An Impossible Conversation: Does Egan education work?
Sunday, Sunday, Sunday: a live event!
Over the short life of this substack, Dr. Ernest Prabhakar has been one of the most enthused supporters of Egan education. He’s also been one of the most skeptical.
What a great opportunity!
We’ve decided to lean into this. This Sunday (Jan 28, 2024) we’ll be livestreaming a conversation to give as much oxygen as possible to a simple idea: maybe all this “Egan will change education” is overblown.
6–7:30 Eastern / 3–4:30 Pacific / 11pm–12:30am Universal1
Sunday January 28, 2024
Here’s the link (updated! the old one was no good!)
If you can’t be there but have a question you’d like me to address, no promises, but feel free to put it in the comment section below and roll the dice!
Ernest was trained as a high-energy physicist, first worked as a management consultant, and has been employed as the Mac OS X marketing manager for Apple Darwin, open source, and open standards.
To make sense of all this, he started dabbling in economics and political theory, which led to his founding a think tank on Radical middle philosophy.
Um, probably you don’t want to trust my (and Google’s) ability to convert to Universal time.
Looking forward to it! This is one of the topics I really wanted to talk about more in our book club.
I have a hunch that to successfully implement Egan's educational philosophy (or almost any other philosophy for that matter), having the right teachers is even more important than having the right content.
Do you agree with that? And if so, what does it take to be a great Egan teacher?
This was a riveting conversation. I really respect both of you for your ability to discuss such a wide range of books and thinkers and your willingness to be vulnerable in pursuit of learning. I want to try and summarize some of my takeaways:
Where I think Ernest is coming from: he wants to formalize Egan's thought and bring it to a testable state. Ernest thinks that this is likely to be a disruptive/destructive thing: to take some that he and Brandon both see as something that accords with their intuitive readings of reality and usefulness with regard to education and to subject it to the rigorous analysis and deconstruction of science. This type of testing would also imply lots of politics because testing education requires selecting goals and measures and there is a lot of time/interest/value involved. In short, when moving from a 'thesis to a theory' (as Ernest expressed it) things are going to get messy and confusing (and very probably fail).
I think Ernest would suggest that Brandon's project heretofore has been publicizing Egan's ideas rather than presenting them in a testable state. [FWIW: I think that Bradon presenting these tools is, by itself, useful to me personally as a teacher]. Ernest wants to see the patterns of the Egan pattern language in action- I think Brandon would agree, and part of the reason he is putting them out there is so that people can go and test them and report back.
A key issue that Brandon refers to is time: there isn’t enough time for one person to test everything (as a teacher I can attest to this). Science is Weird is Brandon’s major attempt to put these ideas into practice.
Ernest asks why Eganism has failed to spread if his ideas were so good? Brandon suggests that his ideas were brilliant (Ernest agrees), but not well-expressed for normal teachers to put them into action (is my interpretation correct?). Relatedly, both seem to agree that the difficulty of communicating ideas is not expressing the ideas themselves but putting them into practice, and that people learn through mimesis and situated learning (somatic tools) rather than hearing a theory and applying it.
Also, Brandon suggests that Egan failed because his ideas presupposed a number of different huge aspects of his own worldview (implicit cosmology), but he didn’t presume to teach those elements as fundamental to education. My reading: In a sense he was too afraid of seeming too authoritarian or restrictive and Ernest would argue that education requires us to take a bold positive stance of teaching some sort of shared narrative. I am very interested to learn more about this.
Ernest's idea: create experiences that we think have potential to mend the world and then test to see whether they do it or not, then afterward - come up with language and theory to explain it. Sort of an experiential hypothesis (my words). Ernest just wants to get people of diverse backgrounds and radically different viewpoints in a room to engage with each other seriously and willingly and be able to come up with a shared narrative. He wants to do this because he feels like previous narratives have failed and we need something better that many people can agree on. Ernest’s narrative: “You were born in a wonderful place. Those who came before you did mighty heroic acts to create this world for you and you should be grateful. And yet, they did this at a horrific cost to themselves and to you and the quest we are on is to build on their successes and redeem their failures.”
Brandon's idea: Mend the world by mending education: build a community to develop the foundations necessary to get some Egan schools up and running. This is explicitly to test his ideas so that he can see if there is a better way to do education and why education reforms keep failing. He is using the blog to publicize the ideas and get more people to help test them.
Ernest’s criticism/suggestion: He is deeply suspicious of presenting ideas to be tried without doing them yourself. He suggests trying out some of the language patterns / Egan’s ideas in workshops live, over video or online. Ernest wants to ‘fight it out’. (I’m not sure what that means). Brandon is willing to give it a try.
Please comment if any of my interpretations are inaccurate.