to write the against paper!"
*If* the teacher is willing to accept the 'wrong' answer. Way back in the time of the dinosaurs, in my Inter Cert* history class I decided to give the 'wrong' answer instead of the pat textbook answer because I had been reading around on the topic, and I got slapped down *hard* for it, to the extent that I vowed I would never again open my mouth in that class with that teacher.
History was my second favourite subject, and she *tore* into me, told me in front of the entire class that I was stupid, said I would fail my exam miserably**, etc. Only because I truly do love history is why I stuck with it, otherwise that reaction would have led to me dropping the subject and staying far away from it in after life outside of school.
Sometimes you have to be aware that the 'transgressive' answer will get you punished.
*Now called the Junior Certificate state national examination, taken at age 15 or so
** For the record, I got a good grade but it was nothing to do with that teacher
I had some really, really good middle school social studies teachers that provided some highly formative experiences for me. In one class we did a similar adversarial project on JFK assassination theories. In another class we did an investigation into public campaign finance records which suffice to say overturned some preconceived notions about the relative behavior of Republicans and Democrats.
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.
It's not just about the intelligence of the teacher, though that's important too. Put John von Neumann in a class of thirty kids from a deprived area and see how he gets on. The brats may well eat him alive.
The amount of wrangling teachers have to do to keep kids from talking on their phones, chatting with their friends, interrupting, not paying attention, asking to go to the toilet, go to their lockers to get their textbooks, I forgot my homework, etc. eats up class time, and that's before you get to the ones throwing chairs and having meltdowns.
> 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 agree with your fourth category. But, do you think this category would impact or alter the essay or the source material in any way? The reason I ask is that Egan's school is still a school, serving the 4th function by default. So, from a social time economics perspective, the 4th category is paramount. But from a quality of a school's education perspective, it is mostly irrelevant.
I couldn't speak as to the source material, I only know it through the essay. But, I do think it would change the essay -- in minor ways. The key thing I ask for is recognition of that fourth role.
We want schools to contain our children not just because they are effective at doing so, from both a governmental perspective and from the point of view of personal improvement, but because of those three other jobs. There are plenty of ways to keep a child contained for 8-10 hours a day, but that's not the only goal.
Since I tend to write long, I'll stop with a summary: I ask for recognition of all four of these *equally* important roles.
Are you able to describe why I should follow this link? I’m not willing to click on a link without a clear reason to do so, because I don’t want to skew anyone’s metrics or advertising incentives.
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.
I should add the not all the Egan's ideas sound bad. But it sounds weird when some of the ideas are told like they would be novel ideas and changes to current way of schooling.
Teacher telling culturally relevant myths and stories and fairytales and saga and occasionally reading some book aloud was bread and butter of my kid age primary school experience. Even the alphabet book came with short stories for each letter (admittedly two decades ago).
Don't Americans / anglophones no longer do this? I thought you were all raised on stories of George Washington and cherry tree and such
When I was in Fifth Class, our teacher never opened the history textbook, instead she taught us by telling us stories. I agree, this is no new approach.
I have an awful feeling teachers today don't do this because they *can't*. Young teachers in their 20s coming out of training will have been brought up where all your cultural learning is done online via movies and mass media, and you never learned about George Washington and the cherry tree because a previous generation of education theorists scrapped all that in the name of "this is a lie, it never happened, we should teach facts" and now they prefer to teach that Washington was a slave-holder and racist and the rest of it.
"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. "
I agree about that, and not just for science and maths. I think the failure mode there is people who will then *think* they know about a historical personage when they don't, witness the online posts about "Galileo was burned at the stake".
And you won't learn maths just by knowing Five Top Facts About Pythagoras or whomever. C.S. Lewis describes it elsewhere, I can't lay my hand on the exact quotation - about the moment when the hard work of learning has to be done. The boy who fell in love with stories from the Iliad setting out to learn Greek and having to settle down to the slog of learning grammar, and so forth.
You can't get around the slog element, I'm afraid, and that is where the "let's make it fun and kids will learn naturally" theories fall flat.
Maybe I'm wrong, but I feel that the reason why those theories of "making education fun and natural" are so popular is that there are some things that people learn to do without much apparent effort, especially in early childhood. For example, learning to speak and understand one's first language(s), or learning to walk. But as it turns out, these things are biologically primary activities for humans, which differ from the biologically secondary activities we learn about in school, and which do require the slog element. The whole "reading wars" in the US and elsewhere between phonics and "whole language" methods to teach reading stemmed from the idea that it might be possible to make learning to read just as fun and natural as learning to speak, instead of having to go through the slog of phonics training. Unfortunately, reading does not seem to be a biologically primary activity.
"without much apparent effort" blows my mind; learning to walk and speak takes months if not years of concentrated effort on the part of the child and parents.
"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."
Same for me, but most kids don't ever use those technical math things so don't need to be taught them anyway. However, when kids are learning about the solar system or why things fall down then Galileo and Newton might be quite interesting, like on the TV show Cosmos.
The idea is to tell the story at the earlier part of the educational cycle. Many people remember Archimedes and his bath water, even if they never become scientists.
Sure, but do they *understand* what the bath water realisation was meant to be? It was years after I knew about "Eureka!" that I discovered it was about solving the displacement problem (supposedly for finding out if a crown really was pure gold or if the goldsmith had cheated, kept some of the gold, and alloyed the remainder to make the crown).
I'm not sure that's a criticism of the eureka story, though. Relative density is a pretty difficult concept, and so I'd expect understanding of that story to come a while after the leaping-out-of-the-bath story, which is one of those brilliant mental images that captures the imagination of children and adults alike. For children, its primary power, I think, lies in the suggestion that ideas can be that powerful - strong enough to make you leap naked out of the bath. When you learn the (slightly disappointing and plutocratic) theory and problem associated, they become much more memorable. But as a story, Archimedes is all about how the Greeks took the life of the mind seriously.
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?
Everyone's got different Hardest Language lists, but Mandarin and Arabic show up high on all of them.
The mention of dead languages, and Cantonese instead of Mandarin, seemed to be emphasizing the languages as a mental exercise rather than a tool. But then that kind of turns it into busywork and goes back into "learn it because we say" education.
'I'm assuming these are very dissimilar to English but I don't actually know much about either of them.' - they are, though there are lots of similarities as well since they're all Indo-European languages. This might be a benefit to teaching them! (Students start out thinking they're completely different and then find out how similar they are in some ways, and by analogy how similar people are...)
I was talking about Arabic and Hindi, but you're right, Arabic is Afro-Asiatic, not Indo-European! My mistake. I was thinking of Urdu, which is sort of a mix.
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.
By the standards of modern science he got a lot wrong. By the standards of basically everyone up to him, he's the only one groping towards actual science.
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.
This is a good criticism. To some extent, this is what curricula are for - get the experts to write the curriculum/textbook, so the teachers don't have to be expert in all those things. But yes, if the textbook/curriculum is too far beyond the abilities of the teacher, then the class isn't going to work.
> 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.
If you ever needed to put a ladder up against a wall, you've used the principles behind the Pythagorean theorem. It really is only in later life that you appreciate "ah, this is what is meant!" when applying the textbook problems to real life.
I think that a simple heuristic would sufficient, "A ladder should be about 20% longer than the height it is used to climb", no need to use square roots to find the length of the ladder.
In that sense I use it a lot myself (nothing like cutting across some corners to get to your next class quicker when you have to cross an enormous university), but I rarely find people who consider it 'the most useful thing they've learned'.
I have used the Pythagorean theorem in my job for something as tedious as writing a macro in PowerPoint to ensure that every object in the top left corner of each slide in the deck is identified and repositioned so that they all perfectly align. I have friends in surveying and construction who use it daily. Certainly there are plenty of cases where they could get by just using the output from a computer program, but, to fall into the trap of invoking Myer's-Briggs, having the theorem to reference in their actions is something very useful for "intuitive" type personalities.
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.
I think there are ways the history of mathematics can make it easier or more interesting to learn. For example in alegbra I remember learning about ”completing the square” as an algebra problem. It would have been useful to learn that historically, this was a geometric problem that was literally about completing a square, and that it is taught in algebra now because algebra and geometry were later combined.
That was my initial reaction too, and then I remembered as part of the relatively few people that actually somewhat enjoyed school and academics as a kid that I'm really not the demographic this proposed reform has in mind. I suspect the average person would rather hear about spicy details from about the life of someone who lived, than about a cool maths result. Whether making that part of the curriculum would help people to actually learn the math itself is another question entirely though
I think the focus isn't so much on who came up with the idea, but rather why they came up with it. Even with Philosophy (which is an outlier amongst fields in this respect) you don't spend that much time on the actual biographies of philosophers, but having a sense of the kind of society they lived in helps to interpret their theories.
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.
I think people don't get the point of the "bears are white" story, and we've discussed this on here before.
"Those silly villagers were too dumb to engage in abstract thinking, they couldn't even work out bears are white" is the takeaway most people have, and what we're supposed to take away.
But in the wider context of the time? You are a peasant living in Stalinist Russia, where the wrong opinion can get you sent off to Siberia, if you're lucky, and shot if you're not. Some bigwig guys come down from the big city and claim to be running an experiment. They ask you and your neighbours all kinds of weird questions.
Now, you know that the obvious answer is "the bears are white", but you *also* know that 'giving the obvious answer' has been used to arrest people and send them off to Siberia. What if this is a loyalty test? What if there's an Officially Approved Answer about if bears are white or not, and you are supposed to give it? You don't know if the Officially Approved Answer is "the bears are white". Maybe the white bears are code for the Whites - you don't want to be caught out expressing support for the Whites, that would be Very Bad:
In that situation, the most self-preservation tactic is "well I'm not saying this is so, but it could be the bears are white, but I've never seen a white bear myself" and the likes. Remember, we're talking about a society where people are afraid to stop applauding at a party meeting because the first guy to stop is going to be considered an Enemy of the State.
There's meta concerns with the white bear thing. It's entirely possible this guy is framing the question this way to force an answer which he will then promote as "99% of northerners agree Northern bears are white, so you can't argue otherwise".
The most fun thing about Robert Mueller's Congressional testimony was watching his absolute refusal to verbalize any part of his own report, because he knew the Democrats wanted to turn him into a soundbite and he wasn't going to let them. ("Would you read this portion for us?" "I would be happy to have YOU read it.")
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?
You make some good points, but I believe that the reason for the emphasis on academics is not that we want or expect every student to join the PMC. Rather, everyone - plumbers, electricians, cashiers, etc - benefits greatly from being literate and numerate.
Literacy and numeracy is accomplished in the elementary schools - 1-6, at least they are supposed to be.
Wherefore then the middle and high school education foci today?
I think it is safe to say that the vast majority of education from middle school onwards is focused on the academic as opposed to the vocational or even to general life such as household budgeting, basic mechanics, basic electricity, basic flujidics etc.
Even computer programming emphasis is utterly misplaced: the actual numbers of people who program in society is a tiny, tiny fraction. How about instead educating people to use Excel type worksheets, basic publishing, etc?
>I am 100% certain that 99.5% of all schooling at whatever levels lays zero emphasis on anything but the "academics" track
This is not true. States often put a fair amount of money and effort into their high school level vocational education programs. These are often very popular with students. There are also a number of partnerships between community college and high school programs aimed at vocational education. They are somewhat held back by some difficulties getting competent e.g. welders and auto mechanics to go work at a high school instead of making more money at their main job, partly because there are extra regulatory hurdles to jump through.
Perhaps you can provide some counterexamples other than funding.
The existence of a woodshop class at a school does not equate to equal focus on vocational vs. academic, any more than the physical education class equates to equal focus on athletic training vs. academic.
There are no vocational equivalents to the team and individual sports, for example, which actually do serve as some form of athletic training and focus.
There are no vocational equivalents to the academic competitions or awards either.
The only type of class which could be termed vocational with some real world impact would be driver's education - and even then it is almost exclusively because most of America requires the ability to drive in order to have some form of independence.
You say universal education was about ”development” but I would have said it was more about socialization and to some extent about academics. Socialization because it got children used to following a schedule and doing boring, repetitive tasks of the kind they would do at work.
"Factory owners were among the biggest champions for the Elementary Education Act 1870, which made education universally available in England."
The thing is - the loudest and earliest proponents for universal education, and the most cited today - are people like Horace Mann who believed universal education would make for better educated voters.
So if you want to say that universal education was a way to train children to work better as labor in early Industrial Age factories as opposed to the non-clock based labor of farms, ok then but it absolutely isn't the case today.
"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."
See Dickens' "Our Mutual Friend" of 1865:
"The school at which young Charley Hexam had first learned from a book—the streets being, for pupils of his degree, the great Preparatory Establishment in which very much that is never unlearned is learned without and before book—was a miserable loft in an unsavoury yard. Its atmosphere was oppressive and disagreeable; it was crowded, noisy, and confusing; half the pupils dropped asleep, or fell into a state of waking stupefaction; the other half kept them in either condition by maintaining a monotonous droning noise, as if they were performing, out of time and tune, on a ruder sort of bagpipe. The teachers, animated solely by good intentions, had no idea of execution, and a lamentable jumble was the upshot of their kind endeavours.
It was a school for all ages, and for both sexes. The latter were kept apart, and the former were partitioned off into square assortments. But, all the place was pervaded by a grimly ludicrous pretence that every pupil was childish and innocent. This pretence, much favoured by the lady-visitors, led to the ghastliest absurdities. Young women old in the vices of the commonest and worst life, were expected to profess themselves enthralled by the good child’s book, the Adventures of Little Margery, who resided in the village cottage by the mill; severely reproved and morally squashed the miller, when she was five and he was fifty; divided her porridge with singing birds; denied herself a new nankeen bonnet, on the ground that the turnips did not wear nankeen bonnets, neither did the sheep who ate them; who plaited straw and delivered the dreariest orations to all comers, at all sorts of unseasonable times. So, unwieldy young dredgers and hulking mudlarks were referred to the experiences of Thomas Twopence, who, having resolved not to rob (under circumstances of uncommon atrocity) his particular friend and benefactor, of eighteenpence, presently came into supernatural possession of three and sixpence, and lived a shining light ever afterwards. (Note, that the benefactor came to no good.) Several swaggering sinners had written their own biographies in the same strain; it always appearing from the lessons of those very boastful persons, that you were to do good, not because it was good, but because you were to make a good thing of it. Contrariwise, the adult pupils were taught to read (if they could learn) out of the New Testament; and by dint of stumbling over the syllables and keeping their bewildered eyes on the particular syllables coming round to their turn, were as absolutely ignorant of the sublime history, as if they had never seen or heard of it. An exceedingly and confoundingly perplexing jumble of a school, in fact, where black spirits and grey, red spirits and white, jumbled jumbled jumbled jumbled, jumbled every night. And particularly every Sunday night. For then, an inclined plane of unfortunate infants would be handed over to the prosiest and worst of all the teachers with good intentions, whom nobody older would endure. Who, taking his stand on the floor before them as chief executioner, would be attended by a conventional volunteer boy as executioner’s assistant. When and where it first became the conventional system that a weary or inattentive infant in a class must have its face smoothed downward with a hot hand, or when and where the conventional volunteer boy first beheld such system in operation, and became inflamed with a sacred zeal to administer it, matters not. It was the function of the chief executioner to hold forth, and it was the function of the acolyte to dart at sleeping infants, yawning infants, restless infants, whimpering infants, and smooth their wretched faces; sometimes with one hand, as if he were anointing them for a whisker; sometimes with both hands, applied after the fashion of blinkers. And so the jumble would be in action in this department for a mortal hour; the exponent drawling on to My Dearert Childerrenerr, let us say, for example, about the beautiful coming to the Sepulchre; and repeating the word Sepulchre (commonly used among infants) five hundred times, and never once hinting what it meant; the conventional boy smoothing away right and left, as an infallible commentary; the whole hot-bed of flushed and exhausted infants exchanging measles, rashes, whooping-cough, fever, and stomach disorders, as if they were assembled in High Market for the purpose.
Even in this temple of good intentions, an exceptionally sharp boy exceptionally determined to learn, could learn something, and, having learned it, could impart it much better than the teachers; as being more knowing than they, and not at the disadvantage in which they stood towards the shrewder pupils. In this way it had come about that Charley Hexam had risen in the jumble, taught in the jumble, and been received from the jumble into a better school."
That's the "good intentions, theory of education completely unmoored from reality" schooling available on the one hand, and then on the other the product of the 'better' schooling:
Bradley Headstone, in his decent black coat and waistcoat, and decent white shirt, and decent formal black tie, and decent pantaloons of pepper and salt, with his decent silver watch in his pocket and its decent hair-guard round his neck, looked a thoroughly decent young man of six-and-twenty. He was never seen in any other dress, and yet there was a certain stiffness in his manner of wearing this, as if there were a want of adaptation between him and it, recalling some mechanics in their holiday clothes. He had acquired mechanically a great store of teacher’s knowledge. He could do mental arithmetic mechanically, sing at sight mechanically, blow various wind instruments mechanically, even play the great church organ mechanically. From his early childhood up, his mind had been a place of mechanical stowage. The arrangement of his wholesale warehouse, so that it might be always ready to meet the demands of retail dealers history here, geography there, astronomy to the right, political economy to the left—natural history, the physical sciences, figures, music, the lower mathematics, and what not, all in their several places—this care had imparted to his countenance a look of care; while the habit of questioning and being questioned had given him a suspicious manner, or a manner that would be better described as one of lying in wait. There was a kind of settled trouble in the face. It was the face belonging to a naturally slow or inattentive intellect that had toiled hard to get what it had won, and that had to hold it now that it was gotten. He always seemed to be uneasy lest anything should be missing from his mental warehouse, and taking stock to assure himself.
Suppression of so much to make room for so much, had given him a constrained manner, over and above. Yet there was enough of what was animal, and of what was fiery (though smouldering), still visible in him, to suggest that if young Bradley Headstone, when a pauper lad, had chanced to be told off for the sea, he would not have been the last man in a ship’s crew. Regarding that origin of his, he was proud, moody, and sullen, desiring it to be forgotten. And few people knew of it.
In some visits to the Jumble his attention had been attracted to this boy Hexam. An undeniable boy for a pupil-teacher; an undeniable boy to do credit to the master who should bring him on. Combined with this consideration, there may have been some thought of the pauper lad now never to be mentioned. Be that how it might, he had with pains gradually worked the boy into his own school, and procured him some offices to discharge there, which were repaid with food and lodging. Such were the circumstances that had brought together, Bradley Headstone and young Charley Hexam that autumn evening. Autumn, because full half a year had come and gone since the bird of prey lay dead upon the river-shore.
...‘Oh, Mary Anne, Mary Anne!’ returned Miss Peecher, slightly colouring and shaking her head, a little out of humour; ‘how often have I told you not to use that vague expression, not to speak in that general way? When you say they say, what do you mean? Part of speech They?’
Mary Anne hooked her right arm behind her in her left hand, as being under examination, and replied:
‘Personal pronoun.’
‘Person, They?’
‘Third person.’
‘Number, They?’
‘Plural number.’
‘Then how many do you mean, Mary Anne? Two? Or more?’
‘I beg your pardon, ma’am,’ said Mary Anne, disconcerted now she came to think of it; ‘but I don’t know that I mean more than her brother himself.’ As she said it, she unhooked her arm.
‘I felt convinced of it,’ returned Miss Peecher, smiling again. ‘Now pray, Mary Anne, be careful another time. He says is very different from they say, remember. Difference between he says and they say? Give it me.’
Mary Anne immediately hooked her right arm behind her in her left hand—an attitude absolutely necessary to the situation—and replied: ‘One is indicative mood, present tense, third person singular, verb active to say. Other is indicative mood, present tense, third person plural, verb active to say.’
‘Why verb active, Mary Anne?’
‘Because it takes a pronoun after it in the objective case, Miss Peecher.’
‘Very good indeed,’ remarked Miss Peecher, with encouragement. ‘In fact, could not be better. Don’t forget to apply it, another time, Mary Anne.’ This said, Miss Peecher finished the watering of her flowers, and went into her little official residence, and took a refresher of the principal rivers and mountains of the world, their breadths, depths, and heights, before settling the measurements of the body of a dress for her own personal occupation."
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.
Claude's 3 paragraph summary (I'm currently trying out this LLM):
Paragraph 1:
The book review discusses Kieran Egan's educational philosophy laid out in his book The Educated Mind: How Cognitive Tools Shape Our Understanding. Egan argues that schools are failing because they ignore the cognitive tools humans have developed over history to make sense of the world, like humor, metaphor, and storytelling. He proposes rebuilding education around these tools, guiding students through the major kinds of understanding humans have developed - mythic, romantic, philosophic, and ironic. Egan believes this approach, tailored to students' abilities at each age, could make school intellectually enriching and help develop rational thinking.
Paragraph 2:
The review summarizes how Egan's philosophy could transform curriculum at the elementary, middle, and high school levels. For elementary, lessons would leverage tools like mental imagery and metaphor to convey history, science, and math through engaging stories drawn from diverse cultures. At middle school, curriculum would tap into adolescents' interest in extremes, gossip, and heroes to make traditional subjects exciting. High school would organize instruction around the major debates within each discipline, helping students see how new knowledge is created. The goal is to keep students engaged while systematically developing more sophisticated reasoning abilities.
Paragraph 3:
While acknowledging weaknesses in Egan's paradigm, the reviewer argues it merits attention based on alignment with cognitive science, cultural evolution theory, and widespread innate human interests. The review suggests empirical studies, application in schools, and scrutiny from the rationalist community could further test Egan's ideas. Overall, the review presents Egan's philosophy as a compelling vision for enlivening education and nurturing rational thinking.
Which I consider a reasonable 3 paragraph summary, out of the huge number of possible ones. It forgets somatic, which I did not when I did a one paragraph summary, so one point for the humans. Side note: we complain LLM's hallucinate/are not grounded on truth. Well... Once they are, that's huge, because they have random built in, and creativity is facts+random+ground.
"An LLM, or Master of Laws, is a graduate qualification in the field of law. The LLM was created for lawyers to expand their knowledge, study a specialized area of law, and gain international qualifications if they have earned a law degree outside the U.S. or Canada."
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.
In 1916 Padraic Pearse produced a pamphlet entitled "The Murder Machine" about the system of education in Ireland; his main objection was that it was set up by the British to keep the Irish docile and good subjects, but he also objects to the system of state exams and has his own views on educational reform:
"I have spent the greater part of my life in immediate contemplation of the most grotesque and horrible of the English inventions for the debasement of Ireland. I mean their education system. ...But the English have actually carried out an even filthier thing. They have planned and established an education system which more wickedly does violence to the elementary human rights of Irish children than would an edict for the general castration of Irish males. The system has aimed at the substitution for men and women of mere Things. It has not been an entire success. There are still a great many thousand men and women in Ireland. But a great many thousand of what, by way, of courtesy, we call men and women, are simply Things. Men and women, however depraved, have kindly human allegiances. But these Things have no allegiance. Like other Things, they are for sale.
...I put it that what education in Ireland needed was less a reconstruction of its machinery than a regeneration in spirit. The machinery, I said, has doubtless its defects, but what is chiefly wrong with it is that it is mere machinery, a lifeless thing without a soul. ...But the machine as a whole is no more capable of fulfilling the function for which it is needed than would an automaton be capable of fulfilling the function of a living teacher in a school. A soulless thing cannot teach; but it can destroy. A machine cannot make men; but it can break men.
One of the most terrible things about the English education system in Ireland is its ruthlessness. I know no image for that ruthlessness in the natural order. The ruthlessness of a wild beast has in it a certain mercy — it slays. It has in it a certain grandeur of animal force. But this ruthlessness is literally without pity and without passion. It is cold and mechanical, like the ruthlessness of an immensely powerful engine. A machine vast, complicated, with a multitude of far-reaching arms, with many ponderous presses, carrying out mysterious and long-drawn processes of shaping and moulding, is the true image of the Irish education system. It grinds night and day; it obeys immutable and predetermined laws; it is as devoid of understanding, of sympathy, of imagination, as is any other piece of machinery that performs an appointed task.
Into it is fed all the raw human material in Ireland; it seizes upon it inexorably and rends and compresses and re-moulds; and what it cannot refashion after the regulation pattern it ejects with all likeness of its former self crushed from it, a bruised and shapeless thing, thereafter accounted waste.
Our common parlance has become impressed with the conception of education as some sort of manufacturing process. Our children are the ‘raw material’; we desiderate for their education ‘modern methods’ which must be efficient but cheap; we send them to Clongowes to be ‘finished’; when finished they are ‘turned out’; specialists ‘grind’ them for the English Civil Service and the so-called liberal professions; in each of our great colleges there is a department known as the ‘scrap-heap’, though officially called the Fourth Preparatory — the limbo to which the debris ejected by the machine is relegated. The stuff there is either too hard or too soft to be moulded to the pattern required by the Civil Service Commissioners or the Incorporated Law Society.
In our adoption of the standpoint here indicated there is involved a primary blunder as to the nature and functions of education. For education has not to do with the manufacture of things, but with fostering the growth of things. And the conditions we should strive to bring about in our education system are not the conditions favourable to the rapid and cheap manufacture of ready-mades, but the conditions favourable to the growth of living organisms — the liberty and the light and the gladness of a ploughed field under the spring sunshine.
In particular I would urge that the Irish school system of the future should give freedom —freedom to the individual school, freedom to the individual teacher, freedom as far as may be to the individual pupil. Without freedom there can be no right growth; and education is properly the fostering of the right growth of a personality. Our school system must bring, too, some gallant inspiration. And with the inspiration it must bring a certain hardening. One scarcely knows whether modern sentimentalism or modern utilitarianism is the more sure sign of modern decadence. I would boldly preach the antique faith that fighting is the only noble thing, and that he only is at peace with God who is at war with the powers of evil.
...All the speculations one saw a few years ago as to the probable effect of Home Rule on education in Ireland showed one how inadequately the problem was grasped. To some the expected advent of Home Rule seemed to promise as its main fruition in the field of education the raising of their salaries; to others the supreme thing it was to bring in its train was the abolition of Dr. Starkie; to some again it held out the delightful prospect of Orange boys and Orange girls being forced to learn Irish; to others it meant the dawn of an era of common sense, the ushering in of the reign of a sound modern education, suitable to the needs of a progressive modern people.
I scandalised many people at the time by saying that the last was the view that irritated me most. The first view was not so selfish as it might appear, for between the salary offered to teachers and the excellence of a country's education system there is a vital connection. And the second and third forecasts at any rate opened up picturesque vistas. The passing of Dr. Starkie would have had something of the pageantry of the banishment of Napoleon to St. Helena (an effect which would have been heightened had he been accompanied into exile by Mr. Bonaparte Wyse), and the prospect of the children of Sandy Row being taught to curse the Pope in Irish was rich and soul-satisfying. These things we might or might not have seen had Home Rule come. But I expressed the hope that even Home Rule would not commit Ireland to an ideal so low as the ideal underlying the phrase ‘a sound modern education.’
It is a vile phrase, one of the vilest I know. Yet we find it in nearly every school prospectus, and it comes pat to the lips of nearly everyone that writes or talks about schools
Now, there can be no such thing as ‘a sound modern education’—as well talk about a ‘lively modern faith’ or a ‘serviceable modern religion.’ It should be obvious that the more ‘modern’ an education is the less ‘sound’, for in education ‘modernism’ is as much a heresy as in religion. In both mediaevalism were a truer standard. We are too fond of clapping ourselves upon the back because we live in modern times, and we preen ourselves quite ridiculously (and unnecessarily) on our modern progress. There is, of course, such a thing as modern progress, but it has been won at how great a cost! How many precious things have we flung from us to lighten ourselves for that race!
...I dwell on the importance of the personal element in education. I would have every child not merely a unit in a school attendance, but in some intimate personal way the pupil of a teacher, or, to use more expressive words, the disciple of a master. And here I nowise contradict another position of mine, that the main object in education is to help the child to be his own true and best self. What the teacher should bring to his pupil is not a set of ready made opinions, or a stock of cut-and-dry information, but an inspiration and an example; and his main qualification should be, not such an overmastering will as shall impose itself at all hazards upon all weaker wills that come under its influence, but rather so infectious an enthusiasm as shall kindle new enthusiasm. The Montessori system, so admirable in many ways, would seem at first sight to attach insufficient importance to the function of the teacher in the schoolroom. But this is not really so. True, it would make the spontaneous efforts of the children the main motive power, as against the dominating will of the teacher which is the main motive power in the ordinary schoolroom. But the teacher must be there always to inspire, to foster. If you would realise how true this is, how important the personality of the teacher, even in a Montessori school, try to imagine a Montessori school conducted by the average teacher of your acquaintance, or try to imagine a Montessori school conducted by yourself!"
I wonder if Egan read this essay, because Pearse too wants to encourage love of books and learning by means of the myths and sagas:
"Every school must conform to a type — and what a type! Every individual must conform to a type — and what a type! The teacher has not been at liberty, and in practice is not yet at liberty, to seek to discover the individual bents of his pupils, the hidden talent that is in every normal soul, to discover which and to cherish which, that it may in the fullness of time be put to some precious use, is the primary duty of the teacher. I knew one boy who passed through several schools a dunce and a laughing-stock; the National Board and the Intermediate Board had sat in judgment upon him and had damned him as a failure before men and angels. Yet a friend and fellow-worker of mine discovered that he was gifted with a wondrous sympathy for nature, that he loved and understood the ways of plants, that he had a strange minuteness and subtlety of observation — that, in short, he was the sort of boy likely to become an accomplished botanist. I knew another boy of whom his father said to me: ‘He is no good at books, he is no good at work; he is good at nothing but playing a tin whistle. What am I to do with him ’? I shocked the worthy man by replying (though really it was the obvious thing to reply): ‘Buy a tin whistle for him’. Once a colleague of mine summed up the whole philosophy of education in a maxim which startled a sober group of visitors: ‘If a boy shows an aptitude for doing anything better than most people, he should be encouraged to do it as well as possible; I don't care what it is — scotch-hop, if you like.’
The idea of a compulsory programme imposed by an external authority upon every child in every school in a country is the direct contrary of the root idea involved in education. Yet this is what we have in Ireland. In theory the primary schools have a certain amount of freedom; in practice they have none. Neither in theory or practice is such a freedom dreamt of in the gloomy limbo whose presiding demon is the Board of Intermediate education for Ireland. Education, indeed, reaches its nadir in the Irish Intermediate system. At the present moment there are 15,000 boys and girls pounding at a programme drawn up for them by certain persons around a table in Hume street. Precisely the same textbooks are being read to-night in every secondary school and college in Ireland. Two of Hawthorne's Tanglewood Tales, with a few poems in English, will constitute the whole literary pabulum of three-quarters of the pupils of Irish secondary schools during this twelve months [1912-13.]
The teacher who seeks to give his pupils a wider horizon in literature does so at his peril. He will no doubt benefit his pupils, but he will infallibly reduce his results fees. As an intermediate teacher said to me, ‘Culture is all very well in its way, but if you don't stick to your programme your boys won't pass.’ ‘Stick to your programme’ is the strange device on the banner of the Irish intermediate system; and the programme bulks so large that there is no room for education.
...The school must make such an appeal to the pupil as shall resound throughout his after life, urging him always to be his best self, never his second-best self. Such an inspiration will come most adequately of all from religion. I do not think that there can be any education of which spiritual religion does not form an integral part; as it is the most important part of life, so it should be the most important part of education, which some have defined as a preparation for complete life. And inspiration will come also from the hero-stories of the world, and especially of our own people; from science and art if taught by people who are really scientists and artists, and not merely persons with certificates from Mr. T. W. Russell; from literature enjoyed as literature and not studied as ‘texts’; from the associations of the school place; finally and chiefly from the humanity and great-heartedness of the teacher.
A heroic tale is more essentially a factor in education than a proposition in Euclid. The story of Joan of Arc or the story of the young Napoleon means more for boys and girls than all the algebra in all the books. What the modern world wants more than anything else, what Ireland wants beyond all other modern countries, is a new birth of the heroic spirit. If our schools would set themselves that task, the task of fostering once again knightly courage and strength and truth — that type of efficiency rather than the peculiar type of efficiency demanded by the English Civil Service — we should have at least the beginning of an educational system. And what an appeal an Irish school system might have! What a rallying cry an Irish Minister of Education might give to young Ireland! When we were starting St. Enda's I said to my boys: ‘We must re-create and perpetuate in Ireland the knightly tradition of Cuchulainn, ‘better is short life with honour than long life with dishonour’; ‘I care not though I were to live but one day and one night, if only my fame and my deeds live after me’; the noble tradition of the Fianna, ‘we, the Fianna, never told a lie, falsehood was never imputed to us’; ‘strength in our hands, truth on our lips, and cleanness in our hearts’; the Christ-like tradition of Colmcille, ‘if I die it shall be from the excess of the love I bear the Gael’.’ And to that antique evangel should be added the evangels of later days: the stories of Red Hugh and Wolfe Tone and Robert Emmet and John Mitchel and O'Donovan Rossa and Eoghan O'Growney. I have seen Irish boys and girls moved inexpressibly by the story of Emmet or the story of Anne Devlin, and I have always felt it to be legitimate to make use for educational purposes of an exaltation so produced.
The value of the national factor in education would appear to rest chiefly in this, that it addresses itself to the most generous side of the child's nature, urging him to live up to his finest self. If the true work of the teacher be, as I have said, to help the child to realise himself at his best and worthiest, the factor of nationality is of prime importance, apart from any ulterior propagandist views the teacher may cherish. The school system which neglects it commits, even from the purely pedagogic point of view, a primary blunder. It neglects one of the most powerful of educational resources.
...Finally, I say inspiration must come from the teacher. If we can no longer send the children to the heroes and seers and scholars to be fostered, we can at least bring some of the heroes and seers and scholars to the schools. We can rise up against the system which tolerates as teachers the rejected of all other professions rather than demanding for so priest-like an office the highest souls and noblest intellects of the race. I remember once going into a schoolroom in Belgium and finding an old man talking quietly and beautifully about literature to a silent class of boys; I was told that he was one of the most distinguished of contemporary Flemish poets. Here was the sort of personality, the sort of influence, one ought to see in a schoolroom. Not, indeed, that every poet would make a good schoolmaster, or every schoolmaster a good poet. But how seldom here has the teacher any interest in literature at all; how seldom has he any horizon above his time-table, any soul larger than his results fees!"
" 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.
Agreed. It's a strange state of affairs that education became such a ready vehicle for promoting the currently fashionable ideology. We push untested and in most cases incoherent ideas onto the most vulnerable minds and we feel righteous as we do it. But this seems entirely backwards. Education should evolve slowly and with the most rigorous scientific backing because they're so vulnerable. These kids don't get these years/decades back when we misfire on the next big educational trend. How did kids become such an easy target for social experimentation? How do we shore up the education industry's defenses against bullshit peddlers?
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?
> 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?
No. It's sufficient to test them once. That's how the Chinese imperial examinations worked - you were free to take them whenever you wanted. (Subject to when they were offered.) Passing meant your life was a success.
That system didn't involve schooling at all, but it was more successful at imparting the knowledge it wanted to impart than the school system is. Incentives matter.
If your claim were true, it wouldn't be possible to count to *ten* on both hands.
It's true that fully extending the ring finger whilst fully curling all other fingers is not typically possible, but this is not necessary - all fingers have enough independent movement to indicate "up" and "down".
> If your claim were true, it wouldn't be possible to count to *ten* on both hands.
Well, 5 seconds was an absurdly generous overestimate here.
You can count to ten on both hands by passing a finger of the other hand over the one you're counting on. That requires the ability to extend one finger on each hand while the other hand makes a fist.
I can count to ten on both hands by extending my fingers one at a time.
For what it's worth, I can and have counted to 1023 on my fingers. Several times in fact... I used to count binary on my fingers to help get to sleep.
This is not some rare ability. This is how children are taught to count in many TV shows etc. There are common children's rhymes that involve extending one finger at a time. I suspect you may have some form of abnormality in your hand.
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.
History matched his theory best. I’m 30, but clearly remember my syllabus at 16 being based around some big evocative events, e.g. the Mi Lai massacre, and analysing and debating the different sources. I enjoyed it so much that I still remember it clearly. Reading this I couldn’t help but wonder whether it is actually quite easy for a History/English teacher to stimulate students in this way, and much harder for a Maths teacher. How much of this is the difference in the fields?
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?
Do we need to teach all kids science, especially in elementary and middle school? Most of them won't be doing science. Also, your take on reinventing is bad - while a student can not be very effective reinventing stuff *by themselves* uless they're genuises, that's what the teacher is for! You can present knowledge as though it feels like a discovery.
> 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.
"People are doing the thing which I'm convinced cannot work, it probably doesn't work haha! I'm not gonna check though". Ugh.
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.
I did not explain why, indeed. Brutally short: Inefficient. No need. No positive side-effects. And as I wrote: Can be done later. No harm done. No "time window" missed. Looong version: 1. Too little positive results. a) In the US/UK/Russia and many non-EU countries, foreign languages taught at school are usu. not learned well. In Russia students of German at a standard school could only giggle, when I said "Guten Tag". Otoh, English in EU-countries is taught with some result. I was somewhere at A2 when I went to college (maybe B1 in reading). b) In a paid language-course you are expected to need 100 to 150 lessons per beginner-level (to A1 then to A2). I had "enjoyed" over 1000 lessons at school .... . My Latin is even worse, obviously. ;) In Russia, kids may get only 300 lessons, resulting in level zero (well, they know the alphabet). In the UK-school I visited, the aim looked similar to A1 (barely) - some got there. So: often too inefficient. We learn driving not 'at school'. But at a driving school. Takes 3000$. Language schools are cheaper.
2. Some negative results: It is not just time and money wasted. Such classes are booooring. I watched a kid opening and closing his pen once per minute during a German lesson in Russia. Most just went blank. And if the marks are bad: bad vibes. (I had a D in English for some years in a row. Got to B- in the end.) Oh, and obviously I refused to take French, as school convinced me I am a "failure at learning foreign languages". Schools failure to teach languages makes kids believe languages are HARD, NO FUN and they are NOT GOOD AT IT. Please, stop this madness! (Many people take classes later on their own - my job, btw - more would do so if school had not failed them.)
3. What for?! Kids and adults in the US/UK have near zero need for German/French and even Spanish. Nice to have, sure. But so are a hundred other things. Piano, poker, python. All the while we wonder why our kids do worse than Chinese in STEM. And wished they knew their English better. - If you are a first-world-foreigner in Germany you will have a hard time to practice your German, as most will want to show off their English to you. (Learning English as a foreign language is highly useful, of course. And should+could be done better in most countries - see my original comment. )
4. If you heard claims "learning language L or G" has positive side-effects: Studies can't find any. Bryan Caplan had some fine posts about it.
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?
Not perfectly, but you can find them scattered across https://astralcodexten.substack.com/archive
If you would consider hiring someone to edit these reviews down to a readers digest version, and collecting them in one place, I would pay for it, and I think many others would too. It's some of the best content on the internet -- like a bunch of passion projects from extremely smart people -- but much of that quality is, I think, a bit hidden under verbosity.
I built https://codexcc.neocities.org/ a few weeks ago for this exact reason :)
Waooh, thank you so much, I was also not finding some of the review, this is great, thank you :-))
Thanks Jenn, that's exactly what I was looking for too!
That is a very good deed - I did not look for, but appreciate highly. What I do look for: An ACX archive as the one Scott had on Star Slate Codex: Highly scroll-able that is. (The ACX-substack archive has become kinda unusable when I want to find a "some piece he wrote a year ago or so about ... - no unique search word ... " or for newbies trying to start from the beginning.) I may be just dumb - well: I am, for sure - but in my experience: Many are. When you - or other saints - are done: repeat for livejounal :D Jackdaws love my big sphinx of quartz
Thank you very much for making this.
> but much of that quality is, I think, a bit hidden under verbosity
I don't necessarily mind the verbosity, but most of the reviews seem to be intentionally trying to ape Scott's writing style, and I find it off-putting.
+1
There is value is picking through ordered writing, highlighting and making notes. I use a page downloader add-in for this.
The comment section is another matter entirely requiring considerably more effort...
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 thought that, especially with Philosophic and Ironic and 4 and 5, but I'm not sure the fit is as good in the lower stages.
Stage 3's focus on social roles and relationships often happens at a similar time to the Romantic understanding, but I'm not sure it is as intimately connected as the later stages, although the themes of gossip and personal heroes do tie the two together. While they're associated with distinct personalities (stage 3 usually being over-socialised and unwilling to push boundaries, Romantic having an emphasis on boundary-pushing and the extremes), that doesn't seem to be fundamental.
Stage 2 is primarily about a focus on the self's interests and desires, which is sort of like Mythic, but not much. The world is what you can do with it, which shares a local emphasis with Mythic, but is not the same.
Stage 1 is somewhat harder to find information about, but with its identification with its impulses and emotions, it shares more with Somatic than 2 with Mythic or even 3 with Romantic. The fit only gets that good again at 4/Philosophic and up.
Is there any data, mathetmatical analysis, experiemental validation etc. to back any of this up? Or is it some some jerk coming up with a "theory"?
I noticed the resemblance to Kohlberg, as well. (My college psychology professor did his PhD under Kohlberg.)
In the initial book review submissions, where all the titles were in alphabetical order, there was a review for Kegan's _The Evolving Self_ almost right after this one.
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 have heard the mermaids singing,
But they do not sing for me.
I would agree. The length is a mark against it.
Yep. I read through most of the first part, thinking "When is he going to get to the point?" I then scrolled through the rest of it and...if you can't get to the point faster, I'm not interested in reading your review.
SSC Podcast on 1.5x helped
This exactly:
https://pca.st/episode/7e5b2589-14a1-4687-8f82-e999fb94c18f
Yeah. Having painstakingly read through the whole thing and being deeply interested in the subject matter, the length just simply isn't worth it.
It simply does not do a good job of condensing the main points and isn't informative or entertaining enough to slog through.
Even the _conclusion_ is almost 5000 words. Some of which are spent pointing out the review was too long.
> 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.)
That reminds me of a line from a novel by the late Willie Rushton along the lines of "While it's true that Opposites attract, they don't attract as strongly as Highly Adjacents".
The interesting thing is, with people and their contradictory natures, both of those can be true at the same time.
There was an SSC post that pointed out that different people need different advice.
The appendix to The Blank Slate included another scholar's compilation of "phenomena that are universal to every documented human society", which can be interesting reading. "Cliches" are an entry on that list; so are "mutually contradictory cliches".
The interaction of the two is the heart of politics.
Some more good pairs:
- "The pen is mightier than the sword" vs. "Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me."
- "Absence makes the heart grow fonder" vs. "Out of sight, out of mind".
- 'The pen is mightier than the sword' and 'Actions speak louder than words'
- 'Absence makes the heart grow fonder' and 'Out of sight, out of mind'
- 'The early bird catches the worm' and 'Good things come to those who wait'
- 'A penny saved is a penny earned' and 'You have to save money to make money'
- 'Fortune favours the bold' and 'Haste makes waste'
- 'Don't judge a book by it's cover' and 'First impressions matter'
- 'Don't judge a book by its cover' and 'Still waters run deep' / 'smooth runs the waters where the brook is deep'
- 'Two heads are better than one' and 'Too many cooks spoil the broth'
- 'Many hand make light work' and 'Too many cooks spoil the broth'
- 'The squeaky wheel gets the grease' and 'Silence is golden'
- 'The squeaky wheel gets the grease' and 'To those who have, more shall be given'
- 'Better safe than sorry' and 'No risk, no reward'
- 'All that glitters is not gold' and 'Dress for success'
- 'Slow and steady wins the race' and 'Time waits for no one'
- 'Knowledge is power' and 'Ignorance is bliss'
- 'The truth shall set you free' and 'Ignorance is bliss'
- 'The more, the merrier' and 'Less is more'
- 'Honesty is the best policy' and 'What they don't know won't hurt them'
- 'A rolling stone gathers no moss' and 'Home is where the heart is'
- 'Look on the bright side' and 'Prepare for the worst'
- 'A stich in time saves nine' and 'If it ain't broke, don't fix it'
- 'Curiosity killed the cat' and 'Curiosity is the mother of invention'
- 'Don't count your chickens before they hatch' and 'Visualise your success'
- 'Don't put all your eggs in one basket' and 'Go big or go home'
My Year 5 teacher pointed this out. She said “Absence makes the heart grow fonder” had a continuation, “of another”. More broadly, lots of the specific mythic/romantic/philosophic techniques look familiar from my schooling, while I notice there weren’t any actual suggestions for how to use ironic understanding at all in teaching. That part felt wishful, but much of the rest sounded practical.
Feels like that's a fake continuation, just like the cursed "of the covenant" continuation. It's fascinating that information age totally didn't stop myth building but instead accelerate it even more.
I think I recognised at the time that it was less widespread and younger than the un-continued version. But I don’t think my teacher was lying when she said she heard it from others. I don’t know enough about the provenance of these expressions in general to say that it “wasn’t a real continuation”.
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?
**Anecdata:** I explained to my college roommate that the Sun was a star. It blew her mind. We attended a fairly selective private college.
These people exist; they walk among us. It's fairly easy for the teach-to-test/standards public schooling (in the United States especially, but also in other countries) to miss basic "common knowledge" the year it's "supposed" to be taught and never return to the subject.
I'm personally ignorant about ~1975-2000. Every single history class I was in stopped right around Watergate, assuming (each teacher SAID THIS OUT LOUD) that the previous and/or subsequent classes had/would cover that time period. I've been trying to fill in the gaps on my own.
Addendum: What you consider "common knowledge" is, as you point out by referencing your bubble, based on the people and society around you. I couldn't believe someone could be so wrong about astronomy! ...but I grew up in a Space Town (TM). How many people have the delight and luxury of knowing people who built and designed things that went to the Moon?
We probably need to see the precise wordings of these questions to interpret what these numbers mean. I imagine one could come up with ways of phrasing them that would get a lot of people to give the "wrong" answers.
Agreed. When dealing with social science, it pays to import an entire mine worth of salt.
Agreed. The idea that the questions "the earth goes around the sun" and "not all radioactivity is man-made" were within 4 % of each other was very strange to me.
I wonder if people are misreading that question about "does the Earth go round the Sun?" because it's easy to skim over things and just pick out "Earth" and "Sun" and assume "oh yeah, this is that old thing about the sun goes round the earth, well that's false, I know that" and answer that way?
The "tomatoes have no genes" might be the same sort of misunderstanding; we hear about it only in the context of GMO so people are really answering "ordinary tomatoes are not genetically modified the same way GMO ones are by specific insertion of specific genes" in the short version of "tomatoes don't have genes". We get the idea of "genes" dinned into us as "GMO genes" and not "everything has genes".
"the 71% who don't believe that tomatoes have genes?"
yeah, you don't catch me out with that one. I've looked inside tomatoes, they're just full of pulp and seeds. I don't see no genes!
Sometimes I get tomato ON my jeans, but that's different.
Jeans For Tomatoes Now! is a campaign militiant vegans should start. Why neglect the health, comfort and safety of our friends the silent green animals?
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.
I'll take it one step further and say—and this is just my theory—that humans as a species are naturally incurious outside a limited range of personal or culturally-imposed interests. I remember that somebody (I forget who)—on an ACX thread a year or two back—claimed that being extremely curious was contra-survival because it would distract one from important things—like making a living. I was a little shocked. But after considering it a bit, I admitted that—if we believe that our behaviors are probably hardwired by our genes—then we are adapted to extracting resources from relatively static environments. Being more efficient at extracting those resources, and finding new ways to extract those resources, was probably beneficial to to our ancestors' survival. The ones that spent all the time away from the campfires looking up at the stars probably got eaten by nighttime predators (I say that in semi-seriousness). The humans who lived long enough to pass on their genes were probably very practical people. Not stupid but very focused. And that focusedness has been selected for over hundreds of thousands of years. So I suspect there's very little schools can do to train or induce young humans to be voraciously curious.
This may also be why we find television so addictive—Because our Paleolithic ancestors spent their evenings around the safety of a fire—while one of the elders of their group narrated stories to them to keep them entertained (and near the fire). TVs are just modern campfires, and our genus Homo brains can't resist their siren call.
I'm don't remember if Piaget commented on this—but children from ages five until adolescence seem to display much more curiosity than teenagers or adults. At an early age, kids start asking why? why? why? why? driving their parents crazy. Then they develop obsessions and passions—like dinosaurs, astronomy, rock collecting, baseball cards, etc. But by the time the hormones kick in most kids give up those pursuits. And they become boring adults.
It's actually thought that was a major reason homo sapiens survived and homo neanderthalensis did not, is that we're inherently more curious and open to new experience. It led us to branch out and explore more, adapting to more unique climates and geographical regions, and also allowed us to form larger groups beyond immediate family, whereas neanderthals tended to stay in one place and live in small very close kin groups. This led to faster spread of technological innovation in homo sapiens compared to neaderthals, not because we were actually smarter but just because we encountered and talked to more other people, resulting in information sharing and spreading.
Neandertals had very small populations. Bigger populations are subject to more selection vs drift, which is why so many Australian species get outcompeted by intrusive species.
I think that's all speculative hand-waving. It's impossible to tell how large their social units were from the limited skeletal remains available. One paper speculated that *all* Neanderthals were inbred based on the recovered genome of a single individual. That study was hyped in the MSM. Meanwhile, in other individuals' DNA we see evidence of exogamy between their lineage with two of the other lineages of Homo sapiens. (Well, they were inbred except when they weren't! ;-) )
As for far-ranging, they successfully populated Europe and Central Asia. The Wikipedia article on Neanderthals claims that the "generally small and widely dispersed fossil sites suggest that Neanderthals lived in less numerous and socially more isolated groups than contemporary Homo sapiens"—but it doesn't give any links to support that claim. The key phrase in that sentence is "than contemporary Homo sapiens". Most of our data on contemporary hunter-gatherer groups is from the past century. And it's been argued that modern hunter-gatherers are not representative of h-g's before the advent of agriculture. I've never heard of a study that compared the number and density of archaeological sites geographically across time. If you have one, please post a link!
Also, Home erectus the predecessor to H. sapiens neanderthalensis, H. sapiens denisova, and H. sapiens sapiens spread farther than Neanderthals ever did. H. erectus had less cranial capacity, but they didn't need more complex behaviors to spread further across the planet than Neanderthals. So the idea that H. sapiens sapiens are "more curious and open to new experience"—and that "led us to branch out and explore more, adapting to unique climates and geographical regions" is an idea made popular based on Jared Diamond's tendency to be a convincing bullshitter. Actually, Jared Diamond didn't originate the idea—it was just received wisdom when he was in grad school. Diamond just popularized it. Back when I was studying Biobehavioral Sciences in grad school (1980s), the consensus theory was that Neanderthals, because of the shape and position of their hyoid bone, couldn't vocalize well—and therefore weren't capable of language—and thus they were incapable of (complex) symbolic reasoning. Now that we've found cave art and ritual behaviors associated with Neanderthals, none except the old guard of Physical Anthropologists believe that anymore.
I broke my own rule by not providing links. Sorry.
What's interesting to me is how many people on a list devoted to rational thinking just accept the standard wisdom if it sounds reasonable without bothering to check the data. Not trying to put you folks on the spot because this seems to SOP for most humans—but this seems like the perfect example of how incurious we are despite as a group being well-educated and (probably) of higher than average intelligence.
Anyway, I was curious enough to double-check my assumptions (Yay! So pin a rose on my ass!).
The inbreeding article is below. A Neanderthal female was the daughter of two half-siblings. What's so great about their study is that they were the first to sequence the entire genome. They just happen to jump the speculative shark with the suggestion that inbreeding rates across all Neanderthal groups were high. Plus they detected interbreeding events among different hominin groups in the Late Pleistocene. (What interests me is the unknown lineage of Homo that contributed the Denisovan gene pool. Other studies have mentioned them, too.)
https://www.nature.com/articles/nature12886
And here's an assessment of Neanderthal creativity...
https://www.academia.edu/80024545/Symbolic_or_utilitarian_Juggling_interpretations_of_Neanderthal_behavior_new_inferences_from_the_study_of_engraved_stone_surfaces
Known Neanderthal range here. I don't know if it's up to date, though.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Range_of_Homo_neanderthalensis.png
Known Homo Erectus range here. Again I don't know if this current data.
https://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~vaucher/History/Evolution/Erectus/slideShow.html
It's an old problem, and one Chesterton discusses in his autobiography: what happens between the time a child learns everything with no trouble and devouring interest, and then goes to school and plods his way through it?
"The change from childhood to boyhood, and the mysterious transformation that produces that monster the schoolboy, might be very well summed up in one small fact. To me the ancient capital letters of the Greek alphabet, the great Theta, a sphere barred across the midst like Saturn, or the great Upsilon, standing up like a tall curved chalice, have still a quite unaccountable charm and mystery, as if they were the characters traced in wide welcome over Eden of the dawn. The ordinary small Greek letters, though I am now much more familiar with them, seem to me quite nasty little things like a swarm of gnats. As for Greek accents, I triumphantly succeeded, through a long series of school-terms, in avoiding learning them at all; and I never had a higher moment of gratification than when I afterwards discovered that the Greeks never learnt them either. I felt, with a radiant pride, that I was as ignorant as Plato and Thucydides. At least they were unknown to the Greeks who wrote the prose and poetry that was thought worth studying; and were invented by grammarians, I believe, at the time of the Renaissance. But it is a simple psychological fact; that the sight of a Greek capital still fills me with happiness, the sight of a small letter with indifference tinged with dislike, and the accents with righteous indignation reaching the point of profanity. And I believe that the explanation is that I learnt the large Greek letters, as I learnt the large English letters, at home. I was told about them merely for fun while I was still a child; while the others I learnt during the period of what is commonly called education; that is, the period during which I was being instructed by somebody I did not know, about something I did not want to know.
But I say this merely to show that I was a much wiser and widerminded person at the age of six than at the age of sixteen. I do not base any educational theories upon it, heaven forbid. This work cannot, on some points, avoid being theoretical; but it need not add insult to injury by being educational. I certainly shall not, in the graceful modern manner, turn round and abuse my schoolmasters because I did not choose to learn what they were quite ready to teach. It may be that in the improved schools of today, the child is so taught that he crows aloud with delight at the sight of a Greek accent. But I fear it is much more probable that the new schools have got rid of the Greek accent by getting rid of the Greek. And upon that point, as it happens, I am largely on the side of my schoolmasters against myself. I am very glad that my persistent efforts not to learn Latin were to a certain extent frustrated; and that I was not entirely successful even in escaping the contamination of the language of Aristotle and Demosthenes. At least I know enough Greek to be able to see the joke, when somebody says (as somebody did the other day) that the study of that language is not suited to an age of democracy. I do not know what language he thought democracy came from; and it must be admitted that the word seems now to be a part of the language called journalese. But my only point for the moment is personal or psychological; my own private testimony to the curious fact that, for some reason or other, a boy often does pass, from an early stage when he wants to know nearly everything, to a later stage when he wants to know next to nothing. A very practical and experienced traveller, with nothing of the mystic about him, once remarked to me suddenly: "There must be something rottenly wrong with education itself. So many people have wonderful children and all the grown-up people are such duds." And I know what he meant; though I am in doubt whether my present duddishness is due to education, or to some deeper and more mysterious cause.
...It is time that something should be said about the masters, and especially the High Master. Immensely important as we thought ourselves in comparison with those remote but respectable enemies, after all they did have something to do with the school. The most eccentric and entertaining of them, Mr. Elam, has already been sketched in brilliant black and white by the pen of Mr. Compton Mackenzie. I have forgotten whether Mr. Mackenzie mentioned what always struck me as the most disturbing eccentricity of that eccentric; the open derision with which he spoke of his own profession and position, of those who shared it with him and even of those who were set over him in its exercise. He would explain the difference between satire and the bitterness of the risus sardonicus by the helpful parable, "If I were walking along the street and fell down in the mud, I should laugh a sardonic laugh. But if I were to see the High Master of this school fall down in the mud, I should laugh a sarcastic laugh." I chiefly mention his name here for another reason; because he once vented his scorn for what he called "the trade of an usher" in the form of a rhetorical question addressed to a boy: "Why are boys sent to school, Robinson?" Robinson, with downcast eyes and an air of offensive virtue, replied faintly, "To learn, sir." "No, boy, no," said the old gentleman wagging his head. "It was because one day at breakfast Mr. Robinson said to Mrs. Robinson, 'My dear, we must do something about that boy. He's a nuisance to me and he's a nuisance to you and he's a perfect plague to the servants.'" Then, with an indescribable extreme of grinding and grating contempt: "'So we'll Pay Some Man. . . .'"
I say I introduce this ancient anecdote for another reason; and it is partly because I would suggest another answer. If ever the problem troubled me in my boyhood, it did not force me in the direction of the lofty morality of Robinson. The idea that I had come to school to work was too grotesque to cloud my mind for an instant. It was also in too obvious a contrast with the facts and the result. I was very fond of my friends; though, as is common at such an age, I was much too fond of them to be openly emotional about it. But I do remember coming, almost seriously, to the conclusion that a boy must go to school to study the characters of his schoolmasters. And I still think that there was something in it. After all, the schoolmaster is the first educated grown-up person that the boy comes to see constantly, after having been introduced at an early age to his father and mother. And the masters at St. Paul's were very interesting; even those of them who were not so obviously eccentric as the celebrated Mr. Elam. To one very distinguished individual, my own personal debt is infinite; I mean, the historian of the Indian Mutiny and of the campaigns of Caesar--Mr. T. Rice Holmes. He managed, heaven knows how, to penetrate through my deep and desperately consolidated desire to appear stupid; and discover the horrible secret that I was, after all, endowed with the gift of reason above the brutes. He would suddenly ask me questions a thousand miles away from the subject at hand, and surprise me into admitting that I had heard of the Song of Roland, or even read a play or two of Shakespeare. Nobody who knows anything of the English schoolboy at that date will imagine that there was at the moment any pleasure in such prominence or distinction. We were all hag-ridden with a horror of showing off, which was perhaps the only coherent moral principal we possessed. There was one boy, I remember, who was so insanely sensitive on this point of honour, that he could hardly bear to hear one of his friends answer an ordinary question right. He felt that his comrade really ought to have invented some mistake, in the general interest of comradeship. When my information about the French epic was torn from me, in spite of my efforts, he actually put his head in his desk and dropped the lid on it, groaning in a generous and impersonal shame and faintly and hoarsely exclaiming, "Oh, shut it. ... Oh, shut up!" He was an extreme exponent of the principle; but it was a principle which I fully shared. I can remember running to school in sheer excitement repeating militant lines of "Marmion" with passionate emphasis and exultation; and then going into class and repeating the same lines in the lifeless manner of a hurdy-gurdy, hoping that there was nothing whatever in my intonation to indicate that I distinguished between the sense of one word and another.
...I recall these things, so contrary to the previous course of my school life, because I am not sorry to be an exception to the modern tendency to reproach the old Victorian schoolmaster with stupidity and neglect and to represent the rising generation as a shining band of Shelleys inspired by light and liberty to rise. The truth is that in this case it was I who exhibited the stupidity; though I really think it was largely an affected stupidity. And certainly it was I who rejoiced in the neglect, and who asked for nothing better than to be neglected. It was, if anything, the authorities who dragged me, in my own despite, out of the comfortable and protected atmosphere of obscurity and failure. Personally, I was perfectly happy at the bottom of the class."
Wow! Thanks for that.
I'm pretty sure it's a matter of proportion. You really do need to pay attention to urgent things, but there's plenty of time for thinking about non-urgent things, too.
I've read that the evidence is pretty clear that people learn math better if you just teach it to them and have them practice. Stories might be nice, but no, you cannot get beyond the simple fact that you have to teach the math, and you should be as clear as possible.
Similar thought on teaching languages. I had a French class I enjoyed because the teacher told us lots of cool facts about french history and how the language depends more on vowels. But that did not help me one bit to learn verb conjugatations, and I came out of the class with very little French. I learned conjugations by rote learning and speaking French a lot - and then lots more rote learning.
I feel like a lot of educational theories are motivated by people struggling to accept that straight on rote learning and practice is often the best tool. There's even evidence (tweeted by Steven Pinker recently) that hard-nosed teaching can even lead to *more* creativity, by giving you the skills you need to be creative.
Indeed. Other than the fact that Egan does not seem to be totally against rote learning (according to the reviewer, he believes in the virtue of learning poems by heart), much of his philosophy seems to be yet another flavour of educational progressivism. Educational progressivism is very tempting, especially among those people who were curious children and who felt stifled by what they were forced to work on in school, but the fact is that if the goal of education is to transmit a certain common base of knowledge, more so-called "traditional" methods are simply more efficient. Of course, this depends on what the goal of education is in the first place, so taking into account the philosophy of education is necessary.
I'm not opposed to Egan's idea to talk about well-known mathematicians in the process of teaching mathematics. I try to do it as much as I can when I teach math, and it's certainly common practice: pick up any mathematics textbook, and it will contain biographies of the mathematicians who came up with the concepts discussed in the book (including female and non-white mathematicians, for diversity, equity and inclusion concerns). But I don't think it's absolutely necessary either.
I remember when I became disillusioned with maths. I was in 4th year of high school in the last year of mandatory maths. I was top of my class but it seemed so utterly pointless. If I followed this set of steps I could work out what the standard deviation was. It seemed clear to me then that no one in the real world was actually doing this set of steps to find the standard deviation of things, especially by hand.
It all seemed to be part of some bizarre make work program and I wanted no part of it. I chose all arts subject for my final years, spent a few years after school bumming around. Eventually I took a notion to learn the basics of programming found I was very suited too it and have since had a very productive career.
I do hold it against my high school that they made math (and IT) seem so boring and worthless that even though I was good at them I couldn't get rid of them fast enough.
A little colour and zooming out to discover who invented standard deviations and why might have gone a long way. Or not, who knows.
The giant problem is that if "if the goal of education is to transmit a certain common base of knowledge", everything tried so far fails if the student is not interested, and no matter how hard teachers try, they can rarely get students interested in much of what the students are supposed to learn. So students "learn" enough to pass a test and go on to the next unit, but forget most of it within a few months. The educational jargon for this is that "knowledge decays over time".
I strongly suspect that there is no way to solve this problem. In other words, our educational goals are impossible.
"I learned conjugations by rote learning and speaking French a lot"
Yep, its the same way kids learn.
https://www.science.org/doi/abs/10.1126/science.1199327
Rote learning was not tried and found wanting. It was found hard and is no longer tried.
We are learning so much about training AIs. Why are we not using that experience to improve our training of children? For example, the knowledge examples appear similar to descriptions of AI fragility. People learn how to respond to questions that are well-represented in their training datasets and suck at generalizing to out-of-distribution problems. But we know how to fix this!
For example, my young daughter is learning math. Change a problem slightly and she can no longer do it. The solution is to give her many, many problems that are all slightly different.
In general, if we are nothing more than stochastic parrots then our educational theories should reflect that unpleasant realization. Rather than being founded on some 18th century view of humanity as exercising our god-given Reason within the bounds of our Knowledge. Like an idealized scholar lived in our heads and teaching was a way of giving him books for his library. Books he would refer to in answering questions about the world.
>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.)
Are you talking about learning a concept by seeing the _same_ example of the pattern many times or by seeing many _different_ examples of the pattern? Because to me, the former is "rote-learning" but the latter is not. But I do also think that rote-learning of the former type does work. The key factor is what is the thing being rote-memorized.
Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman had the example where students memorized the description of some physical law from a book but then when confronted with an example of it in action couldn't apply the law they'd "learned". They'd learned the description of the concept but not the actual concept. I think all learning is actually just memorization of information but the exactly what information you memorize decides whether you now understand something better or not.
Example of rote-learning that works:
- Using flash cards to memorize vocabulary. Each flash card has the same information that you review again and again. A short explanation of the meaning and one example sentence using the word will suffice to adequately learn a word well enough to understand it when later encountered in a new context.
Example of rote-learning that doesn't work:
- Using a flash card describing the structure of adding -ize to a word and how it changes the meaning. Repeatedly reading the description and trying to understand it with the hope that you'd then understand the meaning of an -ize word when you encounter one. Doesn't work very well in my experience for a lot of language learning concepts. Even if I kind of get the concept from a description, when I actually encounter a word with the structure I just don't recognize it.
Not rote-learning that works:
- Learning the meaning of adding -ize to a word by learning multiple words of this type with flash cards. The concept isn't being learned by repeating the same info again again so this isn't rote-learning, in my opinion. Often works better for language structures that the above method.
So to me it seems that sometimes a concept is describable in words but those words can't impart the concept to you. And in that case, rote-learning (as I defined it above) won't work. The Feynman case wouldn't actually be an example of this but rather of only repeating words without understanding their meaning.
I think the issue is, "learning method [X] is good" and "teaching method [X] is good" are not the same things.
I once encountered a programming course that appeared to consist entirely of retyping existing, working pieces of code. I self-learned programming from a relatively young age, I distinctly recall how hard the process was, and having the idea spelled out explicitly it was one of those "eureka!" moments for me.
I'm sure it works, but there's a necessary caveat here - it works for people who want to learn, know what they want to learn, and know what they want to accomplish with what they learned. If, instead, you use it on unsuspecting kids, the result will be a stuff of nightmares. The kids will struggle with what they will (correctly) view as absurd demands, most will learn nothing, a minority will end up with a fraction of their precious brain resources permanently dedicated to something they'll never need, and lucky few will one day discover they have a valuable skill acquired.
Multiply this across all disciplines of human knowledge, and you get... schools for most of history of schooling.
While I agree that rote learning and repetition are essential in places, one also needs to provide the student with the motivation to do them - you need a carrot to entice them, not merely a stick to punish the ones who dare to want to have fun. I read the proposal described here as being about providing that motivation, and while it was barely a line in the review it was said that Egan is not opposed to rote learning.
I read it largely the same way, which is why I think it would fail if the subject matter remained the same as it is today. Stated bluntly, lots of students have little intrinsic interest in much of today's curriculum. Teaching it a different way probably isn't going to get them to develop an interest.
"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."
This is the problem with at least half of the rhetoric (political and academic) about education and school. Which is one reason so little thought is given to the question, "Why do we actually want people to know that?" Because everybody is curious about something.
> 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.
Ditto on the "why the hell would I want to wrestle an octupus? that's dumb, they have the advantage in hand-to-tentacle combat, instead let me use the human tech that can blow that sucker into calamari".
*slowly puts bottle of lube behind back*
Y-yeah, wrestling octopus? Terrible idea, who'd try that?
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?
> If his methods cannot help the worst performing students, his methods are worthless.
Why?
Presumably because the remainder "are amongst the best in the world."
Pretty methods to teach smart kids from involved homes work fine, whether it's Egan or any of the other systems going back decades.
Pretty methods that crash up against less able kids and kids who are able but totally uninterested in what you're trying to teach, including the civic virtues you are trying to smuggle in, and kids who are going to have to go out into the world of work where it's not fun passion jobs but boring, grind jobs where you do the same thing over and over and over again and you say 'yes sir no sir three bags full sir' to the boss who gives you dumb work are not prepared for the same after a schooling that is all "okay kids, let's be DRAMATIC and EMOTIONAL and ENGAGE YOUR NATURAL SENSE OF PLAY".
Oh, I do have Opinions on "you're only going to work in the box factory so Music and Art are not for you and would be wasted on you".
That is what aggravates me about the proposals (mainly on here, sorry lads!) about "I loved STEM but having to write English essays was dumb and boring, drop that shit from the curriculum in the name of improving the education system". Without exposure to a wide range of subjects, you don't know who will find an aptitude or an interest for something that they aren't getting at home.
But even if you love music or art or languages, there is a point where it's no longer enough to be 'this is the fun engaging way to teach', it has to be 'now you practice the same thing over and over until you ingrain it into muscle memory'. And that does involve 'learn to sit still and concentrate and focus, learn to finish a task even if you're bored and tired'.
Because whether it's cooking a meal or doing the laundry, never mind a work job, you can't simply wander off to do something more fun in the middle of it if you expect to have anything at the end. Otherwise you have half-cooked items and dirty clothes piling up, and nothing to eat or wear.
That's why the "do it as long as it's fun" approach to teaching/learning will only work for small kids, because they don't have the capacity to sit still and work on one thing for a long period. As they get older, they need to acquire this ability: being sixteen and still operating on "after ten minutes I'm bored and want to do something else" won't help you learn something.
And also, having parents who judge your ability to persevere by your ability to keep trying to solve a difficult math problem sucks. My parents thought I could "do science" but not work in a shop. Because working in a shop requires Being Responsible with Other People's Money, and also because Science is Interesting. When I discovered that I could feed pigs, too, I won something precious.
"But even if you love music or art or languages, there is a point where it's no longer enough to be 'this is the fun engaging way to teach', it has to be 'now you practice the same thing over and over until you ingrain it into muscle memory'. And that does involve 'learn to sit still and concentrate and focus, learn to finish a task even if you're bored and tired'."
Yes, becoming skilled at anything requires many hours of repetitive, tedious, exhausting practice, and that requires devotion. But cultivating a passion for art or music or literature or science can help fuel that devotion, even for the boring aspects of learning that don't stoke the passions directly. The idea is to make children really *care* about a subject while they're young, enough that they'll be willing to put in the work by the time they reach adolescence.
Judging by this review, Egan would agree that a 16 year old can't simply rely on "do it as long as it's fun" anymore. For one thing, he doesn't reject the traditional academic/philosophic model of education; in fact, he considers it to be an essential stage in the learning process, especially at the high school level. For another, he specifies that all of his ideas are meant to complement traditional education styles, not replace them.
There's a big difference between being groomed for factory work, and being treated as no different than any other kid.
Kids without an IQ of 85 are never, ever going to be capable of any remotely cognitively demanding job. It doesn't matter how much you encourage them, it doesn't matter how much tutoring you give them. They simply lack the raw brain power. Insisting that everyone is taught algebra and how to write essays is not just a waste of resources, you're not optimally preparing them for work they're actually capable of.
And if you want to talk about their spirit, they're going to feel like morons for not understanding algebra or how to write essays. But if you show them how to do trade work from a relatively young age, not only will they be better prepared for the job market they actually have access to, but they'll probably also feel better about themselves because they're doing things they're actually capable of. Most people with an IQ of 85 don't read books at all except when required to by school. As a group, they're never going to be 'intellectually curious' in any meaningful way.
It's easy to identify the diamonds in the rough. There's little risk of the '1 in X thousand' smart but poor black student not being recognized for their intelligence and missing out on their potential (though even if there were, it's weird that they're treated as more important than the thousands of non-bright students getting suboptimal preparation for the world).
Because you can only make smart students marginally smarter and the impact that will have is trivial.
But if you can make the dumb students closer to the average student, this represents a radical societal shift.
And if the school was only made up of smart students and dumb ones, that would be an entirely valid point. But as you just pointed out, there's another group, the largest of all: the average students. And Chris J says nothing about moving the average students closer to the smart ones. Seems to me that that would have an even bigger societal impact, no?
The dumber someone is, the harder life will be for them and the bigger societal drag they will provide (on *average*). The further from smart you are, the bigger the impact of marginal intelligence gains are.
Of course, it's all irrelevant since Egan has no evidence that marginal intelligence (or academic ability) can be improved in the US, and we should assume his theory is as valid as every other failed educational theory of the past century until he has some experiements to prove otherwise.
IRC, New Orleans was able to increase tests scores by an entire standard deviation by moving to a 100% charter model.
https://www.stitcher.com/show/rationally-speaking/episode/rationally-speaking-225-neerav-kingsland-on-the-case-for-charter-schools-58335211
Cool! Now, do we have any evidence that this translates to 1 SD worth of actual better learning and knowledge retention, as opposed to the charter schools just being good at teaching to the test? It's always important to remember Goodhart's Law in scenarios like this.
I listened to the podcast years ago, but never went and read the primary literature. They did some controlled trials with some students in traditional schools and some with the option of going to charter schools. Some Harvard profs were involved. I really doubt they tried to distinguish 'test scores' from 'actual learning' though
There are plenty of stupid white kids, uninterested white kids, white kids who only want to play games, smoke weed, and watch porn all day. I can tell you that from experience.
And I wonder about the Chinese system; testing well tells you nothing apart from "they use cram schools to tutor kids to do standardised tests". I think standardised tests are very useful, but they're not the be-all and end-all. Cherry pick your best performing students, don't let the dummies sit the tests in order not to drag the results down, and only enter the best performing cities in things like PISA gives you a slanted view of what the system is like.
Financial literacy education is a joke. Nobody is going to remember stuff that isn't relevant for them until years later. The only students who will even be interested are the students who work this stuff out independently.
And good luck teaching meditation to students who can't sit still long enough to even focus on things more stimulating than their own breathing.
[I deleted the wrong post now the thread is messed up...C'est la vie!]
"Nobody is going to remember stuff that isn't relevant for them until years later. "
Agreed, and keeping this in mind you pull them with teacher magic of anecdotes they can relate to and role play of their future selves, for example. And push them in the traditional way with grades. As someone said far easier with the upper-middle, college educated area. Meld 'financial literacy' with math do an age-appropriate version of public company analysis(fav meme stock), business operation(e.g. theme park), real estate(dinosaur ranch?).
Some stuff you teach with all stick if you have to then swerve back to what they're more interested in. The benefits of meditation and a couple basic techniques, 'selling' it to them as a superpower(because it is) or first aid kit for the mind if there is no present interest or whatever teachers do to pull rabbits out of hat.
Re: independent study. Yes, but for K-12 they still must achieve core competencies. It would be neat to have individual or small groups work on a piece of a project they have them assemble the their pieces into a whole class project. Never heard of this being done though.
Speaking for myself, I find scams interesting, and probably would have when I was a teenager.
Recognizing and fending off scams isn't all there is to financial literacy, but I think it would be worth teaching and has a reasonable chance of being remembered.
Also, stories, stories, stories.
There's a guy in my group of friends who was born and educated in an Asian country (although not China). We've noticed that whenever we go out to a restaurant and it's time to pick up the bill, he adds up the individual dishes and figures out everyone's share (plus tax plus tip) almost instantly. When we asked him how he does it, he was at first surprised, then said, "It's nothing special, everyone at my school could do it. They'd teach you the mental arithmetic techniques, give you a timed test, and the worst couple students would get to kneel on some dried peas in the corner for an hour. A kid who goes through that a couple times tends to learn math pretty quick afterwards".
I was born and raised in Southeast Asia. Your friend's story reminded me of the thing our math teacher did in elementary school.
Before teaching the session, he'd first line up all the students in front of a poster tacked to the wall on which were 35 cards (5x7 arrangement) each with a simple multiplication question, like 9x8=?. He'd tell the kid at the front of the line to get ready, take out his stopwatch, point the tip of his cane (my school caned everyone for all kinds of reasons) to the first card at the top left, and move rightward zig-zagging down at a speed of slightly over one card per second.
Every time the tip of the cane touched a card, the kid was supposed blurt out the answer (e.g. '72!'). Every time the kid missed an answer, or stayed silent, he'd count out: 'One.' 'Two.' And so on.
At the end -- let's say the kid missed 6 questions out of 35 -- our math teacher would say: 'Palm.' The kid would put his or her non-writing hand's palm out, and the teacher would whack it with his cane 6 times. He'd pause a bit between strikes, so less machine gun and more distinct WHACKS. Then the kid would go to his or her seat, and the next kid in line would do the same thing.
It was all done pretty efficiently, because there was a lot of us in the class and he did want to spare enough time to cover the day's lessons. I don't remember malice or glee from the teacher, just a sense of... duty?
We were all scared shitless of him, so pretty soon nearly all of us did our times tables quickly and perfectly. We could of course Goodhart it, by practicing on that poster in our free time. Our class' math scores topped our cohort, so I suppose from that perspective our teacher achieved his goal?
Chortle! The original Tudor method - "Knowledge that is not willingly sought, must needs with the rod be taught!"
Seriously, that approach if applied generally tends to produce a dogmatic inflexible outlook. But in times past that was exactly what was required, and innovations were a threat to the status quo. That is pretty much the opposite of the aims of education today, certainly in STEM subjects.
I disagree. STEM requires that you know your multiplication tables. How can you expect to innovate if you don't even know the basics of what has already been done?
Of course, but that is why I said "if applied generally" i.e. rote learning of everything.
Why of all things would knowing the multiplication table be required? Especially when we have calculators in our pockets
I think that is how it works: the kid who is figuring out from first principles the answer to the problem is going to be outpaced by the kid who goes "9x8=72" from rote learning memory and moves on to do the rest of the test.
The first kid may understand the maths better, but won't score as high as "second kid completed all the questions in the time allotted".
It's not even clear that the first kid will in fact understand the mathematics better. There is a tendency in mathematics education to push learners to develop personal strategies to solve problems instead of teaching standard methods, based on the idea that teaching these standard methods can lead to learners being able to solve problems but without knowing what they're doing (being "mathematical zombies"), but what evidence there is actually appears to show that procedural and conceptual understanding in fact develop hand in hand. In other words, knowing how to solve a problem helps in understanding why the method works.
Evidence also appears to show that developing fluency in solving problems, which can be helped by learning standard techniques, is good for motivation.
I feel we need a dogmatically inflexible approach to multiplication tables, that stamps on innovative beliefs such as 5x7 = 57.
Learning off times tables seems to be something that has been ditched in the name of the 'new maths' and that you want kids to understand from first principles how multiplication works. All I can say is that would never work for me and rote learning is the only way I survived.
I went to school in the days of corporal punishment, too 😁 And we too had a scary maths teacher (who didn't slap us but simply terrorised us by quiet aura of menace) and she dragged us through three years of maths in one year and we all passed our state exam, even me. So fear works!
But understanding is better. But rote learning is not the enemy, either.
For what it's worth, I learned the times tables without anyone hitting me. I'm not the fastest at mental arithmetic, but I can do it.
Being able to do arithmetic like that used to be a useful and typical skill for shopkeepers. In Britain they even had to deal with a non decimal currency. I once found an old book in the library that explained how to learn it and contained exercises.
>There are plenty of stupid white kids, uninterested white kids, white kids who only want to play games, smoke weed, and watch porn all day. I can tell you that from experience.
So what?
The point is that on average, white american students outperform literally MOST of the world. The point is not that all white students are smart or all black students are dumb. But overall, American whites are better than most of the world and most of the apparent "failings" of american education lie in the underperformance of black and hispanic students.
>And I wonder about the Chinese system; testing well tells you nothing apart from "they use cram schools to tutor kids to do standardised tests".
The point is that whatever the Chinese education is doing, the practical reality is that it works! Not in the standardized test scores, but in the fact that the people educated by this system effected the rapid industrialization of a giant country. The practical outcomes of Chinese education are people capable of great things, and that's all that really matters.
"There are plenty of stupid white kids, uninterested white kids, white kids who only want to play games, smoke weed, and watch porn all day. I can tell you that from experience."
The fact you think this is relevant in any way is astounding.
"White people are taller than Asians on average" does NOT imply the non-existence of short whites or tall asians. But if we assembled basketball teams by randomly selecting from the general population asians for one team and whites for the other team, the white team being taller on average is going to explain much of why the white team does better than the asian team on average. Even IF some of the white players are shorter than some of the Asian players.
Every country has smart and dumb people. The average is the main thing that matters here.
Mark_NoBadCake
3 hr ago
"including the civic virtues you are trying to smuggle in, and kids who are going to have to go out into the world of work where it's not fun passion jobs but boring, grind jobs"
Civic virtues become surprisingly relevant after a few hard life experiences and if embedded in interesting, time-worn stories they'll stick in memory so the encapsulated advice will be readily available. Also helps with abstract thinking and understanding articles written by and for educated persons which are always chuck full of allusions. Then there's Egan's life skill training that few students wouldn't benefit from. The first subjects I'd suggest are financial literacy and meditation.
I've been completely convinced by Kmele Foster that looking at almost _anything_ through the lens of race obscures more than it reveals and whatever patterns you might find are almost definitionally spurious.
But ignoring that for a second, according to this review, Egan thinks that htis method would be beneficial across the intellectual spectrum, which was stated pretty clearly.
This whole comment reads like a screed that you felt like you could slot in seeing that this review was "about education", and so you felt no need to actually engage with what was being said at all. You mentioned Egan a few times, but didn't actually address anything said in this review, including the parts that actually are relevant.
I'd be interested in hearing Foster's arguments about this; do you have any recommendations about what would give me the most bang for my buck?
Unfortunately I don't think he has collected his entire argument in a single place. He has had several discussions on the We the Fifth podcase with Coleman Hughes, Glenn Lowrey and others on the topic, so those might be helpful. I'll try to give my (very poor) summary, but there's a reason I'm just a consumer of content and not a generator, so please don't take this as the best version of this argument (or anything close to it).
At the very core, the main thing is that Kmele Foster is an individualist who believes that individual characteristics and differences are always going to be more important than _any_ group characteristics (race or otherwise). That, while someone may be a member of a multitude of groups, none of them come anywhere close to enclosing the totality of who a person is.
But even aside from that, I think what he would say about race specifically is that the way race is defined and used in actual cultural context, it _can not_ be the causal factor for _any_ of the things that people like to look at through the lens of race. Imagine some hypothetical "criminality" gene. It might be true that this gene is present in a higher percentage of one race than another. But the definition of race actually has nothing to do with this gene, and so there will be lots of members of a given race who _don't_ have it, and lots of members of the other that _do_. So when you start talking about how crime is higher in race x as if that is an explanation, you are actually hiding from yourself the underlying truth and preventing yourself from finding it.
This also of course ignores the fact that many of the statistics that show that "race x has more y when you control for z" are all kind of bullshit. How many times has Scott and others written about how _hard_ it is to _actually_ control for z? How many people who espouse these kinds of arguments would also probably talk a big game about the replication crisis, ignoring the fact that those kinds of "I controlled for z" studies are a _huge_ part of what has failed to replicate?
So to try and summarise:
1) The statistics showing that "race" has some differences are questionable and even when not, they ignore things like the fact that Eastern European whites are some of the lowest performing immigrants while Nigerian immigrants are some of the highest (which also shouldn't be taken as causative or that meaningful, just that you can find differences in racial groups/subgroups in almost any direction you want if you cherry pick)
2)Individual characteristics, situations, contexts, and histories are almost always more important
3) The actual definitions of race are such that race _can't_ be the true causal characteristic in any of these things and talking about it like it is prevents you from finding the real underlying reasons
I really wish that he had a centrally located thing I could link you to rather than saying "go listen to the last 5 years of We The Fifth podcasts", since that's a very unhelpful thing. He's talked about it on Twitter some, but that's not a very good venue for deep discussions, and I think it's the place where he usually makes the weakest case, thanks to the constraints of the platform.
You might get a sense of his arguments from these two podcasts, but even those won't be complete and aren't aimed _exactly_ at this idea, but it's probably the best I can give you unfortunately:
https://wethefifth.com/blogs/episodes/121-8220-on-anti-racism-w-glenn-loury-john-mcwhorter-coleman-hughes-thomas-chatterton-williams-8221?page=5
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3hfm4D64Xt4
You went above and beyond, thank you.
+1
>At the very core, the main thing is that Kmele Foster is an individualist who believes that individual characteristics and differences are always going to be more important than _any_ group characteristics (race or otherwise). That, while someone may be a member of a multitude of groups, none of them come anywhere close to enclosing the totality of who a person is.
Nothing encloses the totality, but that's irrelevant! Sex doesn't explain the toality of an individual, but it's obviously absurd to ignore people's sex when analyzing society. This person just wants to treat race differently for ideological reasons.
Either we explain the world better using race, or not. And the data clearly, CLEARLY shows we do explain it better with race.
There's no way of making sense of the world, or even american society, by ignoring race except through an endless series of just so stories.
>It might be true that this gene is present in a higher percentage of one race than another. But the definition of race actually has nothing to do with this gene, and so there will be lots of members of a given race who _don't_ have it, and lots of members of the other that _do_.
It doesn't matter!
We're interested in explaining group differences.
If blacks commit more crime, and this difference can be significantly explained by the higher prevlance of these gene (or really, genes) in the black population, then that's all that matters!
No other individual factor explains why black people commit more crime or do worse in school, so by your own reasoning, all other explanations are necessarily invalid.
If we have to treat people only as individuals, then you do NOT get to complain that black people as a group make less money than whites, go to jail more than whites, get shot by police more than whites, or do worse by almost any socio-economic measure. If you endorse this view, then great. But saying race isn't a valid lens and then caring about race differences is simple having your cake and eating it too.
> So when you start talking about how crime is higher in race x as if that is an explanation, you are actually hiding from yourself the underlying truth and preventing yourself from finding it.
Cool, so let's get rid of separate men's and women's prisions. Sure, SOME of the men are more likely to commit sexual assault, and likely for biological reasons. But certainly not ALL of them. And since this fact is just an average and doesn't describe literally everyone at an individual level, it's completely invalid to treat men differently as a category.
This is the inescapable implication of your logic.
>This also of course ignores the fact that many of the statistics that show that "race x has more y when you control for z" are all kind of bullshit. How many times has Scott and others written about how _hard_ it is to _actually_ control for z?
Ah yes, the one edged sort of radical statistical skepticism. All things by out group belives in are "bullshit", everything my in group believes in is statistically sound.
>How many people who espouse these kinds of arguments would also probably talk a big game about the replication crisis, ignoring the fact that those kinds of "I controlled for z" studies are a
If we're going down this route, then we HAVE to throw out ALL claims about racial and seuxal inequality. You don't get to claim black people are discriminated against by anyone or anything, because statistics showing as such apaprently cannot be trusted. You cannot claim women are treated unfairly by anyone or anything, because 'muh replication crisis'.
Unless you have endorse literally no positive positions on any topic, you're trivially guilty here of making a fully general counterargument that can be turned on literally any and all beliefs that you hold.
>this person wants to treat race differently for ideological reasons
You probably shouldn't speak about people's opinions without knowing them
>We're interested in explaining group differences
No we aren't. _You_ are. I actually don't care what groups commit crime, for the reasons outlined up above. I do care about crime, and I'm interested in decreasing it. _Who_ is commiting that crime is completely irrelevant to me (other than the obvious "the person who commits a crime should be punished, I don't care what groups they were a part of).
You didn't really engage with anything I said (and furthermore assumed a bunch of things I didn't), and have made it clear that you aren't interested in having a good faith discussion about this. And even if you were, _I_ don't really feel like having one. I explained (to the best of my limited ability), the views of another person who has influence me. I don't care if you agree and I'm not interested in convincing you. I've heard all the stuff your spouting before and I find it vacuous.
I hope you have a nice day.
I think part of the problem here is linguistic. You two are using "explain" in two different ways. Goldman Sachs Occultist is using it in a statistical way, as in, "The month of the year explains 60% of the temperature reading in Boston, Massachusetts. Knowing nothing other than the month, I can predict the temperature with 60% accuracy." DangerouslyUnstable says month doesn't explain anything at all. What actually causes the temperature is the length of the day and the angle of the sun and the temperature of the ocean and what happened in Ohio yesterday and a million other things. Some of those things, e.g. length of day and angle of sun, are correlated with month, but they are causal; month isn't.
It's true that individual characteristics are relevant, but we shouldn't downplay the size and significance of the between-group differences. If there weren't sizeable inherent genetic differences between groups, you wouldn't get principal component analyses of DNA that look like this: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/core/lw/2.0/html/tileshop_pmc/tileshop_pmc_inline.html?title=Click%20on%20image%20to%20zoom&p=PMC3&id=3543766_439_2012_1235_Fig1_HTML.jpg
Note the lack of overlap between groups - meaning one could achieve near-100% accuracy in predicting race (roughly defined as a genetic background tracing back to a particular historically geographically-isolated subgroup) based on DNA alone, indicating the biological reality of race.
"You can predict genetic background using DNA" looks to me like a tautology.
Not just "genetic background" - rather "a genetic background tracing back to a particular historically geographically-isolated subgroup". By your DNA alone, I know the continent your ancestors are from. This means race is biologically real.
Genes are likely very important for all kinds of things such as criminality and educational attainment, and genes are, of course, somewhat correlated with race since race is to an incomplete degree (_very_ incomplete in some cases) tied to genetic background. But I still don't care about race itself. For one, everyone in this thread seems willing to admit (they just won't say the words) that _race_ is not the causal thing. It's merely correlated with the real causal thing. And knowing the correlation isn't helpful. It's not even actionable!
I'm more than willing to admit that race is _correlated_ with all kinds of things _I just don't care_. Knowing that it is correlated doesn't help me _do_ anything, and since I know it's not causal, it also doesn't help me understand the world better than me knowing that the real causal thing is genetic + environmental.
And race being correlated with genes does not mean it is, at it's core, a genetic category, because it's not. Many _many_ people would be socially and culturally labeled as one race or another and yet wouldn't be genetically identified into that group, and that's even completely ignoring how races change over time _much_ faster than genetics can explain (100 years ago Italians and Irish weren't "white" in the US at least). Not to mention the fact that I can almost guarantee you that almost any arbitrarily generated groups will have _some_ degree of genetic differentiation because there are so many genes that it's almost guaranteed to happen by chance for _any_ group. Nitters vs. Non-nitters, stand up comedians vs. dramatic actros, pick two groups, and throw enough genetic analysis at it and you will almost certainly find _some_ degree of imperfect correlation. Race is almost definitely higher than most, but now you've just set an arbitrary limit for what matters and what doesn't.
Probably the most important thing is that no one has _ever_ successfully shown me how knowing the correlational facts with race actually helps us solve any problems without descending into the kind of unconstitutional nation that I have no interest in living in. Some babies are absolutely not worth throwing out, no matter how dirty the bathwater.
The only thing it's ever used for is to argue _against_ certain progressive policies that I mostly already don't agree with for reasons that have nothing to do with race. It's a completely unnecessary piece of information.
My feeling on reading the review was that the author brought up race and the associated progressive talking points unnecessarily, when the ideas he's actually trying to get across are very clearly human universals and there was no need to mention race at all.
If you're going to pepper Tribe A points where they don't belong, it's not surprising that Tribe B should drive by and give you their riposte.
The review would have been better imo if this stuff had been left out, and it just focused on the more interesting human development ideas.
>I've been completely convinced by Kmele Foster that looking at almost _anything_ through the lens of race obscures more than it reveals and whatever patterns you might find are almost definitionally spurious.
That's simply, TRIVIALLY wrong.
NOTHING explains the variance in educational ability in the US as much as race.
Poor white kids do better than rich black kids in school. Black kids raised by white parents don't do radically better in school. Sending black kids to majority white schools or wealthier schools or private or otherwise highly selective schools does not radically improve their performance.
If you treat everyone as a great mass of individuals, you simply cannot explain why people with dark skin and kinky hair do so much worse in school than the pale kids.
Same with ALL race differences.
Black criminality cannot be explained by icnone, education, employment rate or anything else. If you assume that there are no essential differences between populations, black criminality is extremely anomalous and you're forced to rely on dataphobic just-so stories to explain it. Race literally explains more of the variance in criminality in the US than income, education and employment rates. So if it's not right to look at crime through the lens of race, then it's even less right to bring up income, education and employment!
There's simply no valid justification for ignoring race, which is commonly the most statistically relevant factor in these things, for reasons unrelated to egalitarian ideological aversion.
>You mentioned Egan a few times, but didn't actually address anything said in this review, including the parts that actually are relevant.
It's OBVIOUSLY relevant, because Egan thinks there's something wrong with the US education system. But if you control for blacks and hispanics, US students are amongst the best in the world. If he is incapable of accounting for this absolutely foundational fact, or explaining why blacks do so much worse in school than whites or asians, why the heck should we assume his theory has any validity whatsoever?
>But ignoring that for a second, according to this review, Egan thinks that htis method would be beneficial across the intellectual spectrum, which was stated pretty clearly.
If Egan cannot explain why black kids do so poorly in school today relative to other students, there's absolutely no reason to believe that his methods will do what all others have failed to do - improve black performance (regardless of whether it helps everyone else's performance or not).
It’s not super relevant to this book review, but I’m just personally curious about what you think the right approach is.
Why do you think there is a huge racial disparity if it’s not racism? What should be done to fix it? What exactly is good about the Chinese system?
> Why do you think there is a huge racial disparity if it’s not racism? What should be done to fix it?
Genetics are the cause. There's sadly not much we can do about it right now. Hopefully in the future our gene editing technology will improve. Though, at the rate we're going, we'll get AGI/ASI first. So, all bets are off as to how that will play out
Thank you for clarifying.
I’m curious why you think it’s genetic. I also am very suspicious of attempts to reduce racial educational disparities to racism in schools, so I’m interested in how you came to your alternative.
Also, your alternative seems to imply that we write off educating non-Asian minorities… is that what you’re suggesting? Because it’s hard for me to imagine an argument for that that isn’t founded in racial supremacism.
First I'll start by noting that all manner of intelligence tests from standard IQ tests to scholastic standardized tests to military aptitude tests and including culture neutral tests like ravens progressive matrices have shown a persistent gap of approximately 1 SD between blacks and whites in the USA. The persistence of the gap across many tests and testing environments suggests that there is a real gap in intelligence and not merely a bias on one test.
Secondly I will note that studies on identical twins have shown a remarkably strong correlation between their IQs, even when adopted apart and raised in different families. And such studies have found weak to non-existent correlations between the IQs of genetically unrelated siblings raised in the same household. This suggests that intelligence is a higly genetic trait and while this alone does not prove that the black-white gap is genetic in origin (the variance between groups does not necessarily have the same cause as the variance within groups) it should set our priors such that this is not an implausible possibility.
Next we will look at transracial adoption studies, the most famous being the minnesota transracial adoption study. Such studies are the best way to equalize envornments. The monnesota transracial adoption study found a 17 point gap between the adopted white and adopted black participants when tested at 17. Not only did being raised in a white household not eliminate the IQ gap, it didn't even shrink it.
Another line of evidence is physiological, Blacks have less brain volume than whites and whites have less than asians. This is the same trend as IQ. Brain volume is not the same as intelligence but it does correlate positively with it.
Admixture studies present another line of evidence. DNA studies can reveal a persons admixture from different races and studies have shown that (with high individual variance of course) as percent black admixture increase, IQ decreases.
I will also point to the relative stabilty of the gap over the decades and the perpetual failure of liberal interventions to change it. Some may argue that racism is still prevalent today but few will argue that it is not greatly improved from 50 years ago and yet the black white IQ gap remains mostly unchanged. This is baffling from an environmental perspective but expected from a genetic perspective.
"This suggests that intelligence is a higly genetic trait and while this alone does not prove that the black-white gap is genetic in origin (the variance between groups does not necessarily have the same cause as the variance within groups) it should set our priors such that this is not an implausible possibility."
I disagree with this line of reasoning. I believe that intelligence is largely (though not wholly) genetic, but saying "some families are inherently smarter than others" is very different from saying "some races are inherently smarter than others," and I don't think the near-certain truth of former makes the latter any more likely.
If intelligence can vary wildly amongst people on the same ancestry with the same evolutionary history, why on earth would you expect this not to be true for people with entirely different evolutionary histories? Why would central Africa and North-East Asia just happen to select for exactly identical distributions of intelligence potential? Suggesting it would is a very extraordinary claim.
Brain volume is a terrible measure; it was often used to 'prove' women were naturally stupider than men because we have smaller brains. Then there was adjustment for relative size which 'proved' men and women have the same size brains.
Brain volume in animals also suffers the same problems. Bigger may indeed mean better, or it may not.
I'm tempted to quote Belloc here again, so here goes:
"All agree that our characters and actions proceed from a cephalic index, and all are agreed upon the relative value of the three main races of Europe.
PS — To my correspondent ‘Tiny,’ who has also given no address, I must reply in this brief postscript. No, the facial angle, as measured from the point of the chin tangentially, the parietal curve of the forehead, and from the cusp of the left nostril to the base of the corresponding ear-lobe, is no longer the criterion of character. I thought I had made that plain. Thirty-five years ago, when I was a boy, all scientists were agreed that the facial angle was the one certain and only test of moral attitude and intellectual power; but that opinion is now universally abandoned, and the facial angle is replaced by the cephalic index."
Brain volume is correlated with intelligence in humans, even within race. Size of brain sub-units are even more strongly with intelligence. You've done nothing to demonstrate otherwise. Calling it "terrible" isn't an argument.
You're literally saying that men and women have the same relative size, which doesn't prove brain size doesn't matter. Asians are smaller on average than Africans and have larger brains in absolute terms, so what (supposedly) happened with men and women cannot possibly be used to explain away racial differences, because it objectively isn't what is happening here.
And brain size isn't used to "prove" that one group is smarter than another. It is used to explain WHY groups are smarter than others. If blacks and whites were equally intelligent on all ways of reliably measuring intelligence, brain size differences wouldn't matter.
Comparisons between species obviously don't work, but they don't need to! There just has to be a relationship between brain size and intelligence within humans, and that's all that matters.
On the issue of male vs female brain size, you're about 30 years behind on the state of intelligence research: it is the well-established scientific consensus that women have *relatively* smaller brains than men, not just smaller brains in absolute terms. Studies doing such 'adjustments' used the flawed adjustment method of simply comparing the average man's brain/body ratio to the average woman's brain/body ratio, but of course men have larger bodies than women, so what they really must compare is the brain/body ratio of men and women at every level of body size:
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00207450802325843
> Ankney (1992) suggested that the large sex difference in brain size went unnoticed for so long because earlier studies used improper statistical techniques to correct for sex differences in body size and thus incorrectly made a large difference “disappear.” The serious methodological error was the use of brain mass/body size ratios instead of analysis of covariance (see Packard & Boardman, 1988). Ankney (1992) illustrated why this is erroneous by showing that, in both men and women, the ratio of brain mass to body size declines as body size increases. Thus, as can be seen in Figure 2, larger women have a lower ratio than smaller women, and the same holds for larger men compared with smaller men. Therefore, because the average-sized man is larger than the average-sized woman, their brain mass to body size ratios are similar. Consequently, the only meaningful comparison is that of brain mass to body size ratios of men and women of equal size. Such comparisons show that at any given size, the ratio of brain mass to body size is much higher in men than in women (Figure 2).
This figure illustrates it quite well - at every level of body size, men's brain/body ratio is higher than women's brain/body ratio: https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/wp-content/uploads/ankney-rushton-fig2.png
>What exactly is good about the Chinese system?
That the students are chinese.
No, really. But if we're going to pretend that all populations are equally capable of intelligence, the burden falls on people like Egan to explain why education systems so alien to what he's proposing are able to generate real world results that are so incredible compared to most of the world.
> 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
Worth noting here that the Chinese economy is the worst-performing of any majority-Chinese country (Compare Taiwan, HK or Singapore - they all have other advantages like being heavily urbanized, but you at least can't take Chinese economic performance as positive evidence in itself).
> If he bit the bullet and said that race differences are mostly inherent but my methods will help everyone
Seems like he mostly does (except obviously he can't say this explicitly for culture war reasons).
>Worth noting here that the Chinese economy is the worst-performing of any majority-Chinese country
Yes, and this is obviously a result of decades of CCP eocnomic mismanagement. As soon as this was removed, growth was rapid but obviously can't catch up to e.g. Singapore overnight. And these economic changes were accompanied by educational changes, so there's no conceivable way of blaming China's lack of growth pre-Deng on the current educational system. Also worth pointing out Singapore doesn't have a third of their population living in rural areas so of course it's going to be easier to have a modern economy all things being equal.
And in any case, it's irrelevant! None of these countries, or Japan or South Korea, have the kind of educational system that Egan supports. South Korea is known for having an extremely demanding, even crushing, educational system that is anathema to liberal educational therorists. But in all cases, it works. It produces people capable of rapidly building modern economies.
South Korea, Japan Taiwan etc
" so there's no conceivable way of blaming China's lack of growth pre-Deng on the current educational system"
I thought your argument was that the educational system didn't matter, it was the inherent superiority of the vastly more intelligent Chinese brain that was - how did you put it? - "able to generate real world results that are so incredible compared to most of the world".
Now somehow it's 'the vastly superior Chinese brains of the leaders somehow stumbled due to Communism and poor previous educational systems".
In other words, the vastly superior Chinese only started catching up when they adopted some at least of the economic system created by the inferior stupid Western whites? That is, emulation rather than origination is behind the Chinese success story?
Egan doesn't seem all that interested in China being able to industrialize, since it didn't produce many Chinese Socrates.
Yeah....so what? The world doesn't need more Socrates, it needs industrialization and technological development. The problem facing Chad and Sierra Leone are not a lack of Socrates. If Africa could experience even half the development that China has in the past 40 years, this would be one of the most profound improvements in human wellbeing in history. And Socrates wouldn't be able to fix climate change or AI risks or prevent engineered pandemics.
I'll give some credit to Socrates: his academic lineage included both Aristotle & Alexander. But that's him as a starting point rather than an ideal. I don't think an Alexander will be permitted in Africa though, so instead Paul Kagame will just do what he can in Rwanda while the rest of the continent is deprived the cultural group selection which fractious Europe underwent through centuries of warfare.
"The problem facing Chad and Sierra Leone are not a lack of Socrates."
They fucking well are, boo. The problems hobbling Africa are not lack of natural resources, it's endemic tribal warfare and wholesale corruption once the new warlord kicks out the old warlord and gets his grubby mitts on the treasury.
An African Socrates who can break down the traditional "this group are my tribe and I'll do anything for them including doing down that group who are not my tribe, even if they happen to live next door to me" attitudes and get people thinking of themselves first as Sierra Leoneans and not as lining up for a civil war, and get the police to act as the guardians of the public peace and not as "yippee, now I can brutalise the civilian population for fun and profit", there will be a lot more improvement in life rather than "another foreign company bought mineral rights at a knock-down price":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Sierra_Leone
"Sierra Leone's economic development has always been hampered by an overdependence on mineral exploitation. Successive governments and the population as a whole have always believed that "diamonds and gold" are sufficient generators of foreign currency earnings and lure for investment.
As a result, large scale agriculture of commodity products, industrial development and sustainable investments have been neglected by governments. The economy could thus be described as one which is "exploitative" - a rentier state - and based upon the extraction of unsustainable resources or non-reusable assets."
>An African Socrates who can break down the traditional "this group are my tribe and I'll do anything for them including doing down that group who are not my tribe, even if they happen to live next door to me" attitudes and get people thinking of themselves first as Sierra Leoneans and not as lining up for a civil war, and get the police to act as the guardians of the public peace and not as "yippee, now I can brutalise the civilian population for fun and profit"
How would an "African Socrates" help with any of this? I don't think Socrates was ever known for resolving disputes between feuding tribes or reforming corrupt political institutions. Did you mean an African Confucius?
I've read about something important being lost as a result of integrating schools-- segregated schools had black teachers who believed it was urgent and quite possible for black children to be well-educated.
Integration meant that black children were transferred to white teachers who were hostile to them, or who "kindly" believed they couldn't learn.
I grant that all I've got is anecdotes, but it seems rather plausible.
I've heard John McWhorter give this as one of the reasons why many African Americans are hostile to schooling and view it as "acting white". When schools were integrated, many black kids ended up with racist teachers who told them in no uncertain terms that schooling was not for them, and they ended up integrating that idea.
Yeah, no.
That was a long time ago. If students were taught that then, they're not taught that now, so it can't explain present black underperformance.
And guess what? When surveyed, black parents are more likely than white parents to say that they want their children to go to college. This demonstrates that there hasn't been some kind of 'anti-education' culture formed in the black community.
There's more than one black subculture.
What parents want and what your peers want are two different things. If you're in a class predominated by a small but troublemaking minority who will kick the shit out of you for "acting white" and being a teacher's pet swot, then all the urging by Mom and Dad that you should go to college won't stand up against "but I don't want to be beaten black and blue for answering a question in class".
I've probably picked it up mostly from McWhorter, but I've also heard it from people talking about their lives.
There's no data to support this.
And it doesn't explain why Asians have done so well in American education. They didn't have asian teachers for the most part, and nobody assumed they were smart until they had actually demonstrated they were smart. The liberal idea that they were positively stereotyped from day one is ahistorical nonsense, and also contradicts other liberal points about 'racism' being directed as Asians in the past.
If we're going to take this seriously, we need actual studies. You need to show black students do better with black teachers, and you need to control for their initial academic ability to make sure their performance isn't simply explained by being an unrepresentative sample of black american students.
This is about black teachers with a particular goal, not just having black teachers in general.
McWhorter (and, I think Loury and possibly Hughes) argue that social justice has been encouraging black people to give up because their problems are entirely caused by racism.
"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."
But he *did* say that his methods will help everyone. He didn't explicitly bring up race, but he said that his methods would help both high-performing and low-performing students. That's the whole point of the "rising tide lifts all ships" metaphor. If you believe that children from certain demographic groups tend to be lower-performing students, then it logically follows that "it will help everyone, regardless of race" is implicit in his statement. (Surely someone with an intellect as advanced as yours is capable of understanding basic syllogisms! I'm sure you can guess the color of the bears in Novaya Zemlya.)
Your comment adds nothing to this discussion, because even if we took all of your claims at face value, it still wouldn't make a difference here. It seems more like you simply wanted an excuse to bring up your favorite debate topic, regardless of whether it was actually relevant.
Egan points to statistics to claim Americans are dumb and ties this to their education. If you only look at white and asian americans, americans are smarter than the majority of people in the world. Therefore, Egan's claims about America's educational outcomes are extraordinarily misleading.
>but he said that his methods would help both high-performing and low-performing students.
There is zero evidence to support this. No method has been able to reliably improve black educational performance, so we should be extraordinarily skeptical of any claims that some new intervention will.
In the spirit of testing whether "Without non-asian minorities, America produces extremely capable highschool graduates compared to the rest of the world."
<a href=https://www.unz.com/isteve/the-new-2018-pisa-school-test-scores-usa-usa/>Graph of PISA scores by country and ethnicity</a>
I felt that the lede was buried too deeply in this book review and lost interest. Scrolled to the bottom to leave this comment.
The tl;dr was too long, even.
I didn't realize there was one, I may go back and look for it.
As a book review, this wasn't particularly useful. I think there is a certain trend among book reviews to try to be entertaining in and of themselves (both here, and in the ACX book review contests) rather than to seek to be good book reviews.
Do I want to read this book? What do I know about it? What was it about? Well, I know it's about this guy's thoughts on education, and he has some kind of thesis about it, which I have now learned from Wikipedia. This reviewer coyly hid the information I needed deep in a very long review. Entertaining, I am sure, for the vast majority of readers, but not useful for me.
It sounds like you already knew whether you wanted to read the book based on the title. If you thought, “Maybe, lots of education books are bad but this one might be good”, this sort of review would have helped a lot in making that judgement.
I get the point you're making. I'm not claiming the review, if read in total, contained no information useful to me. Also, it's true that I did in fact learn whether I wanted to read the book based on reading the wikipedia article, and this review did inspire me to look that up. The very presence of this review means that the book was at least interesting to someone, etc etc. In fact, I did benefit from this review existing, as it inspired me to look into things.
However, it would also be nice if I benefited from the actual content of the review, and it wasn't an incredible slog to read with the thesis/lede buried way down behind thousands of words. In this regard, the book review was quite unuseful. It wasn't of zero use, and it's true that I could have gotten more use out of it by reading it in its entirety, but the structure of the review itself is very bad and time-wasting.
That’s fair in some ways. I thought the main point of the book was the specific techniques it recommended, not its underlying theory. It’s really hard to judge a theory about education by listening to it. I’d rather see whether it advocated for some things I already agreed with, but wasn’t aware of explicitly or hadn’t heard good theoretical arguments for. I thought the underlying framework which the reviewer considered the point of the book was the weakest part of the theory, and I would have dismissed the book much more if I hadn’t already read the advice, which served as evidence.
Same, I gave up halfway through.
Yeah, too long for me.
I saved time by quitting this review and just reading the actual book!
Nice, was it worth reading or not?
Long, but also very self-conscious, or self-satisfied, in a way that quickly began to irritate me. I want to say "fourth wall breaking" maybe.
It felt like the author was trying to waste my time in the same way those empty marketing blog posts do, when they have one useful thing to say but make you read through a million "are you prepared to hear this" lines first.
If you're the author reading this then there's your feedback on writing style. But I actually stuck it out and read the whole thing cause I'm very interested in the topic - so thanks for introducing me to Egan's ideas.
> It felt like the author was trying to waste my time in the same way those empty marketing blog posts do
I described this as "gently manipulative" elsewhere and stand by it. It's not terrible, but it compounds over a large article like this, and I eventually resorted to skim-reading. I liked the subject, so I feel a bit bad about the skim-reading, but I've found many of the comments here enlightening, which helped fill in the 'blanks'.
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?
You have hit on something important: There is an emphasis on age cohort continuity in education; I suppose it comes from an emphasis on the socialization aspect of education. It wasn't always quite so pronounced. I remember a mustachioed fifth-grader with whom I had a couple of (losing) playground altercations. The entire grade promotion scheme deserves to be re-examined. Some sort of certification process for basic skills seems somehow more appropriate, rather than stranding creative writers in waters over their heads in mathematic instruction ( and vice-versa). I tend to think that the objective skills and social acclimatization parts of education probably should be at least mostly decoupled. Everybody likes story-time, but calculus is another matter.
Yeah. I went to CTY camps a few times as a kid, and one summer I did the “Individually Paced Math Sequence”. There was a lot of self-study, but they also had group activities where we did different types of math puzzles, learned about fractals, and did various other stuff that wasn’t directly related to the math we were studying (since, even though we were all advanced in math, there was a variety of levels represented in exactly what we were doing).
I often think about that summer and wonder if school in general could be more like that: learning at your own pace and then also coming together for other activities, a sense of community, and that sort of thing.
For a long time I've thought that standardized academic tests ought to be organized more like scout merit badges, rather than grade-level advancement gatekeeping. Prove your competence in a particular specialized skill, gain permission to display the corresponding iconic trinket as part of a larger collection. Centralized list of nationally accredited intellectual achievements could help ignorant or disoriented aspirants understand more clearly what they're missing, where to start. Existing experts designing the test could be set up with intrinsically balanced incentives to make it neither too easy (lest they end up surrounded by fools) nor too difficult (lest they exclude enough worthy contributors to trigger a schism).
Also probably unclog a lot of artificial scarcity, and provide definitive rebuttal to various perennial anti-intellectual talking points:
"Anyone could do that!" Well where's your badge, then? Just walk in and take the test cold (if you're not a liar and/or coward). Easier to find excuses for dodging multi-year commitment than a mere wasted afternoon.
"Buncha ivory-tower bullshit, no practical use!" Any given certification being pass / fail would make it easy to compare side-by-side salary data for arbitrary combinations, rather than getting caught up in blurry issues of scores and correlation. If an employment sector simply refuses to hire anyone lacking some particular set of relevant badges, that's even clearer.
Very good point.
A lot of the issues I had with my schooling, looking back, relate not to what I was taught, but to my feeling now it was too stressful and uselessly so. I went to the kind of high school where students came to school sick because missing anything just made everything harder. Once I was ill for ten days and my grades dropped because I had to make up all the work I missed before the end of the semester and I couldn’t do it as well as I would have ordinarily. Looking back that seems a completely inappropriate way to treat a 15 year old.
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?
Aside from a few technical aspects, young children aren't actually better than adults at learning languages. They just don't have other things that they need to be doing. If you spent 80 hours every week doing nothing but learning Mandarin Chinese for three years, you'd probably be at least as good as a three-year-old native speaker. :P
Speaking as someone who was taught French for ten years, Spanish for three, and can speak a LOT more Spanish, I think you are basically right.
The problem, IMO, is that understanding how to speak a language you don't already speak means you need to know what a verb is and what conjugating is and things like that (bar immersing the kid). And that is stuff that makes a LOT more sense when you're a little bit older (French class became a LOT easier once English class got around to teaching us what verbs and nouns and such were. To be fair, given how shocked our English teacher was, I think someone had been supposed to teach us much earlier).
Learning to think in another language is, I think, something more easily done when you are slightly older but not too old - you have enough abstract understanding you can do it, but you understand things well enough you keep the languages more or less straight and don't accidentally create a creole. I can think in Spanish to some extent, but not in French yet, and I think a lot of that is that I understand how the language actually works, so I know what I'm doing with it, whereas with French I am largely mashing words together in 1:1 correspondence with English.
Of course, it helps that Spanish is to some extent "French, but if someone made it make sense and people were a bit more relaxed about it."
"French class became a LOT easier once English class got around to teaching us what verbs and nouns and such were."
My experience was similar but also the exact opposite. When I started taking French (in 8th grade) I only vaguely knew what nouns, verbs, etc., were. Studying French taught me to understand the grammar part of my English classes better.
I have studied various modern languages with reasonable success but Latin I found very frustrating, because the word order in any classical text seems so convoluted.
I remember some online debate about whether classicists can fluently read classical Latin texts they have never seen before.
My experience has been that Latin is easier to learn but Greek is easier to *read*, for precisely this reason--Greek authors rarely play these sorts of ridiculous syntax games.
I think to the extent that 'nonconfigurationality' actually exists, literary classical Latin is a prime example. The sort of nonsense that produces *saevae memorem Iunonis ob iram* isn't found in most other Old World languages, although it's surprisingly common in North America.
Seriously this community needs to learn how to write concisely. Holy shit
Like attracts like I think. Scott is routinely accused of verbosity, but he's also engaging in a way very few other comparably verbose writers are, which makes reading his posts not feel as drawn-out an experience.
Right, this was a stellar topic and written well, but I just want these book reviews entries overall to be shorter. I think it would be helpful if Scott, next year, reminded entrants that they are under no obligation to try and hit the post lengths he often goes to.
I don't know. I think the longer-form essay is kind of falling out of favor because it's harder to monetize in the Internet era, but there's no reason it's inherently wrong, and it can explore things in more depth.
This essay is about 5 times longer than it should be. It’s inane length and it’s insistence on waiting for what feels like (and possibly is!) 3000 words before telling you the main argument of the book is just sloppy writing. Sloppy writing reflects sloppy thinking. Which is also evident in the summary section whose length leads me to believe that the author does not know what the word “Summary” means...
If you can’t properly summarize the argument of a book you are reviewing, then you don’t understand it well enough to review.
I checked. It's over *Fifteen Thousand* words before we finally find the buried lede. The review is over 23,000 words total, close to five thousand of which is "summary".
Omfg
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!
He described himself as "he" in the dialogue with Alice.
‘K
"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.
"Unless you have from the moment the child is born an individual education plan..."
Interestingly, you have just described my son. He was about 30 minutes old when my wife looked up at me and said, "Oh, honey, by the way, we are home-schooling." I appreciated the warning as it gave me a few years to prepare :-)
The upshot of this, however, was not what I expected. My wife and I are more academic then our son was ... we got a child who REALLY cared about sports, and, specifically, baseball.
Also, our homeschooling wasn't based on test scores. Our child didn't get grades nor did he get assessements ... we just kept working on a given topic until we were happy with it OR decided to put things on hold and return in a few months/years.
On the whole, I think things turned out pretty well -- though NOT as I expected.
Child grew up reading and continued to do so as an adult.
Child grew up with an appreciation of good/okay/acceptable/trash literature and ... maintained it as an adult, though the interest in sports dominated.
Child ... you can fill in the blanks.
Assume we raised a well adjusted to the "real world" child who could get along with lots of different people (what, no 'socialization' issues???), was moderately interested in the world around him, appreciated some bits of learning that most other kids avoid like the plague (e.g. shakespeare) and had a reasonable model for how the world worked (thing economics, physics, etc.).
What I DON'T see is how to SCALE this :-(
And it doesn't necessarily produce savants. My child has strengths, and is okay academically (can, for example, make it through a mid-tier University of California education, though not in math/physics/engineering) but isn't going to change the world. Still, I'm happy with how his education turned out and think it was better than mine. But, again, I don't see how this scales.
Do you wish he turned out a little more academically inclined like you and your wife? I'm at that age where I'm thinking of having children, and this consideration stops me in my tracks. I'm not expecting them to be carbon copies of me, I suppose I'm just concerned they'll turn out so different it'll lead to incomprehension and then suffering.
My wife isn't terribly academic, either :-)
Note: I'm not using academic as a synonym for "smart," but mean something like, "finds spending time on a computer or in a library (or in a lab) trying to understand something" to be a good use of time. An example would be pulling all the California monthly mortality death counts for the past 20 years to try to get a handle on how severe Covid actually was. I did that. My wife and son would not (and did not).
But to answer this: "Do you wish he turned out a little more academically inclined like you and your wife?"
No.
With, as always, some caveats :-)
With "all things being the same" then the answer is, "Yes, of course." But all things WON'T be the same and if he had been more academically focused then he'd have been less focused on something else. Paul Graham has a good essay titled "Why Nerds are Unpopular" and points out in it that the popular kids *work* hard at being popular and while the nerds would like to be popular they aren't willing to spend less time working on being smart. As always, the tradeoffs matter.
So, if nothing had to be given up I'd prefer my child (and myself!) to be more academic. And better at languages. And more well read. And lots of other things :-)
But that isn't how the world works and I'm very happy how things turned out.
"...I suppose I'm just concerned they'll turn out so different it'll lead to incomprehension and then suffering."
I think it depends on how willing you are to be flexible for your kid. Lots of parents are willing to be quite flexible ... because it is YOUR kid. An example: *I* grew up knowing about baseball and even having a vague sense of how the local Major League team was doing but other than that paid very little attention. My *child* (and this has to be genetic ...) grew up with a MASSIVE fascination in sports. So, starting when he was six, the family went to a LOT of minor league baseball games (20+ per year for a while). It was fun. It didn't have to be fun, but my wife and I tried to make it fun for ourselves and that turned out well [imagine me name dropping a bit about players we met while in the minor leagues who then made it to the major leagues and still remembered us as an example of 'turned out well.' It is fun to see a young kid who you watched in the minor leagues 'make it']
The upshot was that as parents we nudged him to pay attention to what we thought was important and we accepted his interests as valid and tried to support him with those. Which meant that he grew up watching old (1920s - 1960s) movies on the big screen at our local retro-theater and he grew up reading a lot of "literature" and we spent a lot of time at Little League baseball games and at other activities he enjoyed. My life (and my wife's life) is richer because of this widening of experience. Seriously, it is.
It *IS* possible for kids to be so different that you just don't know what to do with them. I expect that this is more likely true for adopted kids (for the obvious reason) and for kids with 'issues' such as extreme autism. But in our case the different-ness of our child from ourselves was wide enough to be massively fun and interesting but not so wide as to be a problem. I'm *guessing* that this is more common than the "incomprehension and suffering" outcome but ... having children is giving hostages to fate.
I think having kids is usually a good idea, but the outcome isn't guaranteed.
Regression to the mean.
You know, it occurs to me a jock kid with geek parents would be beautifully positioned for management or sales in a Silicon Valley firm.
For quite some time I have believed that his destiny would be sales :-)
What did your wife see at the first half hour which caused her to realize your son would need home schooling?
I think she had been thinking about it for a few months at that point and just chose that moment to let me know :-)
Yes, it's so adorably naive that people still have this attitude that we're one weird trick away from finally unlocking humanity's true potential through wonders of public education. What's their evidence, I wonder? I skimmed the (overlong) review, but this question didn't seem to be addressed.
Search for the part in the final dialogue about noticing the skulls - that's the place where it's addressed most directly.
In short, Egan didn't believe that his system is the One True Way of education, just that it seems much better than the existing alternatives.
Well, I buy that improving the status quo somewhat on the margin might be feasible, but that's a vastly weaker claim, and even that doesn't have much evidence, as the reviewer pointed out, to his/her credit. I guess there's a thematic continuity with Scott's previous post, about propaganda making grand claims untethered from reality in service of trying to move the needle in a hopefully better direction.
All the new systems seem much better than the existing alternatives, be it Waldorf or Montessori or the 'students run the school' systems.
Until you try scaling them up.
When you have a small group of selected kids with enthusiastic teachers and no outside pressures, then of course it works great to produce the 'hungry to talk to us about what they were learning' kiddies. All teaching of young children generally goes great up till about seven or so, because it's easy (relatively) to teach kids at that stage of development as you're teaching them the basics and nobody expects them to have a deep understanding. They can as easily learn about Ancient Greece as to tie their shoelaces because it's all being learned for the first time then.
As they get older, as you do need depth and learning to work hard and concentrate, as different abilities and interests in the characters of the kids show through, as they start becoming individuals (which includes hitting the sulky, stroppy teenage years) it gets harder. Especially because what do we want schools to do? What is the purpose of modern education?
We have a host of conflicting demands on schools - they have to be babysitters as well as turning out kids who will be the next Steve Jobs because business wants and government wants critical-thinking entrepreneurs who can work in tech and earn high salaries to be highly taxed.
Not every kid is going to be the next Steve Jobs. But schools are supposed to make sure the variable input they get turns out on a particular model of output.
And as the economy gets more stratified into "if you want a good job, you need to work in these areas, and to work in these areas you need these skills or abilities", we are putting pressure on schools to produce that. And nobody can fail. And we must tackle systemic oppression. And nurture creativity. And turn out law-abiding model citizens who will vote and participate in democracy. And whether you're from the hood or Beverley Hills, you must have the same outcome of equity and advance into the ranks of the middle class.
And all that has to be done at scale, on a one-size-fits-all model, with money pumped in but nobody knowing what it's doing or if it's doing anything. Freddie deBoer writes a lot about it.
Give me a couple of million to spend on the project, a picked handful of inner city ghetto youth ages four to six, split them off from their parents and home environment, give me twenty or so hippy-dippy teachers, and let me cocoon them in my purpose built schooling pod, and I'll give you Egan kids.
Try that model on the public school with about 400 students of all ages, abilities, developmental and behavioural problems *not* cut off from home and neighbourhood, and see how well it works out.
So how can we reliably produce "smart, sensitive, informed, interested, curious, inventive and productive citizens," if not through education? Do you think it's simply impossible?
I think that it's very very difficult to scale this up so that *every* child will tick all the boxes of what we want, and that we don't really know what the hell we want out of education.
The basic fundamentals should be "reading, writing, arithmetic" but we also want schools to teach kids to (for one instance) love Pride Month and all that entails. We want social engineering, and to overcome racism and prejudice, and to be a place to park the kids while the parents are at work during the day, and to teach them to be good citizens, and the notion of a what a 'good citizen' is wavers all over the place, and ninety other things.
All must go on to college because college education gives you the middle class life, but (1) production of excess college graduates flattens that 'good salary lifestyle' because now with a wider labour pool of skilled workers, employers don't have to pay as highly as when there is a limited pool and (2) we're being told automation is coming for your job anyway.
"What do we want from education?" is the first question to be decided, long before we get to "and how do we get it?"
I think it is possible within certain limits. For example, producing smart citizens is limited by their IQ.
You can provide great education for the most intelligent ones. You can try to teach the simple facts (such as: the Earth rotates around the Sun) to the average ones. And I suppose you can teach some practical skills to the dumbest ones.
But this already means three different ways of education, and if you try to design one way that fits all, you will fail.
Similarly, some people are curious by nature, and an optimal education for them could be something like "answer all their questions, and occasionally introduce them to new topics". Other people are passive, you need to make a checklist for the knowledge you want to push into them; better make it short.
I guess I am trying to say that we could find good solutions for individual students, the problem is how to make it scale. (Similarly to medicine: we could heal almost every individual human, the question is how to make the system work for millions of humans.)
That felt like a weak point of the thesis to me, but many/most of the specific suggestions about teaching seemed like good ideas being clearly described, and getting plausible justifications.
So you're saying that because there's no educational ideal, there can be no improvements to be found in our methods of education? That seems like a pretty extreme position.
No, I am not saying that. I am saying "Our pilot programme with thirty hand-picked kids from enthusiastically supportive families, guided by twenty freshly-minted teachers and with visits by experts from art to science, in a purpose-built location with no disruptive, poor, or disabled kids, worked beautifully. I see no problems in scaling this up to hundreds of thousands of kids of all abilities, problems, economic backgrounds, in schools all over the nation as presently constituted!" is probably not likely to work.
I trudged through the comments to ensure that someone pointed this out, and here it is.
We have two-hundred odd countries, some of them hosting multiple education systems, that have been running schools for the masses for decades or centuries. Each of them has its boffins coming up with the latest whiz-bang idea that's going to turn every kid into a creative genius. Absurd amounts of money get thrown into these schemes, often when there's a change of government.
To be fair, some of these reforms are good. Some ways of teaching are more effective or promote a more independent mindset.
However, none of these new ideas live up to the hype.
That this review won first prize suggests that Astral readers in general are poor noticers. Smart, sure, but given there's a new story in the media every month about a school that's pioneered some amazing new approach that's going to revolutionize everything and solve all the world's problems, a story that is never followed up on, it seems they only have good pattern recognition for the material that's in the textbook, not that which is in front of their (our?) noses.
Also they have exemplary patience.
The biggest problem with every new theory is - well, let me rephrase, because there is more than one problem.
(1) Scaling up. Proof-of-concept project works great for anything up to 100 kids in the special environment of the testing grounds. Making that work for hundreds to thousands of kids, of all ages and ability range, all over the country/countries, is a horse of a different colour, particularly when you get the government, curriculum experts, teachers unions, parents, and all other stakeholders sticking their oar in about what they want to achieve. Freddie deBoer, because he's been up the sharp end, knows how shiny theories work out in practice and I think he's none too gruntled about the latest paedagogic revolution that comes down the pike on a regular schedule.
(2) Following on from the above - let's be brutally blunt here. This kind of creative learning notion works best in small numbers of self-directed, bright, interested kids who want to learn and would be doing a lot of extra-curricular reading on all topics, where the pressure of exam results and hitting the national goalpost markers for achievement isn't the driver of teaching, and there are supportive, involved parents who have the money and more importantly the ability to help the kids learn and give them a stable, comfortable, dependable home environment where they have access to learning materials if they want or need them.
That part about the parents is vital. Poor parents can be involved, interested and supportive, but when you have a parent who has poor literacy and maybe left school early, there's only so much they can do to help the kid with homework, how to find answers to questions, and general awareness of how the bureaucracy and form-filling of the world works. I'm going to spill the beans on family history here, but my late father was not stupid, was interested in maths, and had no idea how compound interest worked because he had to leave school at twelve to start work to help his family. So here's me at age twelve, having just learned this in school, trying to explain to my own father why there was one more payment left on that loan and that is why the bank was sending reminder letters that he had not, in fact, paid it off in full. That's what I mean about "lack of supportive environment" - not even active abuse, just lack of capacity.
So yeah - the guy may be claiming that this is only a suggestion, isn't the One Weird Trick solution, and is something to run alongside conventional education system, but by God am I fed up with "the new maths/new reading/new teaching" styles that have come along all through the years.
This is not to say that there was no value in them, or that the old ways didn't need to be changed, but in some cases it's like the pendulum has swung too far the other way. I learned to read before ever I started school, and I can only thank God this happened, because if I were one of the experimental animals for the new system of the day, I'd never have learned a thing. EDIT: And I say this because the "new maths" was just in swing at the period I was learning, so the styles switched over, and I hadn't a clue. The teachers hadn't a clue because this was a new system they had to learn instead of how they themselves were taught. I was already bad at maths, and this put the kibosh on any chance I had of learning and understanding, because all the "learn from first principles, let the kids discover themselves the underlying principles, away with rote memorisation!" worked if you had an instinctive grasp of mathematics. I didn't. I needed rote memorisation and to have the entire thing explained to me.
Take it away, Tom Lehrer:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UIKGV2cTgqA
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.
Agreed. It connotes “lol nothing matters and everything is meaningless and if you disagree you’re a dumb idiot lololol” in a way that’s neither helpful nor useful.
I wasn't too pleased with Egan's valorization of Socrates. (I think it was Egan's and not the review author's.) Socrates, or at least the one I found in the dialogues of plato that I've read, was a jerk.
Maybe I'd except the Socrates in the Apology and the one in whatever dialogue where his friends try to convince him to escape.
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.
Yes, chimps can learn by observation, but they don't deliberately teach each other things.
Stripping branches to use to get termites out to eat? If I'm remembering right? Got to look that one up:
"In Gombe National Park in 1960, Jane Goodall observed a chimpanzee, David Greybeard, poking pieces of grass into a termite mound and then raising the grass to his mouth. After he left, Goodall approached the mound and repeated the behaviour because she was unsure what David was doing. She found that the termites bit onto the grass with their jaws. David had been using the grass as a tool to "fish" or "dip" for termites. Soon after this initial discovery of tool use, Goodall observed David and other chimpanzees picking up leafy twigs, stripping off the leaves, and using the stems to fish for insects. This modification of a leafy twig into a tool was a major discovery: previously, scientists thought that only humans made and used tools, and that this was what separated humans from other animals.
Other studies of the Gombe chimps show that young females and males learn to fish for termites differently. Female chimps learn to fish for termites earlier and better than the young males. Females also spend more time fishing while at the mounds with their mothers—males spend more time playing. When they are adults, females need more termite protein because with young to care for, they cannot hunt the way males can."
I don't know if you'd class that as learning by observation, or as chimpanzee mothers teaching their daughters how to do it?
As far as we know, the mothers don't do any sort of "look at me; now try it yourself; no, you're doing it wrong; watch closely as I do it slowly." They just do it and let the young watch. Young chimps also watch other young chimps.
My bias is to believe that "this is what makes us human as opposed to animals" claims are almost always not central to the main point under discussion, even if the claim is true.
Of course, if the point under discussion is "what makes us human as opposed to animals, then I suppose the claim is central.
Yeah, this was a glaring error. (And an completely unnecessary one, "this is just what all animals do" would make for a much better argument for the point that section was trying to make.)
I expect the author to be reading the comments (I know I would), so the following is directed at him:
As a general rule, "we often imagine that language is the trait that sets us apart from the animals" because it is the sole trait that, empirically, sets us apart from the animals. (And not even in the "no animal ever could" sense. They do represent concepts with symbols in the wild. Upon encountering humans and their languages, some can even learn to string symbols together into meaningful sequences - to a very limited degree that nevertheless requires, and demonstrates, the ability to understand semantic and grammatical relationships between them. But the chasm is obvious - for them, it's an uphill battle to grasp and reproduce even a very small fraction of a fundamentally alien system that all but the most developmentally deprived human use naturally and spontaneously.) For anything else one could think of as exclusively human - complex societies, tool use, planning, coordination, whatever - there's probably already a mountain of evidence somewhere of apes/birds/elephants/octopuses doing it. And this just makes the absence of language use all the more striking.
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.
I don't think that's how Chesterton's Fence works. If the existing institution works the way it does for actual reasons, but they're immoral reasons, then it's right to change it.
> 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.
Is there any evidence that smarter or more educated people are more likely to rebel? The 'educated' are already at the top of society anyway and have no reason to rebel. In Mao's China, the commoners and peasants engaged in mass slaughter of the educated class. Education is also highly correlated with conformity and negatively correlated with things like impulsivity, violence, and tendency to commit crimes, all of which would predispose one to rebellion.
> 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?
This statement is incoherent. A "society" cannot have a "purpose," since it is not an entity in itself, it is an abstraction. Abstractions cannot have intentions; they are not people.
Without your abstractions, the weakness of your argument becomes clear here. What exactly is being claimed - that teachers being bad at teaching arithmetic and basic grammar is due to... "a conspiracy of billionaire elites trying to keep the people precisely smart enough to do basic jobs, but not smart enough to rebel..." ? How would that possibly work in reality? What precise mechanisms are these billionaires using to achieve this?
> keep our human environment working with electricity, food, roads, planes, and luxury goods
The horror! Those evil billionaires providing needs and wants for people!
> Before you go educating the masses, have you considered how they might revolt or demand better wages?
That's not how economics works - people already implicitly "demand" better wages by working for whoever is willing to pay them the most. Companies are then forced to compete with each other for access to the best talent, paying workers higher and higher wages up to the point at which they are no longer net-profitable to the company, i.e. their cost is higher than their value. "Demanding" higher wages in the literal sense - just throwing a temper tantrum and demanding more money despite not providing any more value - could not possibly actually increase people's real wages, because their current market wage is already the most that any company is willing to pay them given the value that they provide. They won't just magically become more productive if they "demand" a higher wage.
> Why do you think we have mass scams like central banks and ‘free markets’ where the borrow rates are set by decree
Socialist government regulation caused by people like you.
> 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
I thought monopolies were bad? Now you support monopolies of labor?
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.
The labels Egan uses for the stages aren’t ideal. I’m interpreting the philosophic stage as the part of research where you construct models of reality and test them empirically. The “ironic” stage is where you are able to notice something from daily life or trained intuition (somatic and mythic?) that reveals your model is imperfect and leads you to new research questions.
The middle school math and science history component doesn’t need to take up much class time in order to show kids heroes. My HS calculus teacher told us briefly about Newton and Leibniz before teaching the actual content, making us all thankful we didn’t have to use Newton’s notation. There’s also no reason students would need to be graded on historical instead of mathematical knowledge.
Supposedly "f'(x)" is descended from Newton's notation, and dy/dx is descended from Leibniz.
Well said.
“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.”
Well in the review you read the author summarises Egan’s ideas on Plato and Galileo which doesn’t mean he doesn’t want the rest taught in a similar way. The review mentions Descartes for instance.
(Bayes gets too much attention on this stack.)
I agree about the idea of focusing on controversies in science. I had about the same thought when reading that section of the review, that students won't be able to actually understand the controversial stuff if they don't have a thorough basis of the settled stuff first, and trying to teach it that way would be counterproductive.
Human knowledge happens to accumulate and refine at a constantly increasing rate, with or without Enlightenment. (E.g., industrial-made clothing precedes it, and so does inoculation. Selective breeding of plants has like tens of thousands of years of history.) Whatever rationality *might* have to do with where we are, the effect was self-evidently much more subtle than the [everything good that you have only happened because of it, so bow before it, peasant] card you're playing.
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?
I think the “an” in Kieran Egan is like the “an” in “anhedonia”
Glad I wasn't the only one thinking this.
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.
I have a hunch but don’t want to say here because it is supposed to be anonymous. Send me an email and I’ll connect you with the author and / or someone cool you’d probably like to talk to regardless. Vicki R Williams at a google email address.
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.)
WRT your question 2... I have no good answers, but I thought I might share what is potentially a cautionary answer about what *not* to do
My situation is very different: I live in China, and have had my kids in both Chinese public school and international schools, and a bit of homeschooling. Their experience has been very mixed, and I wouldn't say they've had easy academic careers, or even as much success as I think they should have (though both are doing OK).
I'm a very mathsy, ready kind of a dad, so they both went into first grade with maths and reading way ahead of the curve. Throughout their schooling they've been recognised by their peers and teachers as clever and knowledgeable. But they never really did well on tests, and indeed failed a bunch of them (China is a test-loving place, so they get tested a lot. I'm not too worried about the tests, but I was worried that their test failures represent an inability to do understand the requirements, and a willingness to do the learning.)
My best guess - and this is only a guess - is that they were both unable to deal with the somewhat contradictory situation where (a) the teacher was teaching stuff they already knew, e.g. basic numeracy; and (b) that despite the fact that they had the skills, the homework might still be challenging and difficult to do right.
So I feel like giving them above-grade-level skills early in their schooling career ended up really hurting them.
Now, it's possible that my interpretation is wrong, and they were just the victims of a messed-up system. My older boy speaks English, and yet in his Chinese public school he could never get top marks in his English (ESL) exams, and even his English teacher was unable to tell me why. It may well be because his English was better than hers, and he was being marked down by idiots.
Also, if you gave me the chance to do it all again, would I read my children fewer books?! Would I put off their numeracy? Would I hell. So... I have no solution to these problems. I'm just saying you're not alone in struggling with it.
Concrete recommendations, though: Rick Riordan. My boys loved those books with an unholy passion! Norse Myths by Neil Gaiman. If you can find accessible versions, Monkey/Journey to the West is also endlessly entertaining.
As someone who passed but did not excel in language classes of my "first" language, language classes usual suck if you speak read write the language. Imagine stripping out the challenges, novelty, nuance, and semblence of value from the material, and what are you left with? Busy work that requires you to stay inside the lines.
Oh, of course! I always tried to give them work to do or books to read, and their teachers were good, not expecting them to actually participate in the ESL classes. But they had to take the tests for administrative reasons, and it was a constant source of bewilderment to us why Older Son couldn’t score 100% in the tests.
Incidentally, giving them separate work to do during the ESL classes never worked: being kids, they preferred to goof off, and never did much productive with that time :-/
"being kids, they preferred to goof off, and never did much productive with that time"
Again, that's a major flaw with most proposals for revamping the education system - "well when I was in school if you gave me free time I'd have done extra work on the more advanced parts of the curriculum!" - yes, but not everyone is like you or me or them or him, and most kids will use the time to goof off instead of self-directed learning.
I think this is something the people who go "I hated school, I was so far ahead in my classes and being held back, I could easily have learned the subject on my own, we should scrap the entire thing" forget.
Understandable, language class was my favorite place to goof off. As for bewilderment, did Older Son want to score a 100?
I don't know! My attitude was, seeing as you can get full marks, you might as well just do it - that will make everyone happy. He agreed and said he'd try. But what the little buggers really think is always a mystery.
My problem was what to do next. If the problem was him not making an effort, I'd need to help him with motivation; if the problem was the test, I'd want to go to the school and say, look, your tests are messed up (definitely a possibility, the school English teachers couldn't speak English worth a damn). But I just didn't know. Anyway, he's back in an international school now, and seems happier at this one.
Seems like you're all working it out :)
I think in test-heavy systems, there is a Model Right Answer and you are expected to learn it off, know how to regurgitate it, and if you deviate then you will be marked down.
I don't know the Chinese system, but for instance in the Irish language exams, they used to be *very* strict on marking, such that if you spelled a word without the siniu fada you would lose marks (and I just lost two marks there because it should be "síniú fada").
Now, this isn't just pettiness because it makes a difference if the word is "fear" or "féar" ("man" or "grass"):
https://twitter.com/proinsy/status/1187683086668062721
But students who had a fluent speaking level were losing marks wholesale because of this, so the marking system was softened in later years. China may well be on the rigid marking system still. This is wholesale speculation on my part, but if your kid was speaking idiomatic English and not Grammatical Formal English Like We Learned, then the school/exam markers might well mark them down for using contractions and slangy terms etc.
Yep, there was definitely some of this. This is primary school level, so it was even a bit more basic than this: he'd get marked down for writing "didn't" instead of "did not" because the kids in his class hadn't learned contractions yet. For that kind of problem, we just giggled at it. Obviously that didn't indicate any kind of underlying problem, just a clash of different levels of knowledge.
What an interesting perspective!
A few thoughts.
On English tests: I recently, as an adult, took competency tests for a language I'm fluent in, and in reading comprehension got tripped up on the exact same ambiguous reading comprehension questions I had trouble with on English comprehension exams-- and I did well in English generally. So the score I got is more reflective of me being bad at that *type of question* than fluency in that language (I'd argue, haha).
2) On math: conceptual knowledge != Fluency. For example, what if these tests require basically instant ability to do easy mental math, not spend time doing it out on paper or in your head. Maybe this is not a skill you care about, but the other students are were drilled in that skill until it's automatic for them, and your kids weren't?
Thanks, Elle. Yes, I think both of those were definitely contributing factors.
Thanks for sharing your experience.
I'm afraid my second question may have given the wrong impression. So far our daughter loves school, and indeed she's sad that it's off for the summer. Our son had some trouble during multiple versions of COVID schooling, but his final preschool seemed like an excellent fit and he's excited about kindergarten. Thus, I don't have any concrete reasons to think that our children are struggling or will find themselves doing so. I was just hoping to be prepared for that eventual possibility, given that I doubt our schools consistently follow the suggestions here.
Sorry, I completely hijacked your comment for my own ranting needs!
In addition to the mythology recommendations at the end of my previous comment, I would also recommend Raymond Smullyan as an amusing intro to maths and logic.
Concerning point no. 1, I noticed the same thing and was also frustrated.
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?
The review answers this. You can’t really tell if a school is implementing Eagan’s ideas, except by talking to the children there. That feels like a “problem” with reality, not with Eagan’s model: the Book List really doesn’t tell you whether a school will teach effectively.
Yeah, that's unfortunate. Problems with reality are worse than problems with models. "Find an Erganian school and talk to the kids (oh wait, the only one closed down...)" is not actionable.
I teach 700 kids, K - 5th grade. I have used some Waldorf content, because it is aesthetic, and concrete. They make videos of teachers instructing on it, or telling stories. I could implement more of it if I wanted to. They also do a lot of narrative in elementary school, which seems like a good idea, and an idea that can be used. There doesn't appear to be anything in particular here that could be used.
Sorry, I misunderstood your complaint. I think I agree: this book review makes the book sound like a manifesto declaring that someone should provide those tools, rather than an actual toolset.
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).
1) It can’t be driven by empiricism unless tested. That said it makes sense.
2) the empirical evidence is against progressive education practices.
Also, and I admit you have to read a lot to begin with, Egan actually admits his system isn’t perfect.
Is the evidence "against progressive education practices" relative to the evidence on Egan's idea or just relative to an ideal a la the nirvana fallacy?
“ relative to the evidence on Egan's idea”
Read 1) again.
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.
I feel like I had a similar experience to the reviewer when it comes to school, which is why I really resonated with these quotes too. My last year of high school was genuinely fantastic in terms of education (even if the social aspect didn’t go as well), and I have the international baccalaureate program to thank for that. But it often felt in lower grades or worse-taught classes that I could have been getting more out the subjects than I actually was. I hope these ideas can be brought into schools, even if only a little, so that other people can develop the love for learning that I did.
Huge chunks of the conversation with Alice could hit the chopping block.
Is there a summary that’s actually summary?
I think an operationalized one-liner would be something like “humans are really good with narrative and story, so education should be more of that especially at younger ages.”
Thanks!
I'd also add, teach in context, help students socialize with (imagine) the people behind theorums
I thought that, actually, but was hardly so concise!
One of the things I noticed is there was a definite masculine edge to a lot of those stories, what with heroes and adventure and such. I feel like one of the effects of chasing out men from education is that tends to disappear, with the expected effects of making boys a lot less interested.
Whether that's intentional is left as an exercise for the reader. ;)
Eventually someone will submit the whole book as their “review” and none of us will notice.
Next year maybe I’ll try to get away with that for something short, like The Stranger.
Another attempt at a summary:
- School is miserable because it's got mixed up and confused goals.
- Human cognition develops in a sequence of phases, that also reflect how human society developed to this point
- We should restructure school to better align with how cognition develops.
- See the figure(s) with the warm colored rectangles.
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.
I had that exact assignment too, and hated it. I spent weeks diving into the details and concluded that I couldn't even explain the tiniest fraction of the ongoing debate within my length limit, much less resolve any part of it. The whole exercise of writing the paper felt irredeemably fake, and I submitted nothing in protest, at which point my parents had to stage a dramatic intervention to keep me from failing that term. (And I wasn't against discussion in general -- at the same time I was spending hours a day arguing with young Earth creationists online, because that was a debate I felt I could actually understand.)
I have the same problem with the post author's proposals about high school science. Ask teenagers to think about the nature of dark energy? At this point I've seen thousands of literate, eloquent, non-physicist adults argue on the internet about it, and 99% of the text they generate doesn't make the slightest bit of sense -- like debating how fast a potato can run.
That sounds like it could be a problem in the way that the assignment was worded more than the concept itself. The goal of doing this kind of thing is not to resolve an issue like global warming or dark energy; it’s to understand how debating these concepts works and to give people the feeling that you got when arguing creationism. It’s a shame that it didn’t work out in your assignment, but I feel like your enjoyment of discussion elsewhere shows that it could work out, if done well. It just needs to focus on a smaller scale or a simpler thing to build up the argument foundation, and it needs to be done with care as opposed to being fake to check off a box.
"The goal of doing this kind of thing is not to resolve an issue like global warming or dark energy; it’s to understand how debating these concepts works"
And that's the problem in a nutshell; when you get literal minded or even on the autism spectrum kids who *do* take it at face value that "I must argue for one side or another and produce a convincing case to win". When it's not explicitly stated that "I don't expect you to solve this problem, what I want you to learn are these skills", then frustration results as with knzhou above.
As a very literal minded kid, I understand the frustrations. I was mainly successful when it became clear that it’s about the method and when it was explicitly stated that the topic is a medium for it. Like you said, the problem is when it’s not explicitly stated, so, in an ideal world, it could be stated explicitly!
But isn't that the entire problem? If you scale up from one charismatic teacher to hundreds of thousands, the median implementation of anything is going to be box checking. I was taught "critical thinking" several times in school, and it always boiled down to "never trust Wikipedia, always believe the New York Times." Going the other way, I did have a couple excellent teachers who engaged us the same way Egan advocates. The rest would not have been able to in the intended spirit, even if they read this whole long-ass book review.
You’re very right, unfortunately. The problem with this sort of system is that it’s very dependent on the capability of the teacher to put it into practice, and it often just doesn’t work. I very much like it’s ideas, though, despite knowing that teachers trying to make it work will often just not get anywhere if they can’t do it right. But sometimes it works, and suggest a system that would work if done well is all someone like Egan can do.
Lots of Egan’s advice looks approachable for teachers. Teaching who Pythagoras was or asking if it’s ever okay to betray a secret seems much easier to do well than teaching critical reasoning. I admit the course on conspiracy theories would probably be taught badly by a median teacher. I don’t think teachers would be expected to read this review, but they could work from textbooks/worksheets/curricula designed around them.
It seems that for the "hypothesis of global warming" it would be particularly hard for a layperson to do much other than regurgitate arguments made by others. How can you reason about whether the global average temperature has risen about a degree Celsius compared to the pre-industrial baseline?
If the topic were instead the "hypothesis proposed by The Educated Mind", we'd at least have some hope of coming up with our own arguments.
Somebody elsewhere in the thread said that Egan's ideas seem to them to be those of a humanities person who doesn't know much about science. Egan would like to involve learners into the controversies animating some disciplines instead of just teaching settled, static fact, as part of his storytelling-based education. He's not alone in this; it reminds me of some flavours of progressive education. But while there are disciplines in which a layman can have a valid opinion on current (or past) controversies, this is not the case for all of them. (I'm not even sure they fall neatly along the humanities vs. science distinction.) I, for one, do teach settled fact when I teach mathematics, and I don't feel like there is anything wrong with that.
"It was fun and transgressive and educational to write the against paper!"
*If* the teacher is willing to accept the 'wrong' answer. Way back in the time of the dinosaurs, in my Inter Cert* history class I decided to give the 'wrong' answer instead of the pat textbook answer because I had been reading around on the topic, and I got slapped down *hard* for it, to the extent that I vowed I would never again open my mouth in that class with that teacher.
History was my second favourite subject, and she *tore* into me, told me in front of the entire class that I was stupid, said I would fail my exam miserably**, etc. Only because I truly do love history is why I stuck with it, otherwise that reaction would have led to me dropping the subject and staying far away from it in after life outside of school.
Sometimes you have to be aware that the 'transgressive' answer will get you punished.
*Now called the Junior Certificate state national examination, taken at age 15 or so
** For the record, I got a good grade but it was nothing to do with that teacher
I had some really, really good middle school social studies teachers that provided some highly formative experiences for me. In one class we did a similar adversarial project on JFK assassination theories. In another class we did an investigation into public campaign finance records which suffice to say overturned some preconceived notions about the relative behavior of Republicans and Democrats.
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.
It would have to be accompanied by more selective hiring, possible as both smarter and more candidates would apply for the job. This would take time.
It's not just about the intelligence of the teacher, though that's important too. Put John von Neumann in a class of thirty kids from a deprived area and see how he gets on. The brats may well eat him alive.
The amount of wrangling teachers have to do to keep kids from talking on their phones, chatting with their friends, interrupting, not paying attention, asking to go to the toilet, go to their lockers to get their textbooks, I forgot my homework, etc. eats up class time, and that's before you get to the ones throwing chairs and having meltdowns.
Higher qualifications for teachers don't seem to make a difference.
> 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.
100% this.
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 agree with your fourth category. But, do you think this category would impact or alter the essay or the source material in any way? The reason I ask is that Egan's school is still a school, serving the 4th function by default. So, from a social time economics perspective, the 4th category is paramount. But from a quality of a school's education perspective, it is mostly irrelevant.
I couldn't speak as to the source material, I only know it through the essay. But, I do think it would change the essay -- in minor ways. The key thing I ask for is recognition of that fourth role.
We want schools to contain our children not just because they are effective at doing so, from both a governmental perspective and from the point of view of personal improvement, but because of those three other jobs. There are plenty of ways to keep a child contained for 8-10 hours a day, but that's not the only goal.
Since I tend to write long, I'll stop with a summary: I ask for recognition of all four of these *equally* important roles.
If occupation is what we want, it would make more sense to just get children into the world of work, the way most pre-modern societies did.
This just over the transom
https://twitter.com/george__mack/status/1659217629469609984
Are you able to describe why I should follow this link? I’m not willing to click on a link without a clear reason to do so, because I don’t want to skew anyone’s metrics or advertising incentives.
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.
I should add the not all the Egan's ideas sound bad. But it sounds weird when some of the ideas are told like they would be novel ideas and changes to current way of schooling.
Teacher telling culturally relevant myths and stories and fairytales and saga and occasionally reading some book aloud was bread and butter of my kid age primary school experience. Even the alphabet book came with short stories for each letter (admittedly two decades ago).
Don't Americans / anglophones no longer do this? I thought you were all raised on stories of George Washington and cherry tree and such
When I was in Fifth Class, our teacher never opened the history textbook, instead she taught us by telling us stories. I agree, this is no new approach.
I have an awful feeling teachers today don't do this because they *can't*. Young teachers in their 20s coming out of training will have been brought up where all your cultural learning is done online via movies and mass media, and you never learned about George Washington and the cherry tree because a previous generation of education theorists scrapped all that in the name of "this is a lie, it never happened, we should teach facts" and now they prefer to teach that Washington was a slave-holder and racist and the rest of it.
"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. "
I agree about that, and not just for science and maths. I think the failure mode there is people who will then *think* they know about a historical personage when they don't, witness the online posts about "Galileo was burned at the stake".
And you won't learn maths just by knowing Five Top Facts About Pythagoras or whomever. C.S. Lewis describes it elsewhere, I can't lay my hand on the exact quotation - about the moment when the hard work of learning has to be done. The boy who fell in love with stories from the Iliad setting out to learn Greek and having to settle down to the slog of learning grammar, and so forth.
You can't get around the slog element, I'm afraid, and that is where the "let's make it fun and kids will learn naturally" theories fall flat.
Maybe I'm wrong, but I feel that the reason why those theories of "making education fun and natural" are so popular is that there are some things that people learn to do without much apparent effort, especially in early childhood. For example, learning to speak and understand one's first language(s), or learning to walk. But as it turns out, these things are biologically primary activities for humans, which differ from the biologically secondary activities we learn about in school, and which do require the slog element. The whole "reading wars" in the US and elsewhere between phonics and "whole language" methods to teach reading stemmed from the idea that it might be possible to make learning to read just as fun and natural as learning to speak, instead of having to go through the slog of phonics training. Unfortunately, reading does not seem to be a biologically primary activity.
Yes! Steven Pinker discusses this point in his book The Blank Slate.
"without much apparent effort" blows my mind; learning to walk and speak takes months if not years of concentrated effort on the part of the child and parents.
I wonder how much effort is involved in cultures where children learn by observation and apprenticeship.
That C.S. Lewis quote you refer to is from The Screwtape Letters, and it’s absolutely true.
"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."
Same for me, but most kids don't ever use those technical math things so don't need to be taught them anyway. However, when kids are learning about the solar system or why things fall down then Galileo and Newton might be quite interesting, like on the TV show Cosmos.
The idea is to tell the story at the earlier part of the educational cycle. Many people remember Archimedes and his bath water, even if they never become scientists.
Sure, but do they *understand* what the bath water realisation was meant to be? It was years after I knew about "Eureka!" that I discovered it was about solving the displacement problem (supposedly for finding out if a crown really was pure gold or if the goldsmith had cheated, kept some of the gold, and alloyed the remainder to make the crown).
I'm not sure that's a criticism of the eureka story, though. Relative density is a pretty difficult concept, and so I'd expect understanding of that story to come a while after the leaping-out-of-the-bath story, which is one of those brilliant mental images that captures the imagination of children and adults alike. For children, its primary power, I think, lies in the suggestion that ideas can be that powerful - strong enough to make you leap naked out of the bath. When you learn the (slightly disappointing and plutocratic) theory and problem associated, they become much more memorable. But as a story, Archimedes is all about how the Greeks took the life of the mind seriously.
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.
I was wondering about this, because in my memory it's a school in the mountains, not by the beach. Great movie, though!
Pretty sure it's alongside water. I remember it being more of a lake than a beach, but there's definitely water.
Is the point supposed to be that the books are on the shelves and no one reads them? Or are they meant to complement the learning outside?
It's supposed to be an idyllic intellectual environment. Children surrounded by books and inventions as they learn and play.
Ok, thanks.
Name of the movie?
>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?
https://www.berlitz.com/blog/hardest-languages-to-learn-english-speakers
Everyone's got different Hardest Language lists, but Mandarin and Arabic show up high on all of them.
The mention of dead languages, and Cantonese instead of Mandarin, seemed to be emphasizing the languages as a mental exercise rather than a tool. But then that kind of turns it into busywork and goes back into "learn it because we say" education.
'I'm assuming these are very dissimilar to English but I don't actually know much about either of them.' - they are, though there are lots of similarities as well since they're all Indo-European languages. This might be a benefit to teaching them! (Students start out thinking they're completely different and then find out how similar they are in some ways, and by analogy how similar people are...)
Arabic is not Indo European. Neither is ancient Egyptian.
I was talking about Arabic and Hindi, but you're right, Arabic is Afro-Asiatic, not Indo-European! My mistake. I was thinking of Urdu, which is sort of a mix.
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.
My impression of Aristotle's influence is that it could have done with a whole lot more undermining for a long time.
By the standards of modern science he got a lot wrong. By the standards of basically everyone up to him, he's the only one groping towards actual science.
"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.
On the bright side, RenaissanceManGPT may be around the corner.
This is a good criticism. To some extent, this is what curricula are for - get the experts to write the curriculum/textbook, so the teachers don't have to be expert in all those things. But yes, if the textbook/curriculum is too far beyond the abilities of the teacher, then the class isn't going to work.
> 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.
Do you use it in your job?
If you ever needed to put a ladder up against a wall, you've used the principles behind the Pythagorean theorem. It really is only in later life that you appreciate "ah, this is what is meant!" when applying the textbook problems to real life.
I think that a simple heuristic would sufficient, "A ladder should be about 20% longer than the height it is used to climb", no need to use square roots to find the length of the ladder.
In that sense I use it a lot myself (nothing like cutting across some corners to get to your next class quicker when you have to cross an enormous university), but I rarely find people who consider it 'the most useful thing they've learned'.
Yup. Not that I can immediately recall in its common form but closely related and derived math comes up a lot.
Interesting! Would you mind saying roughly what field/profession you're in? Some kind of engineering?
I have used the Pythagorean theorem in my job for something as tedious as writing a macro in PowerPoint to ensure that every object in the top left corner of each slide in the deck is identified and repositioned so that they all perfectly align. I have friends in surveying and construction who use it daily. Certainly there are plenty of cases where they could get by just using the output from a computer program, but, to fall into the trap of invoking Myer's-Briggs, having the theorem to reference in their actions is something very useful for "intuitive" type personalities.
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.
I think there are ways the history of mathematics can make it easier or more interesting to learn. For example in alegbra I remember learning about ”completing the square” as an algebra problem. It would have been useful to learn that historically, this was a geometric problem that was literally about completing a square, and that it is taught in algebra now because algebra and geometry were later combined.
That was my initial reaction too, and then I remembered as part of the relatively few people that actually somewhat enjoyed school and academics as a kid that I'm really not the demographic this proposed reform has in mind. I suspect the average person would rather hear about spicy details from about the life of someone who lived, than about a cool maths result. Whether making that part of the curriculum would help people to actually learn the math itself is another question entirely though
I think the focus isn't so much on who came up with the idea, but rather why they came up with it. Even with Philosophy (which is an outlier amongst fields in this respect) you don't spend that much time on the actual biographies of philosophers, but having a sense of the kind of society they lived in helps to interpret their theories.
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.
I think people don't get the point of the "bears are white" story, and we've discussed this on here before.
"Those silly villagers were too dumb to engage in abstract thinking, they couldn't even work out bears are white" is the takeaway most people have, and what we're supposed to take away.
But in the wider context of the time? You are a peasant living in Stalinist Russia, where the wrong opinion can get you sent off to Siberia, if you're lucky, and shot if you're not. Some bigwig guys come down from the big city and claim to be running an experiment. They ask you and your neighbours all kinds of weird questions.
Now, you know that the obvious answer is "the bears are white", but you *also* know that 'giving the obvious answer' has been used to arrest people and send them off to Siberia. What if this is a loyalty test? What if there's an Officially Approved Answer about if bears are white or not, and you are supposed to give it? You don't know if the Officially Approved Answer is "the bears are white". Maybe the white bears are code for the Whites - you don't want to be caught out expressing support for the Whites, that would be Very Bad:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_movement
In that situation, the most self-preservation tactic is "well I'm not saying this is so, but it could be the bears are white, but I've never seen a white bear myself" and the likes. Remember, we're talking about a society where people are afraid to stop applauding at a party meeting because the first guy to stop is going to be considered an Enemy of the State.
There's meta concerns with the white bear thing. It's entirely possible this guy is framing the question this way to force an answer which he will then promote as "99% of northerners agree Northern bears are white, so you can't argue otherwise".
The most fun thing about Robert Mueller's Congressional testimony was watching his absolute refusal to verbalize any part of his own report, because he knew the Democrats wanted to turn him into a soundbite and he wasn't going to let them. ("Would you read this portion for us?" "I would be happy to have YOU read it.")
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?
You make some good points, but I believe that the reason for the emphasis on academics is not that we want or expect every student to join the PMC. Rather, everyone - plumbers, electricians, cashiers, etc - benefits greatly from being literate and numerate.
Literacy and numeracy is accomplished in the elementary schools - 1-6, at least they are supposed to be.
Wherefore then the middle and high school education foci today?
I think it is safe to say that the vast majority of education from middle school onwards is focused on the academic as opposed to the vocational or even to general life such as household budgeting, basic mechanics, basic electricity, basic flujidics etc.
Even computer programming emphasis is utterly misplaced: the actual numbers of people who program in society is a tiny, tiny fraction. How about instead educating people to use Excel type worksheets, basic publishing, etc?
>I am 100% certain that 99.5% of all schooling at whatever levels lays zero emphasis on anything but the "academics" track
This is not true. States often put a fair amount of money and effort into their high school level vocational education programs. These are often very popular with students. There are also a number of partnerships between community college and high school programs aimed at vocational education. They are somewhat held back by some difficulties getting competent e.g. welders and auto mechanics to go work at a high school instead of making more money at their main job, partly because there are extra regulatory hurdles to jump through.
Perhaps you can provide some counterexamples other than funding.
The existence of a woodshop class at a school does not equate to equal focus on vocational vs. academic, any more than the physical education class equates to equal focus on athletic training vs. academic.
There are no vocational equivalents to the team and individual sports, for example, which actually do serve as some form of athletic training and focus.
There are no vocational equivalents to the academic competitions or awards either.
The only type of class which could be termed vocational with some real world impact would be driver's education - and even then it is almost exclusively because most of America requires the ability to drive in order to have some form of independence.
I don't know whether it would be good to have competitions for voc ed skills, but it would at least be interesting to see it tried.
Competitions demonstrate focus and enable acclamation associated with some type of accomplishment.
And there are some examples of this: consider 4H programs, but it is safe to say that these types of programs are outside "standard" curricula.
And while farming families are less than 2% of the US population - what percentage of the US population are programmers? Probably far, far less...
Unfortunately, competitions are also subject to Goodhart's Law-- you end up optimizing for winning rather than practical accomplishment.
I don't disagree, but my point was not that competitions yield more/better vocational skills themselves.
My point is that the existence of competitions, and the resultant recognition, is a signal that such activity matters.
You say universal education was about ”development” but I would have said it was more about socialization and to some extent about academics. Socialization because it got children used to following a schedule and doing boring, repetitive tasks of the kind they would do at work.
Your views are based ib the industrialists in 1870 and later - see https://qz.com/1314814/universal-education-was-first-promoted-by-industrialists-who-wanted-docile-factory-workers
"Factory owners were among the biggest champions for the Elementary Education Act 1870, which made education universally available in England."
The thing is - the loudest and earliest proponents for universal education, and the most cited today - are people like Horace Mann who believed universal education would make for better educated voters.
So if you want to say that universal education was a way to train children to work better as labor in early Industrial Age factories as opposed to the non-clock based labor of farms, ok then but it absolutely isn't the case today.
"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."
See Dickens' "Our Mutual Friend" of 1865:
"The school at which young Charley Hexam had first learned from a book—the streets being, for pupils of his degree, the great Preparatory Establishment in which very much that is never unlearned is learned without and before book—was a miserable loft in an unsavoury yard. Its atmosphere was oppressive and disagreeable; it was crowded, noisy, and confusing; half the pupils dropped asleep, or fell into a state of waking stupefaction; the other half kept them in either condition by maintaining a monotonous droning noise, as if they were performing, out of time and tune, on a ruder sort of bagpipe. The teachers, animated solely by good intentions, had no idea of execution, and a lamentable jumble was the upshot of their kind endeavours.
It was a school for all ages, and for both sexes. The latter were kept apart, and the former were partitioned off into square assortments. But, all the place was pervaded by a grimly ludicrous pretence that every pupil was childish and innocent. This pretence, much favoured by the lady-visitors, led to the ghastliest absurdities. Young women old in the vices of the commonest and worst life, were expected to profess themselves enthralled by the good child’s book, the Adventures of Little Margery, who resided in the village cottage by the mill; severely reproved and morally squashed the miller, when she was five and he was fifty; divided her porridge with singing birds; denied herself a new nankeen bonnet, on the ground that the turnips did not wear nankeen bonnets, neither did the sheep who ate them; who plaited straw and delivered the dreariest orations to all comers, at all sorts of unseasonable times. So, unwieldy young dredgers and hulking mudlarks were referred to the experiences of Thomas Twopence, who, having resolved not to rob (under circumstances of uncommon atrocity) his particular friend and benefactor, of eighteenpence, presently came into supernatural possession of three and sixpence, and lived a shining light ever afterwards. (Note, that the benefactor came to no good.) Several swaggering sinners had written their own biographies in the same strain; it always appearing from the lessons of those very boastful persons, that you were to do good, not because it was good, but because you were to make a good thing of it. Contrariwise, the adult pupils were taught to read (if they could learn) out of the New Testament; and by dint of stumbling over the syllables and keeping their bewildered eyes on the particular syllables coming round to their turn, were as absolutely ignorant of the sublime history, as if they had never seen or heard of it. An exceedingly and confoundingly perplexing jumble of a school, in fact, where black spirits and grey, red spirits and white, jumbled jumbled jumbled jumbled, jumbled every night. And particularly every Sunday night. For then, an inclined plane of unfortunate infants would be handed over to the prosiest and worst of all the teachers with good intentions, whom nobody older would endure. Who, taking his stand on the floor before them as chief executioner, would be attended by a conventional volunteer boy as executioner’s assistant. When and where it first became the conventional system that a weary or inattentive infant in a class must have its face smoothed downward with a hot hand, or when and where the conventional volunteer boy first beheld such system in operation, and became inflamed with a sacred zeal to administer it, matters not. It was the function of the chief executioner to hold forth, and it was the function of the acolyte to dart at sleeping infants, yawning infants, restless infants, whimpering infants, and smooth their wretched faces; sometimes with one hand, as if he were anointing them for a whisker; sometimes with both hands, applied after the fashion of blinkers. And so the jumble would be in action in this department for a mortal hour; the exponent drawling on to My Dearert Childerrenerr, let us say, for example, about the beautiful coming to the Sepulchre; and repeating the word Sepulchre (commonly used among infants) five hundred times, and never once hinting what it meant; the conventional boy smoothing away right and left, as an infallible commentary; the whole hot-bed of flushed and exhausted infants exchanging measles, rashes, whooping-cough, fever, and stomach disorders, as if they were assembled in High Market for the purpose.
Even in this temple of good intentions, an exceptionally sharp boy exceptionally determined to learn, could learn something, and, having learned it, could impart it much better than the teachers; as being more knowing than they, and not at the disadvantage in which they stood towards the shrewder pupils. In this way it had come about that Charley Hexam had risen in the jumble, taught in the jumble, and been received from the jumble into a better school."
That's the "good intentions, theory of education completely unmoored from reality" schooling available on the one hand, and then on the other the product of the 'better' schooling:
Bradley Headstone, in his decent black coat and waistcoat, and decent white shirt, and decent formal black tie, and decent pantaloons of pepper and salt, with his decent silver watch in his pocket and its decent hair-guard round his neck, looked a thoroughly decent young man of six-and-twenty. He was never seen in any other dress, and yet there was a certain stiffness in his manner of wearing this, as if there were a want of adaptation between him and it, recalling some mechanics in their holiday clothes. He had acquired mechanically a great store of teacher’s knowledge. He could do mental arithmetic mechanically, sing at sight mechanically, blow various wind instruments mechanically, even play the great church organ mechanically. From his early childhood up, his mind had been a place of mechanical stowage. The arrangement of his wholesale warehouse, so that it might be always ready to meet the demands of retail dealers history here, geography there, astronomy to the right, political economy to the left—natural history, the physical sciences, figures, music, the lower mathematics, and what not, all in their several places—this care had imparted to his countenance a look of care; while the habit of questioning and being questioned had given him a suspicious manner, or a manner that would be better described as one of lying in wait. There was a kind of settled trouble in the face. It was the face belonging to a naturally slow or inattentive intellect that had toiled hard to get what it had won, and that had to hold it now that it was gotten. He always seemed to be uneasy lest anything should be missing from his mental warehouse, and taking stock to assure himself.
Suppression of so much to make room for so much, had given him a constrained manner, over and above. Yet there was enough of what was animal, and of what was fiery (though smouldering), still visible in him, to suggest that if young Bradley Headstone, when a pauper lad, had chanced to be told off for the sea, he would not have been the last man in a ship’s crew. Regarding that origin of his, he was proud, moody, and sullen, desiring it to be forgotten. And few people knew of it.
In some visits to the Jumble his attention had been attracted to this boy Hexam. An undeniable boy for a pupil-teacher; an undeniable boy to do credit to the master who should bring him on. Combined with this consideration, there may have been some thought of the pauper lad now never to be mentioned. Be that how it might, he had with pains gradually worked the boy into his own school, and procured him some offices to discharge there, which were repaid with food and lodging. Such were the circumstances that had brought together, Bradley Headstone and young Charley Hexam that autumn evening. Autumn, because full half a year had come and gone since the bird of prey lay dead upon the river-shore.
...‘Oh, Mary Anne, Mary Anne!’ returned Miss Peecher, slightly colouring and shaking her head, a little out of humour; ‘how often have I told you not to use that vague expression, not to speak in that general way? When you say they say, what do you mean? Part of speech They?’
Mary Anne hooked her right arm behind her in her left hand, as being under examination, and replied:
‘Personal pronoun.’
‘Person, They?’
‘Third person.’
‘Number, They?’
‘Plural number.’
‘Then how many do you mean, Mary Anne? Two? Or more?’
‘I beg your pardon, ma’am,’ said Mary Anne, disconcerted now she came to think of it; ‘but I don’t know that I mean more than her brother himself.’ As she said it, she unhooked her arm.
‘I felt convinced of it,’ returned Miss Peecher, smiling again. ‘Now pray, Mary Anne, be careful another time. He says is very different from they say, remember. Difference between he says and they say? Give it me.’
Mary Anne immediately hooked her right arm behind her in her left hand—an attitude absolutely necessary to the situation—and replied: ‘One is indicative mood, present tense, third person singular, verb active to say. Other is indicative mood, present tense, third person plural, verb active to say.’
‘Why verb active, Mary Anne?’
‘Because it takes a pronoun after it in the objective case, Miss Peecher.’
‘Very good indeed,’ remarked Miss Peecher, with encouragement. ‘In fact, could not be better. Don’t forget to apply it, another time, Mary Anne.’ This said, Miss Peecher finished the watering of her flowers, and went into her little official residence, and took a refresher of the principal rivers and mountains of the world, their breadths, depths, and heights, before settling the measurements of the body of a dress for her own personal occupation."
Sadly, the first few sentences are just about as accurately descriptive of inner city schools now - students and teachers both.
Full circle...
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
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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.
Claude's 3 paragraph summary (I'm currently trying out this LLM):
Paragraph 1:
The book review discusses Kieran Egan's educational philosophy laid out in his book The Educated Mind: How Cognitive Tools Shape Our Understanding. Egan argues that schools are failing because they ignore the cognitive tools humans have developed over history to make sense of the world, like humor, metaphor, and storytelling. He proposes rebuilding education around these tools, guiding students through the major kinds of understanding humans have developed - mythic, romantic, philosophic, and ironic. Egan believes this approach, tailored to students' abilities at each age, could make school intellectually enriching and help develop rational thinking.
Paragraph 2:
The review summarizes how Egan's philosophy could transform curriculum at the elementary, middle, and high school levels. For elementary, lessons would leverage tools like mental imagery and metaphor to convey history, science, and math through engaging stories drawn from diverse cultures. At middle school, curriculum would tap into adolescents' interest in extremes, gossip, and heroes to make traditional subjects exciting. High school would organize instruction around the major debates within each discipline, helping students see how new knowledge is created. The goal is to keep students engaged while systematically developing more sophisticated reasoning abilities.
Paragraph 3:
While acknowledging weaknesses in Egan's paradigm, the reviewer argues it merits attention based on alignment with cognitive science, cultural evolution theory, and widespread innate human interests. The review suggests empirical studies, application in schools, and scrutiny from the rationalist community could further test Egan's ideas. Overall, the review presents Egan's philosophy as a compelling vision for enlivening education and nurturing rational thinking.
Which I consider a reasonable 3 paragraph summary, out of the huge number of possible ones. It forgets somatic, which I did not when I did a one paragraph summary, so one point for the humans. Side note: we complain LLM's hallucinate/are not grounded on truth. Well... Once they are, that's huge, because they have random built in, and creativity is facts+random+ground.
Who is Claude?
An LLM
https://www.google.com/search?q=LLM
"An LLM, or Master of Laws, is a graduate qualification in the field of law. The LLM was created for lawyers to expand their knowledge, study a specialized area of law, and gain international qualifications if they have earned a law degree outside the U.S. or Canada."
Claude LLM
A large language model.
Oh.
Thank you for this!🙏
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.
Men of Mathematics is a terrific book, I’ve read it multiple times
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.
Hear hear! Me too! Looking very forward to more of this!
> 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.
Yes.
In 1916 Padraic Pearse produced a pamphlet entitled "The Murder Machine" about the system of education in Ireland; his main objection was that it was set up by the British to keep the Irish docile and good subjects, but he also objects to the system of state exams and has his own views on educational reform:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Murder_Machine
https://celt.ucc.ie/published/E900007-001/text002.html
"I have spent the greater part of my life in immediate contemplation of the most grotesque and horrible of the English inventions for the debasement of Ireland. I mean their education system. ...But the English have actually carried out an even filthier thing. They have planned and established an education system which more wickedly does violence to the elementary human rights of Irish children than would an edict for the general castration of Irish males. The system has aimed at the substitution for men and women of mere Things. It has not been an entire success. There are still a great many thousand men and women in Ireland. But a great many thousand of what, by way, of courtesy, we call men and women, are simply Things. Men and women, however depraved, have kindly human allegiances. But these Things have no allegiance. Like other Things, they are for sale.
...I put it that what education in Ireland needed was less a reconstruction of its machinery than a regeneration in spirit. The machinery, I said, has doubtless its defects, but what is chiefly wrong with it is that it is mere machinery, a lifeless thing without a soul. ...But the machine as a whole is no more capable of fulfilling the function for which it is needed than would an automaton be capable of fulfilling the function of a living teacher in a school. A soulless thing cannot teach; but it can destroy. A machine cannot make men; but it can break men.
One of the most terrible things about the English education system in Ireland is its ruthlessness. I know no image for that ruthlessness in the natural order. The ruthlessness of a wild beast has in it a certain mercy — it slays. It has in it a certain grandeur of animal force. But this ruthlessness is literally without pity and without passion. It is cold and mechanical, like the ruthlessness of an immensely powerful engine. A machine vast, complicated, with a multitude of far-reaching arms, with many ponderous presses, carrying out mysterious and long-drawn processes of shaping and moulding, is the true image of the Irish education system. It grinds night and day; it obeys immutable and predetermined laws; it is as devoid of understanding, of sympathy, of imagination, as is any other piece of machinery that performs an appointed task.
Into it is fed all the raw human material in Ireland; it seizes upon it inexorably and rends and compresses and re-moulds; and what it cannot refashion after the regulation pattern it ejects with all likeness of its former self crushed from it, a bruised and shapeless thing, thereafter accounted waste.
Our common parlance has become impressed with the conception of education as some sort of manufacturing process. Our children are the ‘raw material’; we desiderate for their education ‘modern methods’ which must be efficient but cheap; we send them to Clongowes to be ‘finished’; when finished they are ‘turned out’; specialists ‘grind’ them for the English Civil Service and the so-called liberal professions; in each of our great colleges there is a department known as the ‘scrap-heap’, though officially called the Fourth Preparatory — the limbo to which the debris ejected by the machine is relegated. The stuff there is either too hard or too soft to be moulded to the pattern required by the Civil Service Commissioners or the Incorporated Law Society.
In our adoption of the standpoint here indicated there is involved a primary blunder as to the nature and functions of education. For education has not to do with the manufacture of things, but with fostering the growth of things. And the conditions we should strive to bring about in our education system are not the conditions favourable to the rapid and cheap manufacture of ready-mades, but the conditions favourable to the growth of living organisms — the liberty and the light and the gladness of a ploughed field under the spring sunshine.
In particular I would urge that the Irish school system of the future should give freedom —freedom to the individual school, freedom to the individual teacher, freedom as far as may be to the individual pupil. Without freedom there can be no right growth; and education is properly the fostering of the right growth of a personality. Our school system must bring, too, some gallant inspiration. And with the inspiration it must bring a certain hardening. One scarcely knows whether modern sentimentalism or modern utilitarianism is the more sure sign of modern decadence. I would boldly preach the antique faith that fighting is the only noble thing, and that he only is at peace with God who is at war with the powers of evil.
...All the speculations one saw a few years ago as to the probable effect of Home Rule on education in Ireland showed one how inadequately the problem was grasped. To some the expected advent of Home Rule seemed to promise as its main fruition in the field of education the raising of their salaries; to others the supreme thing it was to bring in its train was the abolition of Dr. Starkie; to some again it held out the delightful prospect of Orange boys and Orange girls being forced to learn Irish; to others it meant the dawn of an era of common sense, the ushering in of the reign of a sound modern education, suitable to the needs of a progressive modern people.
I scandalised many people at the time by saying that the last was the view that irritated me most. The first view was not so selfish as it might appear, for between the salary offered to teachers and the excellence of a country's education system there is a vital connection. And the second and third forecasts at any rate opened up picturesque vistas. The passing of Dr. Starkie would have had something of the pageantry of the banishment of Napoleon to St. Helena (an effect which would have been heightened had he been accompanied into exile by Mr. Bonaparte Wyse), and the prospect of the children of Sandy Row being taught to curse the Pope in Irish was rich and soul-satisfying. These things we might or might not have seen had Home Rule come. But I expressed the hope that even Home Rule would not commit Ireland to an ideal so low as the ideal underlying the phrase ‘a sound modern education.’
It is a vile phrase, one of the vilest I know. Yet we find it in nearly every school prospectus, and it comes pat to the lips of nearly everyone that writes or talks about schools
Now, there can be no such thing as ‘a sound modern education’—as well talk about a ‘lively modern faith’ or a ‘serviceable modern religion.’ It should be obvious that the more ‘modern’ an education is the less ‘sound’, for in education ‘modernism’ is as much a heresy as in religion. In both mediaevalism were a truer standard. We are too fond of clapping ourselves upon the back because we live in modern times, and we preen ourselves quite ridiculously (and unnecessarily) on our modern progress. There is, of course, such a thing as modern progress, but it has been won at how great a cost! How many precious things have we flung from us to lighten ourselves for that race!
...I dwell on the importance of the personal element in education. I would have every child not merely a unit in a school attendance, but in some intimate personal way the pupil of a teacher, or, to use more expressive words, the disciple of a master. And here I nowise contradict another position of mine, that the main object in education is to help the child to be his own true and best self. What the teacher should bring to his pupil is not a set of ready made opinions, or a stock of cut-and-dry information, but an inspiration and an example; and his main qualification should be, not such an overmastering will as shall impose itself at all hazards upon all weaker wills that come under its influence, but rather so infectious an enthusiasm as shall kindle new enthusiasm. The Montessori system, so admirable in many ways, would seem at first sight to attach insufficient importance to the function of the teacher in the schoolroom. But this is not really so. True, it would make the spontaneous efforts of the children the main motive power, as against the dominating will of the teacher which is the main motive power in the ordinary schoolroom. But the teacher must be there always to inspire, to foster. If you would realise how true this is, how important the personality of the teacher, even in a Montessori school, try to imagine a Montessori school conducted by the average teacher of your acquaintance, or try to imagine a Montessori school conducted by yourself!"
(1/2)
(2/2)
I wonder if Egan read this essay, because Pearse too wants to encourage love of books and learning by means of the myths and sagas:
"Every school must conform to a type — and what a type! Every individual must conform to a type — and what a type! The teacher has not been at liberty, and in practice is not yet at liberty, to seek to discover the individual bents of his pupils, the hidden talent that is in every normal soul, to discover which and to cherish which, that it may in the fullness of time be put to some precious use, is the primary duty of the teacher. I knew one boy who passed through several schools a dunce and a laughing-stock; the National Board and the Intermediate Board had sat in judgment upon him and had damned him as a failure before men and angels. Yet a friend and fellow-worker of mine discovered that he was gifted with a wondrous sympathy for nature, that he loved and understood the ways of plants, that he had a strange minuteness and subtlety of observation — that, in short, he was the sort of boy likely to become an accomplished botanist. I knew another boy of whom his father said to me: ‘He is no good at books, he is no good at work; he is good at nothing but playing a tin whistle. What am I to do with him ’? I shocked the worthy man by replying (though really it was the obvious thing to reply): ‘Buy a tin whistle for him’. Once a colleague of mine summed up the whole philosophy of education in a maxim which startled a sober group of visitors: ‘If a boy shows an aptitude for doing anything better than most people, he should be encouraged to do it as well as possible; I don't care what it is — scotch-hop, if you like.’
The idea of a compulsory programme imposed by an external authority upon every child in every school in a country is the direct contrary of the root idea involved in education. Yet this is what we have in Ireland. In theory the primary schools have a certain amount of freedom; in practice they have none. Neither in theory or practice is such a freedom dreamt of in the gloomy limbo whose presiding demon is the Board of Intermediate education for Ireland. Education, indeed, reaches its nadir in the Irish Intermediate system. At the present moment there are 15,000 boys and girls pounding at a programme drawn up for them by certain persons around a table in Hume street. Precisely the same textbooks are being read to-night in every secondary school and college in Ireland. Two of Hawthorne's Tanglewood Tales, with a few poems in English, will constitute the whole literary pabulum of three-quarters of the pupils of Irish secondary schools during this twelve months [1912-13.]
The teacher who seeks to give his pupils a wider horizon in literature does so at his peril. He will no doubt benefit his pupils, but he will infallibly reduce his results fees. As an intermediate teacher said to me, ‘Culture is all very well in its way, but if you don't stick to your programme your boys won't pass.’ ‘Stick to your programme’ is the strange device on the banner of the Irish intermediate system; and the programme bulks so large that there is no room for education.
...The school must make such an appeal to the pupil as shall resound throughout his after life, urging him always to be his best self, never his second-best self. Such an inspiration will come most adequately of all from religion. I do not think that there can be any education of which spiritual religion does not form an integral part; as it is the most important part of life, so it should be the most important part of education, which some have defined as a preparation for complete life. And inspiration will come also from the hero-stories of the world, and especially of our own people; from science and art if taught by people who are really scientists and artists, and not merely persons with certificates from Mr. T. W. Russell; from literature enjoyed as literature and not studied as ‘texts’; from the associations of the school place; finally and chiefly from the humanity and great-heartedness of the teacher.
A heroic tale is more essentially a factor in education than a proposition in Euclid. The story of Joan of Arc or the story of the young Napoleon means more for boys and girls than all the algebra in all the books. What the modern world wants more than anything else, what Ireland wants beyond all other modern countries, is a new birth of the heroic spirit. If our schools would set themselves that task, the task of fostering once again knightly courage and strength and truth — that type of efficiency rather than the peculiar type of efficiency demanded by the English Civil Service — we should have at least the beginning of an educational system. And what an appeal an Irish school system might have! What a rallying cry an Irish Minister of Education might give to young Ireland! When we were starting St. Enda's I said to my boys: ‘We must re-create and perpetuate in Ireland the knightly tradition of Cuchulainn, ‘better is short life with honour than long life with dishonour’; ‘I care not though I were to live but one day and one night, if only my fame and my deeds live after me’; the noble tradition of the Fianna, ‘we, the Fianna, never told a lie, falsehood was never imputed to us’; ‘strength in our hands, truth on our lips, and cleanness in our hearts’; the Christ-like tradition of Colmcille, ‘if I die it shall be from the excess of the love I bear the Gael’.’ And to that antique evangel should be added the evangels of later days: the stories of Red Hugh and Wolfe Tone and Robert Emmet and John Mitchel and O'Donovan Rossa and Eoghan O'Growney. I have seen Irish boys and girls moved inexpressibly by the story of Emmet or the story of Anne Devlin, and I have always felt it to be legitimate to make use for educational purposes of an exaltation so produced.
The value of the national factor in education would appear to rest chiefly in this, that it addresses itself to the most generous side of the child's nature, urging him to live up to his finest self. If the true work of the teacher be, as I have said, to help the child to realise himself at his best and worthiest, the factor of nationality is of prime importance, apart from any ulterior propagandist views the teacher may cherish. The school system which neglects it commits, even from the purely pedagogic point of view, a primary blunder. It neglects one of the most powerful of educational resources.
...Finally, I say inspiration must come from the teacher. If we can no longer send the children to the heroes and seers and scholars to be fostered, we can at least bring some of the heroes and seers and scholars to the schools. We can rise up against the system which tolerates as teachers the rejected of all other professions rather than demanding for so priest-like an office the highest souls and noblest intellects of the race. I remember once going into a schoolroom in Belgium and finding an old man talking quietly and beautifully about literature to a silent class of boys; I was told that he was one of the most distinguished of contemporary Flemish poets. Here was the sort of personality, the sort of influence, one ought to see in a schoolroom. Not, indeed, that every poet would make a good schoolmaster, or every schoolmaster a good poet. But how seldom here has the teacher any interest in literature at all; how seldom has he any horizon above his time-table, any soul larger than his results fees!"
An early vision of Moloch.
" 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.
Agreed. It's a strange state of affairs that education became such a ready vehicle for promoting the currently fashionable ideology. We push untested and in most cases incoherent ideas onto the most vulnerable minds and we feel righteous as we do it. But this seems entirely backwards. Education should evolve slowly and with the most rigorous scientific backing because they're so vulnerable. These kids don't get these years/decades back when we misfire on the next big educational trend. How did kids become such an easy target for social experimentation? How do we shore up the education industry's defenses against bullshit peddlers?
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?
> 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?
No. It's sufficient to test them once. That's how the Chinese imperial examinations worked - you were free to take them whenever you wanted. (Subject to when they were offered.) Passing meant your life was a success.
That system didn't involve schooling at all, but it was more successful at imparting the knowledge it wanted to impart than the school system is. Incentives matter.
> 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.
> The norm is for people to be unable to move ring fingers independently of the adjacent middle fingers.
First time hearing this notion -- how do the "unable" folks touch-type?! (Worth a poll?)
If your claim were true, it wouldn't be possible to count to *ten* on both hands.
It's true that fully extending the ring finger whilst fully curling all other fingers is not typically possible, but this is not necessary - all fingers have enough independent movement to indicate "up" and "down".
> If your claim were true, it wouldn't be possible to count to *ten* on both hands.
Well, 5 seconds was an absurdly generous overestimate here.
You can count to ten on both hands by passing a finger of the other hand over the one you're counting on. That requires the ability to extend one finger on each hand while the other hand makes a fist.
I can count to ten on both hands by extending my fingers one at a time.
For what it's worth, I can and have counted to 1023 on my fingers. Several times in fact... I used to count binary on my fingers to help get to sleep.
This is not some rare ability. This is how children are taught to count in many TV shows etc. There are common children's rhymes that involve extending one finger at a time. I suspect you may have some form of abnormality in your hand.
Do you realise how many people you have likely made to silently wiggle their ring 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.
History matched his theory best. I’m 30, but clearly remember my syllabus at 16 being based around some big evocative events, e.g. the Mi Lai massacre, and analysing and debating the different sources. I enjoyed it so much that I still remember it clearly. Reading this I couldn’t help but wonder whether it is actually quite easy for a History/English teacher to stimulate students in this way, and much harder for a Maths teacher. How much of this is the difference in the fields?
> 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?
Do we need to teach all kids science, especially in elementary and middle school? Most of them won't be doing science. Also, your take on reinventing is bad - while a student can not be very effective reinventing stuff *by themselves* uless they're genuises, that's what the teacher is for! You can present knowledge as though it feels like a discovery.
> 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.
"People are doing the thing which I'm convinced cannot work, it probably doesn't work haha! I'm not gonna check though". Ugh.
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.
What is the rationale for dropping foreign languages completely, sorry? I don’t see your logic there
I did not explain why, indeed. Brutally short: Inefficient. No need. No positive side-effects. And as I wrote: Can be done later. No harm done. No "time window" missed. Looong version: 1. Too little positive results. a) In the US/UK/Russia and many non-EU countries, foreign languages taught at school are usu. not learned well. In Russia students of German at a standard school could only giggle, when I said "Guten Tag". Otoh, English in EU-countries is taught with some result. I was somewhere at A2 when I went to college (maybe B1 in reading). b) In a paid language-course you are expected to need 100 to 150 lessons per beginner-level (to A1 then to A2). I had "enjoyed" over 1000 lessons at school .... . My Latin is even worse, obviously. ;) In Russia, kids may get only 300 lessons, resulting in level zero (well, they know the alphabet). In the UK-school I visited, the aim looked similar to A1 (barely) - some got there. So: often too inefficient. We learn driving not 'at school'. But at a driving school. Takes 3000$. Language schools are cheaper.
2. Some negative results: It is not just time and money wasted. Such classes are booooring. I watched a kid opening and closing his pen once per minute during a German lesson in Russia. Most just went blank. And if the marks are bad: bad vibes. (I had a D in English for some years in a row. Got to B- in the end.) Oh, and obviously I refused to take French, as school convinced me I am a "failure at learning foreign languages". Schools failure to teach languages makes kids believe languages are HARD, NO FUN and they are NOT GOOD AT IT. Please, stop this madness! (Many people take classes later on their own - my job, btw - more would do so if school had not failed them.)
3. What for?! Kids and adults in the US/UK have near zero need for German/French and even Spanish. Nice to have, sure. But so are a hundred other things. Piano, poker, python. All the while we wonder why our kids do worse than Chinese in STEM. And wished they knew their English better. - If you are a first-world-foreigner in Germany you will have a hard time to practice your German, as most will want to show off their English to you. (Learning English as a foreign language is highly useful, of course. And should+could be done better in most countries - see my original comment. )
4. If you heard claims "learning language L or G" has positive side-effects: Studies can't find any. Bryan Caplan had some fine posts about it.
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.