And since you seem familiar with Catholicism, what do you think Egan meant when he identified as a "Catholic atheist"? Do you think that influenced his philosophy of education?
To lay my own cards on the table, I used to call myself evangelical, but these days that tends to carry a lot of political baggage, so I simply identify as Christian.
I’m presently an agnostic, and put it at about 5% that I convert back to some form of Christianity someday. I really like Christianity — I think that IF the Universe has a mind, that mind was dead-set on me becoming a theologian, and was confused when I (painfully, over many years) lost my faith in college. As was I! That said, I’m fascinated by Buddhism, charmed by Hinduism, seem to have a permanent inferiority complex to Judaism, and feel like deep down I’m actually a Daoist Confucian. And Native American religious cosmology has played a formative role in my understanding of the world (as you might be able to discern in a future post). Someday I’d like to get a better feel of Islam and Hinduism. And THAT all said, I find what we call the secular tradition — kicked off twenty-five hundred years ago on the Aegean Sea — bewitching, and a deep cause of hope.
When Egan said he was a CATHOLIC atheist, I personally take him to mean that he had been profoundly shaped by religion, and a specific one at that. But of course I’d say that, with my history — I worry that I’m doing my own memoir and calling it “biography”.
Readers who knew Kieran well: what do you take him to have meant?
Also, I'm probably not as well-versed in other religions as you are, but I do believe that sincerely pursuing anything life-giving and meaningful will eventually lead one back to the true Source of all life and meaning (though of course that's not to say that all beliefs about God are equally correct). In the Narnia series, C.S. Lewis seemed to agree: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/1104698-then-i-fell-at-his-feet-and-thought-surely-this.
Perhaps even more radically, and partly due to influence from LessWrong-style transhumanism, I'm a committed optimist. As a child, I was taught that the world would simply go from bad to worse, until finally when there's nothing good left in the world Jesus would return to rescue the remaining Christians and judge everyone else.
My attitude now is much closer to what Scott Alexander describes in "The Goddess of Everything Else": https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/08/17/the-goddess-of-everything-else-2/. I believe that God is quietly restoring the world from behind the scenes by gently nudging the actions of deeply flawed people (including me). And while there may be setbacks, the general trend is for the world and everything in it to become better and better over time.
And apologies if this is derailing your comment section amid all the discussion of educational strategies, but you did say to ask about anything... ;-)
I'm excited about all of this great Egan stuff! And overwhelmed. And busy. And intrigued. And ignorant. Can you give me a "quick start guide" for a busy homeschool parent? Top 5 ideas on where to start or stuff to try? Maybe a decision tree flow chart to accommodate different learners/subjects/preferences? Make it practical. Spell out for me some "easy wins" for a newbie. I find myself reading all of this cool stuff, and yet applying nothing, which annoys me. How about some "notes from the field" of readers comparing stories of implementing stuff you're talking about?
RIGHT? Homeschooling makes you too busy to think about homeschooling.
Coincidentally (or, rather: not) I’m working on a “Egan for Homeschoolers (and other parents)” project right now. Or, well, I’m [secret details redacted, something something this summer]. In the meantime, feel free to ask any specific questions, including your kids’ ages (and if relevant their interests and ability levels, and what you e tried already that hasn’t worked). It might help me [more secret details redacted].
Glad you're working on something like this! And I kinda don't want to answer your question about my kids' ages/interests/what I've tried. I want the total generic "greatest good for the greatest number of students" kind of resources, no "pigeonholing" allowed. Teaching towards the masses here. You're allowed to say "this resource/strategy/whatever works great for math-inclined kids ages 5-8" but I want to be exposed to a wide variety of things and do the specific curating myself. Just saying what I want if I'm allowed to be dictator for the day!
Ha! I’ll bite (ER situation permitting). First, take a look at the thread of comments (below, or above, or something) between me and Scott about Charlotte Mason — I should have mentioned that before!
But for specifics, I’ll stick to elementary math for the moment. Beast Academy, JUMP Math, and Exploding Dots (which is currently being revamped). Though that said, I am REALLY excited to try out the AI-powered Synthesis Tutor. Oh, and to take a look at everything Math for Love does, and try some of that with your kid.
What are the top three/five/ten things I can sneak into my secondary school colleagues' teaching practice to make them more Egan?
I'm thinking things like "embedding content in stories" rate highly because yeah it's work but everyone feels good doing it, but the song a week pattern maybe not because the response from your average teacher might be wtf, I'm a maths teacher not a music teacher, get away from me.
Number 1: Before you craft your lesson, ask, “what do I find to be the most interesting/meaningful/electrifying thing in it?”
Number 2: See number one.
Number three: Ask, “if Ken Burns / Michael Moore / Werner Herzog were making a documentary of this, what emotional binary would they choose as its theme?” I.e. dead/alive, hate/love, slavery/freedom, cowardice/courage, stupidity/wisdom…
Number four: Ask, “what’s the basic question that the Most Electrifying Thing is the answer to? Can I ask that basic question at the start of class, and see what kids know? Can I offer a couple hints? Then, two-thirds of the way through, can I reveal the answer, and see what they do and don’t understand in it?”
Number five: Ask, “where did this piece of knowledge come from in the first place? Can I ask ChatGPT to tell me the origin? Can I tell part of the story as a clue, before I reveal the answer?”
On a podcast you mentioned a great history of economics book that was all about how economics was started as a way to try and end poverty. You couldn’t remember the book’s name on the podcast but I would be very interested to know it as someone trying to learn more in that area in an Egan-inspired way!
OH MY GOSH WHY CAN I NOT FIND THIS? After I failed to find this in my library, I also failed to find this after 15 minutes of Googling.
What I can tell you is that it (in the hardback version) has a red cover, and is about the birth of economics in the 1800s, especially with Alfred Marshall (but also with Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and Thomas Malthus).
In lieu of that book, I can recommend the following, if you're looking for Eganized economics:
1. General introduction to the big ideas, and how they can help mend the world: Naked Economics, by Charles Wheelan. (The stories and anecdotes drive the book.)
2. Stories about how the big ideas were created: The Making of Modern Economics, by Mark Skousen (very pro-market). Progressive: The Worldly Philosophers, by Robert Heilbroner (less).
3. Just really fantastic books that'll shake the foundations of what you think you understand about the economic world, even after reading the above: Economix, by Michael Goodwin (very progressive), and Economic Facts and Fallacies, by Thomas Sowell (very conservative).
The trap in reading economics is to be snatched up by one or another ideological side, so I strongly recommend against reading any one of the book that I've paired. (Charles Wheelan is unusually balanced; if anyone thinks otherwise, lemme know.)
I think a lot about this — and would love to know more about how the Master’s in Imaginative Education at Simon Fraser University (which Egan, and some readers of this substack, set up) works: sfu.ca/education/programs/graduate-studies/masters/ci-itl.html
When I dream about this, what I imagine is…
(1) A big course in theory which (though Eganized lessons) help teachers pick apart the different ideas that are smooshed together in education, generally, and recognize their strengths and weaknesses.
(2) A course on Egan’s theory and its limits.
(3) A course in each academic subject the teacher will teach (for an elementary teacher, that would include math, science, reading, history, and so on; for a high school math teacher, that would include algebra, geometry, etc.). These would leverage everything teachers had learned in the first two, and be grounded in actually making lessons, and critiquing others.
One thing I’d love — but which we can’t do yet — is to make the courses Actually Teach How to Teach the Curriculum. This seems like a huge strength of eg Montessori and Waldorf — you practice doing the things you’ll actually be doing! My understanding of mainstream programs — correct me if I’m wrong — is that you practice by doing fairly unrelated things. To the extent this is true, it seems a harsh indictment of how unprofessional we hold classroom teaching to be.
(I’m worried I’m being unclear here — sorry; ER concerns.)
In my dream program, you’d learn eg the history, the linguistics, the art skills that you’d be teaching. And of course you’d be in a school from the very start, teaching lessons. Alas, we don’t yet HAVE such a curriculum! So, that’ll have to wait, at best.
If you had a bright and eager tween who loves learning online from brilliant and engaging teachers, whose history and math classes would you choose? In short, who is the Brandon of math and history?
NOT sure of the answer to "whose classes" if by "classes" I need to name, y'know, actual CLASSES, but for history I might recommend:
1. Larry Gonick's "History of the Universe" and "History of the Modern World" series(es) of graphic novels. If they were DRYLY written, they would still qualify as great history; if they were merely WELL written, they might qualify as some of the best history ever. As it is, they're well-written AND well-drawn graphic novels; they're SO GOOD. (I got a degree in history, and reading it with students, I kept thinking, "Why did I never learn anything about ___?")
2. The Crash Course History series on YouTube, by John Green.
3. Any pair of books from very opposing viewpoints about the same historical period. (E.g. "A People's History of the United States" by Howard Zinn vs. "A History of the American People" by Paul Johnson, read chapter-by-chapter.)
For math, I'm always less sure. Beast Academy is the easy answer for elementary school; maybe JUMP Math + James Tanton (youtube.com/@JamesTantonMath) for middle school? And James Tanton for high school? Wow, this is a good question we need to answer! (James Tanton, by the way, is the teacher they trained the AI Synthesis Tutor model on; I'll be testing this out with my daughter in the future, and reporting back.)
I'm a huge fan of an intuitions first, formalism later approach to teaching math and computer science, meaning trying to get students to see why a result is true before giving them an actual formal proof. This is in stark contrast to the way math and cs is taught here and basically anywhere, which is pretty much stuff then with theorems so they can make proofs, no matter if they understand why the theorem has to be true. I guess I'm trying to find some validation for my hypothesis that intuitions first is the way to go. Is there any Egan principle or idea I can build off my case?
Y’know, I’d like to see a defense of formalism-first. Anyone wanna try to steelman it?
Re: Egan: yeah! The big picture of Egan could be simplified thusly — the atoms of thought are relatively simple things: emotional binaries, basic agent-desires-x-and-does-y narrative, images. Then metaphors allow us to see new things as the old things we’ve already comprehended through those forms.
The formalisms of math, science, & so on developed out of that, driven by a new civilizational need: to perfectly communicate information from one mind to another, so as to join into a hive mind that could do powerful things.
But these formalisms (e.g. knowing the exact conversion between miles and kilometers, the precise definition of a word, the dates someone was born and died) were never meant for individual human minds. They don’t fit easily in, and when we cram them in they typically sit there inert, not participating in the creative process, not grabbing the yoke of motivation and memory.
Note: some of the above isn’t verbatim Egan; it’s my unpacking of him. Any Eganheads who’d like to answer that question differently, do!
Formalism is training data. Intuition is model output. Your LLM is not very interesting without a certain amount of training data.
Also, see the whole literature on cognitive load theory, as well as any of Engelmann's Direct Instruction programs, which was validated in Project Follow Through. He also wrote a technical book called Theory of Instruction and a very technical book called Inferred Functions of Performance and Learning.
Man, who ARE you?! That’s an EXCELLENT answer! Just to restate its core, for anyone who missed how gorgeously my belief was eviscerated there: “Traditionalism, Brandon! People have limited working memories! DON’T REPEAT THE FAILED MATH REFORMS OF THE SEVENTIES THROUGH NINETIES!”
(Seriously, Lamson, you get the gold star sticker — and we should look at seeing whether Substack can do this — of the post.)
I’ve been a soldier in the Constructivist–Traditionalist wars (both sides! regular Benedict Arnold, me), and think the reasons I had forgotten that would take some unpacking I don’t have time to do right now (about to leave the ER, thank goodness). But just to try to get some of it out now:
Combining Egan with John Mighton’s ”microscaffolding” approach allows us another shot at doing what the anarchistic Constructivists failed to do (which hurt so many people).
In other words, though I think I sometimes imagine myself to be some sort of crypto-Educational-Traditionalist, I actually have a bone to pick with the movement.
As someone with a math degree myself, I'm inclined to agree with Orlin's suggestion that math education should first and foremost be about math. And I'm actually fine if that leads to math having much less prestige in our educational system, on par with other creative arts.
Yesterday, my wife spent her evening designing a songbook for our kids. I spent a few hours trying to write a program to calculate how many natural numbers are needed to fill an infinite grid such that no two values of N are within distance N of one another. By any measure, her work seems far more useful. (And of course, math also has its uses. But that's not why we love it.)
Thanks! You spelled it out better than I could have, but it is exactly my intuition (haha) that we have to first, know if I'm out guts, and then seek to make it formal as a way to both find any holes in our reasoning and make it understandable for others.
I guess a possible attempt to steelman the formalism first is that you'll get access to the tools first and then by using them you'll build intuitions later as to why they work. My experience is that too often students can apply a theorem perfectly within its traditional context but fail to see how it fits into a larger picture.
In my mind, one of the goals of an Egan education is to help kids fall in love with books. Nonfiction books are one of humanity’s most glorious inventions (though not perfect and open to improvement — see Andy’s famous “Why Books Don’t Work”: https://andymatuschak.org/books/). That said, so many books for kids are flavorless, soulless, pointless insults to trees. The Charlotte Mason people have it right with their “living books” idea — we need to help elementary-school-age kids find the quality ones, into which real human value is evident. (This can particularly be done with the Learning in Depth projects.) We should hold “book tastings” for them (a forthcoming pattern), and in the upper grades teach them to x-ray and fully digest good books (à la Mortimer Adler’s “How to Read a Book”).
I think that Mason’s prescription to require “narration” of students goes a long way in improving how well books “work”. I’m also in complete agreement about the number of crappy children’s books (thanks Common Core!)
Charlotte Mason’s “narration” technique is as powerful as it is simple. (In short: after a kid reads a thing, have them TELL YOU WHAT THEY READ, in their own words.) Step one in the first draft of Egan homeschooling: build off what those wonderful people have done. Boots-ready homeschooling advice, from someone (like Egan) who was raised in classical schooling, was deeply influenced by both Christianity (Mason stayed one; Egan didn’t) and the Romantic movement. The biggest difference is that the CM people have been testing and honing homeschooling advice for decades already. Brilliant system.
Any thoughts on Egan and higher ed? It seems like your focus has been on early ed through high school (which is great!!) but I was wondering if there were any specific ideas aimed toward older young adults. I’m assuming more focus on philosophic and ironic, but I’d love to hear more!
I love the substack and your book review was probably top 5 things I read this year that changed the way I look at the world--thanks!
Higher ed: "heck yes" on more Philosophic. Egan wrote that, typically, kids start to heap on that kind of understanding around grade 11 (when, that is, they DO), and they continue to do so throughout undergraduate education.
And "heck yes" on Ironic, and remember that Ironic means realizing that there seem to be limits to what we can know with Philosophic, so we go back to the other kinds of understanding (Somatic, Mythic, and Romantic) and develop them further. Which, to be fair, we should have been doing all along.
Which is an important reminder that, in the real world, very very few students in college even have a well-worked Romantic understanding of most of the subjects they're learning. (How many students in Religions 100 know the story of Siddhartha's battle with Mara, or the story of St. Benedict's attempted assassination? How many students in Biology 100 know the story of Carolus Linnaeus's trip to Lapland, or Jon Snow's quasi-discovery of germs?) So how we teach higher ed NOW should include, in most circumstances, a lot more Romantic understanding than we currently offer. And (though this is a harder sell to people) maybe a lot more Somatic and Mythic: see Robin Kimmerer's "Braiding Sweetgrass" for one example of how this can, and probably should, be done.)
Hi Brandon, loving the substack! A bit of a double whammy for you:
1) Do you think a progression through the 5 kinds of understanding is possible for a motivated adult already finished with schooling to do on their own? As a 23 year old trying to patch up their complete lack of attention to history, science and geography before university, I think the hardest part is finding really compelling stories (like you just touched on in your last post!) to fully embrace the Romantic and Mythic, particularly for History.
2) In one of the other comments, you reference Andy's "Why books don't work". I'm interested in what you do yourself and recommend for your own continued science/history learning of non-fiction books to combat the issues he mentions: do you do a secret sauce blend of SQ3R and other tricks to just summarise it and think about it to integrate it with long term memory? Anki-fy the key concepts/facts? (and if so, how do you go about this for history/fuzzier things than pure science?)
I volunteer at our kids primary school where I teach once a week 3 groups of 4 students, from ages 4 through 10. I have access to a 3D printer (and a laser cutter soon) and have experience with programming and woodworking. I've previously taught lessons in simple electronics to the older students and a lesson about mushrooms inspired by your free example to the youngest. My goals are to make them more well versed in STEM topics and rationality. What advice can you give me? Maybe reading suggestions or more personalized advice? I live in Europe.
Oh man, how exciting! Because the field isn’t mine, I haven’t yet given this much thought. Could you share about what you’ve seen as some of the more amazing things you’ve seen people do in this? I’d like to cheat, and piggyback off of theirs. (Alternately, things you’ve considered doing.)
Do you feel like wide spread adoption of new teaching techniques will be advanced by entrepreneurs selling software/curricula or by published reports being taken up by observant practitioners? If you really want to make a change, what route would lead to effective dissemination?
I think the historically responsible answer is “ha, there’s no way to spread better teaching techniques!”
But, y’know, it’s probably not all as dark as that. (Though, y’know, if it’s an adventure we’re looking for, “let’s go down this road that’s littered with skulls” isn’t a bad Act One.)
For example, JUMP Math (which I adore, and think that Egan can even improve on) seems to have done well spreading in schools, in part because of their salespeople, and in part because of the books John Mighton has written.
That said, I personally have become convinced of a third option: the best way to spread this is to do it, all together, in new schools set aside for this purpose. There, measure the heck out of everything to see what works (not everything will!), evolve it to be better, and then publicize it.
This seems to have been the way that John Dewey’s Lab School at the University of Chicago worked to make progressive ideas mainstream.
What is your religious background?
And since you seem familiar with Catholicism, what do you think Egan meant when he identified as a "Catholic atheist"? Do you think that influenced his philosophy of education?
To lay my own cards on the table, I used to call myself evangelical, but these days that tends to carry a lot of political baggage, so I simply identify as Christian.
I’m presently an agnostic, and put it at about 5% that I convert back to some form of Christianity someday. I really like Christianity — I think that IF the Universe has a mind, that mind was dead-set on me becoming a theologian, and was confused when I (painfully, over many years) lost my faith in college. As was I! That said, I’m fascinated by Buddhism, charmed by Hinduism, seem to have a permanent inferiority complex to Judaism, and feel like deep down I’m actually a Daoist Confucian. And Native American religious cosmology has played a formative role in my understanding of the world (as you might be able to discern in a future post). Someday I’d like to get a better feel of Islam and Hinduism. And THAT all said, I find what we call the secular tradition — kicked off twenty-five hundred years ago on the Aegean Sea — bewitching, and a deep cause of hope.
When Egan said he was a CATHOLIC atheist, I personally take him to mean that he had been profoundly shaped by religion, and a specific one at that. But of course I’d say that, with my history — I worry that I’m doing my own memoir and calling it “biography”.
Readers who knew Kieran well: what do you take him to have meant?
Well, I'm familiar with the pain and confusion of abandoning core beliefs. In one of my favorite answers on Quora, I compared it to playing Jenga: https://www.quora.com/Looking-for-an-honest-religious-perspective-What-does-it-feel-like-to-know-that-there-is-conflicting-information-about-your-beliefs/answer/Timothy-Johnson-6
Also, I'm probably not as well-versed in other religions as you are, but I do believe that sincerely pursuing anything life-giving and meaningful will eventually lead one back to the true Source of all life and meaning (though of course that's not to say that all beliefs about God are equally correct). In the Narnia series, C.S. Lewis seemed to agree: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/1104698-then-i-fell-at-his-feet-and-thought-surely-this.
Perhaps even more radically, and partly due to influence from LessWrong-style transhumanism, I'm a committed optimist. As a child, I was taught that the world would simply go from bad to worse, until finally when there's nothing good left in the world Jesus would return to rescue the remaining Christians and judge everyone else.
My attitude now is much closer to what Scott Alexander describes in "The Goddess of Everything Else": https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/08/17/the-goddess-of-everything-else-2/. I believe that God is quietly restoring the world from behind the scenes by gently nudging the actions of deeply flawed people (including me). And while there may be setbacks, the general trend is for the world and everything in it to become better and better over time.
And apologies if this is derailing your comment section amid all the discussion of educational strategies, but you did say to ask about anything... ;-)
I'm excited about all of this great Egan stuff! And overwhelmed. And busy. And intrigued. And ignorant. Can you give me a "quick start guide" for a busy homeschool parent? Top 5 ideas on where to start or stuff to try? Maybe a decision tree flow chart to accommodate different learners/subjects/preferences? Make it practical. Spell out for me some "easy wins" for a newbie. I find myself reading all of this cool stuff, and yet applying nothing, which annoys me. How about some "notes from the field" of readers comparing stories of implementing stuff you're talking about?
RIGHT? Homeschooling makes you too busy to think about homeschooling.
Coincidentally (or, rather: not) I’m working on a “Egan for Homeschoolers (and other parents)” project right now. Or, well, I’m [secret details redacted, something something this summer]. In the meantime, feel free to ask any specific questions, including your kids’ ages (and if relevant their interests and ability levels, and what you e tried already that hasn’t worked). It might help me [more secret details redacted].
Glad you're working on something like this! And I kinda don't want to answer your question about my kids' ages/interests/what I've tried. I want the total generic "greatest good for the greatest number of students" kind of resources, no "pigeonholing" allowed. Teaching towards the masses here. You're allowed to say "this resource/strategy/whatever works great for math-inclined kids ages 5-8" but I want to be exposed to a wide variety of things and do the specific curating myself. Just saying what I want if I'm allowed to be dictator for the day!
Ha! I’ll bite (ER situation permitting). First, take a look at the thread of comments (below, or above, or something) between me and Scott about Charlotte Mason — I should have mentioned that before!
But for specifics, I’ll stick to elementary math for the moment. Beast Academy, JUMP Math, and Exploding Dots (which is currently being revamped). Though that said, I am REALLY excited to try out the AI-powered Synthesis Tutor. Oh, and to take a look at everything Math for Love does, and try some of that with your kid.
What are the top three/five/ten things I can sneak into my secondary school colleagues' teaching practice to make them more Egan?
I'm thinking things like "embedding content in stories" rate highly because yeah it's work but everyone feels good doing it, but the song a week pattern maybe not because the response from your average teacher might be wtf, I'm a maths teacher not a music teacher, get away from me.
Number 1: Before you craft your lesson, ask, “what do I find to be the most interesting/meaningful/electrifying thing in it?”
Number 2: See number one.
Number three: Ask, “if Ken Burns / Michael Moore / Werner Herzog were making a documentary of this, what emotional binary would they choose as its theme?” I.e. dead/alive, hate/love, slavery/freedom, cowardice/courage, stupidity/wisdom…
Number four: Ask, “what’s the basic question that the Most Electrifying Thing is the answer to? Can I ask that basic question at the start of class, and see what kids know? Can I offer a couple hints? Then, two-thirds of the way through, can I reveal the answer, and see what they do and don’t understand in it?”
Number five: Ask, “where did this piece of knowledge come from in the first place? Can I ask ChatGPT to tell me the origin? Can I tell part of the story as a clue, before I reveal the answer?”
On a podcast you mentioned a great history of economics book that was all about how economics was started as a way to try and end poverty. You couldn’t remember the book’s name on the podcast but I would be very interested to know it as someone trying to learn more in that area in an Egan-inspired way!
OH MY GOSH WHY CAN I NOT FIND THIS? After I failed to find this in my library, I also failed to find this after 15 minutes of Googling.
What I can tell you is that it (in the hardback version) has a red cover, and is about the birth of economics in the 1800s, especially with Alfred Marshall (but also with Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and Thomas Malthus).
In lieu of that book, I can recommend the following, if you're looking for Eganized economics:
1. General introduction to the big ideas, and how they can help mend the world: Naked Economics, by Charles Wheelan. (The stories and anecdotes drive the book.)
2. Stories about how the big ideas were created: The Making of Modern Economics, by Mark Skousen (very pro-market). Progressive: The Worldly Philosophers, by Robert Heilbroner (less).
3. Just really fantastic books that'll shake the foundations of what you think you understand about the economic world, even after reading the above: Economix, by Michael Goodwin (very progressive), and Economic Facts and Fallacies, by Thomas Sowell (very conservative).
The trap in reading economics is to be snatched up by one or another ideological side, so I strongly recommend against reading any one of the book that I've paired. (Charles Wheelan is unusually balanced; if anyone thinks otherwise, lemme know.)
What would an Egan teacher prep program look like?
I think a lot about this — and would love to know more about how the Master’s in Imaginative Education at Simon Fraser University (which Egan, and some readers of this substack, set up) works: sfu.ca/education/programs/graduate-studies/masters/ci-itl.html
When I dream about this, what I imagine is…
(1) A big course in theory which (though Eganized lessons) help teachers pick apart the different ideas that are smooshed together in education, generally, and recognize their strengths and weaknesses.
(2) A course on Egan’s theory and its limits.
(3) A course in each academic subject the teacher will teach (for an elementary teacher, that would include math, science, reading, history, and so on; for a high school math teacher, that would include algebra, geometry, etc.). These would leverage everything teachers had learned in the first two, and be grounded in actually making lessons, and critiquing others.
One thing I’d love — but which we can’t do yet — is to make the courses Actually Teach How to Teach the Curriculum. This seems like a huge strength of eg Montessori and Waldorf — you practice doing the things you’ll actually be doing! My understanding of mainstream programs — correct me if I’m wrong — is that you practice by doing fairly unrelated things. To the extent this is true, it seems a harsh indictment of how unprofessional we hold classroom teaching to be.
(I’m worried I’m being unclear here — sorry; ER concerns.)
In my dream program, you’d learn eg the history, the linguistics, the art skills that you’d be teaching. And of course you’d be in a school from the very start, teaching lessons. Alas, we don’t yet HAVE such a curriculum! So, that’ll have to wait, at best.
If you had a bright and eager tween who loves learning online from brilliant and engaging teachers, whose history and math classes would you choose? In short, who is the Brandon of math and history?
NOT sure of the answer to "whose classes" if by "classes" I need to name, y'know, actual CLASSES, but for history I might recommend:
1. Larry Gonick's "History of the Universe" and "History of the Modern World" series(es) of graphic novels. If they were DRYLY written, they would still qualify as great history; if they were merely WELL written, they might qualify as some of the best history ever. As it is, they're well-written AND well-drawn graphic novels; they're SO GOOD. (I got a degree in history, and reading it with students, I kept thinking, "Why did I never learn anything about ___?")
2. The Crash Course History series on YouTube, by John Green.
3. Any pair of books from very opposing viewpoints about the same historical period. (E.g. "A People's History of the United States" by Howard Zinn vs. "A History of the American People" by Paul Johnson, read chapter-by-chapter.)
For math, I'm always less sure. Beast Academy is the easy answer for elementary school; maybe JUMP Math + James Tanton (youtube.com/@JamesTantonMath) for middle school? And James Tanton for high school? Wow, this is a good question we need to answer! (James Tanton, by the way, is the teacher they trained the AI Synthesis Tutor model on; I'll be testing this out with my daughter in the future, and reporting back.)
I'm a huge fan of an intuitions first, formalism later approach to teaching math and computer science, meaning trying to get students to see why a result is true before giving them an actual formal proof. This is in stark contrast to the way math and cs is taught here and basically anywhere, which is pretty much stuff then with theorems so they can make proofs, no matter if they understand why the theorem has to be true. I guess I'm trying to find some validation for my hypothesis that intuitions first is the way to go. Is there any Egan principle or idea I can build off my case?
Y’know, I’d like to see a defense of formalism-first. Anyone wanna try to steelman it?
Re: Egan: yeah! The big picture of Egan could be simplified thusly — the atoms of thought are relatively simple things: emotional binaries, basic agent-desires-x-and-does-y narrative, images. Then metaphors allow us to see new things as the old things we’ve already comprehended through those forms.
The formalisms of math, science, & so on developed out of that, driven by a new civilizational need: to perfectly communicate information from one mind to another, so as to join into a hive mind that could do powerful things.
But these formalisms (e.g. knowing the exact conversion between miles and kilometers, the precise definition of a word, the dates someone was born and died) were never meant for individual human minds. They don’t fit easily in, and when we cram them in they typically sit there inert, not participating in the creative process, not grabbing the yoke of motivation and memory.
Note: some of the above isn’t verbatim Egan; it’s my unpacking of him. Any Eganheads who’d like to answer that question differently, do!
Re: steelmanning formalism
Formalism is training data. Intuition is model output. Your LLM is not very interesting without a certain amount of training data.
Also, see the whole literature on cognitive load theory, as well as any of Engelmann's Direct Instruction programs, which was validated in Project Follow Through. He also wrote a technical book called Theory of Instruction and a very technical book called Inferred Functions of Performance and Learning.
Man, who ARE you?! That’s an EXCELLENT answer! Just to restate its core, for anyone who missed how gorgeously my belief was eviscerated there: “Traditionalism, Brandon! People have limited working memories! DON’T REPEAT THE FAILED MATH REFORMS OF THE SEVENTIES THROUGH NINETIES!”
(Seriously, Lamson, you get the gold star sticker — and we should look at seeing whether Substack can do this — of the post.)
I’ve been a soldier in the Constructivist–Traditionalist wars (both sides! regular Benedict Arnold, me), and think the reasons I had forgotten that would take some unpacking I don’t have time to do right now (about to leave the ER, thank goodness). But just to try to get some of it out now:
Combining Egan with John Mighton’s ”microscaffolding” approach allows us another shot at doing what the anarchistic Constructivists failed to do (which hurt so many people).
In other words, though I think I sometimes imagine myself to be some sort of crypto-Educational-Traditionalist, I actually have a bone to pick with the movement.
I learned recently that the math education wars go back much further than I had realized: https://mathwithbaddrawings.com/2023/12/18/the-battlestar-galactica-theory-of-math-education/.
As someone with a math degree myself, I'm inclined to agree with Orlin's suggestion that math education should first and foremost be about math. And I'm actually fine if that leads to math having much less prestige in our educational system, on par with other creative arts.
Yesterday, my wife spent her evening designing a songbook for our kids. I spent a few hours trying to write a program to calculate how many natural numbers are needed to fill an infinite grid such that no two values of N are within distance N of one another. By any measure, her work seems far more useful. (And of course, math also has its uses. But that's not why we love it.)
These are good pointers, thanks!
Thanks! You spelled it out better than I could have, but it is exactly my intuition (haha) that we have to first, know if I'm out guts, and then seek to make it formal as a way to both find any holes in our reasoning and make it understandable for others.
I guess a possible attempt to steelman the formalism first is that you'll get access to the tools first and then by using them you'll build intuitions later as to why they work. My experience is that too often students can apply a theorem perfectly within its traditional context but fail to see how it fits into a larger picture.
What is the role of books/literature in Egan’s philosophy?
More of ‘em, and point kids toward the good ones.
In my mind, one of the goals of an Egan education is to help kids fall in love with books. Nonfiction books are one of humanity’s most glorious inventions (though not perfect and open to improvement — see Andy’s famous “Why Books Don’t Work”: https://andymatuschak.org/books/). That said, so many books for kids are flavorless, soulless, pointless insults to trees. The Charlotte Mason people have it right with their “living books” idea — we need to help elementary-school-age kids find the quality ones, into which real human value is evident. (This can particularly be done with the Learning in Depth projects.) We should hold “book tastings” for them (a forthcoming pattern), and in the upper grades teach them to x-ray and fully digest good books (à la Mortimer Adler’s “How to Read a Book”).
I think that Mason’s prescription to require “narration” of students goes a long way in improving how well books “work”. I’m also in complete agreement about the number of crappy children’s books (thanks Common Core!)
Charlotte Mason’s “narration” technique is as powerful as it is simple. (In short: after a kid reads a thing, have them TELL YOU WHAT THEY READ, in their own words.) Step one in the first draft of Egan homeschooling: build off what those wonderful people have done. Boots-ready homeschooling advice, from someone (like Egan) who was raised in classical schooling, was deeply influenced by both Christianity (Mason stayed one; Egan didn’t) and the Romantic movement. The biggest difference is that the CM people have been testing and honing homeschooling advice for decades already. Brilliant system.
Any thoughts on Egan and higher ed? It seems like your focus has been on early ed through high school (which is great!!) but I was wondering if there were any specific ideas aimed toward older young adults. I’m assuming more focus on philosophic and ironic, but I’d love to hear more!
I love the substack and your book review was probably top 5 things I read this year that changed the way I look at the world--thanks!
Man, I want to know the other top 4 things!
Higher ed: "heck yes" on more Philosophic. Egan wrote that, typically, kids start to heap on that kind of understanding around grade 11 (when, that is, they DO), and they continue to do so throughout undergraduate education.
And "heck yes" on Ironic, and remember that Ironic means realizing that there seem to be limits to what we can know with Philosophic, so we go back to the other kinds of understanding (Somatic, Mythic, and Romantic) and develop them further. Which, to be fair, we should have been doing all along.
Which is an important reminder that, in the real world, very very few students in college even have a well-worked Romantic understanding of most of the subjects they're learning. (How many students in Religions 100 know the story of Siddhartha's battle with Mara, or the story of St. Benedict's attempted assassination? How many students in Biology 100 know the story of Carolus Linnaeus's trip to Lapland, or Jon Snow's quasi-discovery of germs?) So how we teach higher ed NOW should include, in most circumstances, a lot more Romantic understanding than we currently offer. And (though this is a harder sell to people) maybe a lot more Somatic and Mythic: see Robin Kimmerer's "Braiding Sweetgrass" for one example of how this can, and probably should, be done.)
Hi Brandon, loving the substack! A bit of a double whammy for you:
1) Do you think a progression through the 5 kinds of understanding is possible for a motivated adult already finished with schooling to do on their own? As a 23 year old trying to patch up their complete lack of attention to history, science and geography before university, I think the hardest part is finding really compelling stories (like you just touched on in your last post!) to fully embrace the Romantic and Mythic, particularly for History.
2) In one of the other comments, you reference Andy's "Why books don't work". I'm interested in what you do yourself and recommend for your own continued science/history learning of non-fiction books to combat the issues he mentions: do you do a secret sauce blend of SQ3R and other tricks to just summarise it and think about it to integrate it with long term memory? Anki-fy the key concepts/facts? (and if so, how do you go about this for history/fuzzier things than pure science?)
Thanks in advance, love your work!
I volunteer at our kids primary school where I teach once a week 3 groups of 4 students, from ages 4 through 10. I have access to a 3D printer (and a laser cutter soon) and have experience with programming and woodworking. I've previously taught lessons in simple electronics to the older students and a lesson about mushrooms inspired by your free example to the youngest. My goals are to make them more well versed in STEM topics and rationality. What advice can you give me? Maybe reading suggestions or more personalized advice? I live in Europe.
Oh man, how exciting! Because the field isn’t mine, I haven’t yet given this much thought. Could you share about what you’ve seen as some of the more amazing things you’ve seen people do in this? I’d like to cheat, and piggyback off of theirs. (Alternately, things you’ve considered doing.)
Do you feel like wide spread adoption of new teaching techniques will be advanced by entrepreneurs selling software/curricula or by published reports being taken up by observant practitioners? If you really want to make a change, what route would lead to effective dissemination?
I think the historically responsible answer is “ha, there’s no way to spread better teaching techniques!”
But, y’know, it’s probably not all as dark as that. (Though, y’know, if it’s an adventure we’re looking for, “let’s go down this road that’s littered with skulls” isn’t a bad Act One.)
For example, JUMP Math (which I adore, and think that Egan can even improve on) seems to have done well spreading in schools, in part because of their salespeople, and in part because of the books John Mighton has written.
That said, I personally have become convinced of a third option: the best way to spread this is to do it, all together, in new schools set aside for this purpose. There, measure the heck out of everything to see what works (not everything will!), evolve it to be better, and then publicize it.
This seems to have been the way that John Dewey’s Lab School at the University of Chicago worked to make progressive ideas mainstream.
I’d LOVE critique on this.