Two thoughts, one very concrete and immediate, one significantly more meta...
Item the first (concrete and immediate):
The methodology espoused in _Moral Ambition_ suggests a shift in focus away from the development of pedagogical methods and towards... something else, TBD. I was struck by Alesandro's comment that Italian schools are largely unchanged over the past 50 or 60 years. I would think that Italy would be fertile ground for the Montessori method, but Alesandro makes it sounds like its had minimal impact. And even within Montessori itself, there's a trend towards credentialism and formal theory which has reduced pedagocial benefit.
Questions arise!
* Why is that happening in Montessori education?
* Why has Montessori education not found a greater foothold in Italy?
The answers to these questions, I suspect, have little to do with the Montessori method itself. But if, hypothetically, you wanted to expand Montessori education in Italy, this seems to imply that the most bang for you buck is to be found in understanding and fixing the causes of the above rather than in further development of pedagogical practice.
Recognizing that Egan's method is not Montessori, and the US is not Italy, my gut still says that having better pedagogical techniques is not the barrier to improving US schools. If you want to make US schools better then effort should be directed towards identifying the causes of dysfunction and fixing them. (Which, incidentally, is where I think Freddie throws up his hands in despair.)
Item the second (meta and abstract):
Assume that Egan's method is a truth-seeking missile (I assume there will be no objection to that). The same techniques that allow people to evaluate the likelihood that cryptids exist may also come to the conclusion that the balance of probabilities is in favor of humans not having free will (see, for example, _Determined_ by Robert Sapolsky).
The challenge of the Egan method, and the Egan classroom, with respect to morality is to deal with this probable reality. Do moral actors exist absent free will? How should humans behave if this is true? Is the notion of "should" totally mistaken in the first place? Etc.
Okay, after some thinking, I have a good example: classical schools. I got excited by classical education way way back in the 1990s, but even I am shocked by how far they've spread: ~1,000 schools, tens of thousands of teachers, probably 100,000 kids who've gone through some substantial part of their curriculum — and the movement is still in its growth phase! If they can do it, others can, too. Montessori isn't the only example, or (given its difference in history) the most relevant one.
Re: #1 — I would indeed like to know why Montessori education, even in Italy, has permeated only to the extent that it has! (Alessandro, you know more about this than I do — let’s talk about this.) I’ll just say that the skillset of “create a model of education that actually works” and the skillset of “rejigger a century-old political system” do not overlap much, and while I agree that the second is important, I am about as useful for it as I am toward installing a new bedroom door (full disclosure: profoundly unuseful).
I’m not as dour as you are, however — people start new and eccentric schools all the time in 21st century America; this is a golden age of experimentation. The trouble is (as I see it) that nearly all the “new and exciting” ideas they’re trying are actually old and tired; they’ve been tried and have achieved lukewarm results for a hundred years.
This isn’t to say that there isn’t a need for people who can work with systems: there is, and one of the things I take from “Moral Ambition” is that we need to find them. All I want to say here is that there’s also a need for models of education that actually do something new.
Re: #2 — I agree that this is another potential fail state; thank you. I think it should be added to the “alienation from surrounding culture” list, which includes “the kids become vegan”.
I just thought of something super-relevant to the idea of determinism. Many (most?) philosophers don't think that the idea of free will and determinism (or at least a mechanism, causally connected universe) are mutually exclusive. The idea is called compatibility and it basically suggests that even though our brains are physical objects affected by things like physics and cause and effect, our wills exist on a different level, as emergent properties of our thoughts and actions.
An analogy: our brains are like a calculator's circuitry, which is physical and cannot be reprogrammed, but our wills are like the fundamentals of math, which calculators are designed to represent in the physical world.
Another example is Erik Hoel's concept of causal emergence, which (to the limited extent that I understand it) suggests that some emergent properties based on aggregation of many smaller processes like thoughts emerging from neurochemical activity can be load bearing in causal descriptions. The idea is that just because a phenomenon is made of underlying processes it may be just as valid (or more) to describe causal relationships on higher rather than lower scales.
Your gut feeling does seem to be onto something. There are probably a lot of factors that could improve schools and pedagogy only covers a subset of all of the potential improvements. That said, if we can improve education even marginally through pedagogical change (and I believe the benefits could be much larger than that), then we certainly ought to try! There is plenty to learn from the failures of past reforms.
I haven't read the book yet but my basic thoughts on determinism are: Even if true, we don't have access to the source code or initial positions of the universe, and thinking like the kind of person who has free will certainly seems to lead to better outcomes than the reverse.
Two thoughts, one very concrete and immediate, one significantly more meta...
Item the first (concrete and immediate):
The methodology espoused in _Moral Ambition_ suggests a shift in focus away from the development of pedagogical methods and towards... something else, TBD. I was struck by Alesandro's comment that Italian schools are largely unchanged over the past 50 or 60 years. I would think that Italy would be fertile ground for the Montessori method, but Alesandro makes it sounds like its had minimal impact. And even within Montessori itself, there's a trend towards credentialism and formal theory which has reduced pedagocial benefit.
Questions arise!
* Why is that happening in Montessori education?
* Why has Montessori education not found a greater foothold in Italy?
The answers to these questions, I suspect, have little to do with the Montessori method itself. But if, hypothetically, you wanted to expand Montessori education in Italy, this seems to imply that the most bang for you buck is to be found in understanding and fixing the causes of the above rather than in further development of pedagogical practice.
Recognizing that Egan's method is not Montessori, and the US is not Italy, my gut still says that having better pedagogical techniques is not the barrier to improving US schools. If you want to make US schools better then effort should be directed towards identifying the causes of dysfunction and fixing them. (Which, incidentally, is where I think Freddie throws up his hands in despair.)
Item the second (meta and abstract):
Assume that Egan's method is a truth-seeking missile (I assume there will be no objection to that). The same techniques that allow people to evaluate the likelihood that cryptids exist may also come to the conclusion that the balance of probabilities is in favor of humans not having free will (see, for example, _Determined_ by Robert Sapolsky).
The challenge of the Egan method, and the Egan classroom, with respect to morality is to deal with this probable reality. Do moral actors exist absent free will? How should humans behave if this is true? Is the notion of "should" totally mistaken in the first place? Etc.
Okay, after some thinking, I have a good example: classical schools. I got excited by classical education way way back in the 1990s, but even I am shocked by how far they've spread: ~1,000 schools, tens of thousands of teachers, probably 100,000 kids who've gone through some substantial part of their curriculum — and the movement is still in its growth phase! If they can do it, others can, too. Montessori isn't the only example, or (given its difference in history) the most relevant one.
Re: #1 — I would indeed like to know why Montessori education, even in Italy, has permeated only to the extent that it has! (Alessandro, you know more about this than I do — let’s talk about this.) I’ll just say that the skillset of “create a model of education that actually works” and the skillset of “rejigger a century-old political system” do not overlap much, and while I agree that the second is important, I am about as useful for it as I am toward installing a new bedroom door (full disclosure: profoundly unuseful).
I’m not as dour as you are, however — people start new and eccentric schools all the time in 21st century America; this is a golden age of experimentation. The trouble is (as I see it) that nearly all the “new and exciting” ideas they’re trying are actually old and tired; they’ve been tried and have achieved lukewarm results for a hundred years.
This isn’t to say that there isn’t a need for people who can work with systems: there is, and one of the things I take from “Moral Ambition” is that we need to find them. All I want to say here is that there’s also a need for models of education that actually do something new.
Re: #2 — I agree that this is another potential fail state; thank you. I think it should be added to the “alienation from surrounding culture” list, which includes “the kids become vegan”.
I just thought of something super-relevant to the idea of determinism. Many (most?) philosophers don't think that the idea of free will and determinism (or at least a mechanism, causally connected universe) are mutually exclusive. The idea is called compatibility and it basically suggests that even though our brains are physical objects affected by things like physics and cause and effect, our wills exist on a different level, as emergent properties of our thoughts and actions.
An analogy: our brains are like a calculator's circuitry, which is physical and cannot be reprogrammed, but our wills are like the fundamentals of math, which calculators are designed to represent in the physical world.
Another example is Erik Hoel's concept of causal emergence, which (to the limited extent that I understand it) suggests that some emergent properties based on aggregation of many smaller processes like thoughts emerging from neurochemical activity can be load bearing in causal descriptions. The idea is that just because a phenomenon is made of underlying processes it may be just as valid (or more) to describe causal relationships on higher rather than lower scales.
If you're interested, this is Blanchard's post on free will:
https://open.substack.com/pub/cognitivewonderland/p/we-have-free-will?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=lqm22
Your gut feeling does seem to be onto something. There are probably a lot of factors that could improve schools and pedagogy only covers a subset of all of the potential improvements. That said, if we can improve education even marginally through pedagogical change (and I believe the benefits could be much larger than that), then we certainly ought to try! There is plenty to learn from the failures of past reforms.
I haven't read the book yet but my basic thoughts on determinism are: Even if true, we don't have access to the source code or initial positions of the universe, and thinking like the kind of person who has free will certainly seems to lead to better outcomes than the reverse.