Comments on the comments on the book review (part 1 of 2)
commenters, attack!
My review of Kieran Egan’s The Educated Mind got over 400 comments — many of them incredibly negative! This is an unmitigated blessing. Why? Because so much of what passes for educational philosophy is dreck. As one commenter wrote:1
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?
Just to be clear, he was including me amongst the peddlers. (I’ll speak to this comment later in this post.) But regardless of whether I’m shoveling cow crap, his observation that schools are shifted back and forth with fad-of-the-week “reforms” is terribly, terribly apt (and also beautifully put).
The question of the week:
How can we shore up our defenses against educational BS?
By inviting — and staying in conversation with — open attacks on our deepest ideas.
So in this post, I’ll address some of the comments that challenged the fundamental notions of the book review.
1. Why does science work?
Science makes a lofty claim: it’s a truth machine. Put in crazy opinions, turn the crank, and out comes a truer description of the world. Lots of intellectual traditions claim to expose the truth about the world — poetry and philosophy and world religions and so on — but science has, since the 1600s at least, actually brought the goods. It’s demonstrated its ability to overturn its old ideas to make better ones. (Disagree? Feel free to — and if you commit to living the next year without recourse to air conditioning, washing machines, and modern medical technology, I might even believe you.)
What’s science’s secret sauce? (It’s the scientific method, right?)
A couple weeks ago I kicked off the first of the 180 lessons in Science is WEIRD’s super-curriculum. I had a problem: what single riddle could I pick to start something so big?
I decided to put this question — why science is overpowered — at the core of the course.
(Feel free to pause right now, and try to answer this. What’s science’s secret sauce?)
Historically, lots of answers have been given. The one I spotlighted for class is given by philosopher of science Michael Strevens in his book The Knowledge Machine: How Irrationality Created Modern Science. In it he points out that a lot of the commands we think are unique to modern science —
observe the world!
ask questions!
make hypotheses!
run experiments!
— were actually developed millennia earlier by the Greeks (especially Aristotle) and people toiling in that tradition. (Heck, al-Hazen even nailed the importance of systematically doubting previous authorities in the eleventh century.) These moves of the “scientific method” essential — but by themselves, they’re not enough to kick off the technological curves that helped make the world modern.
What launched the Scientific Revolution in the 1600s, Strevens argues, is something else — a commitment to ceaseless combat.
In the past, scientists in different schools of thought (think the Atomists and the Aristotelians) would quarrel, and then split. The secret sauce of the Scientific Revolution were new rules of arguing that made it possible to stay in conversation with one’s frenemies forever.
I said that a lot of the comments on the book review were negative — but a lot of them were really, really positive, too:
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.
Or:
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.
And to be clear, I’m certainly excited about the possibilities that Egan’s paradigm holds for education — it’s what I’ve been dedicating the last decade of my life to developing and forwarding. More: I flipping love these ideas. They’ve helped me make sense of what works in schools, in my own teaching, and in the wider world. They’ve stopped being ideas I think about, and have become ideas I think with.2
Which means I’m the worst person to be objective here. How can we know what’s true and what’s false in Egan’s model?
Well: the history of science tells us that to love an idea means to help others attack it. So I’ve been pouring over some of the negative comments — they’re our golden ticket out of the world of educational BS.
Let’s have at it.
2. Comments questioning whether people are naturally curious
One commenter writes:
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 (and the conversation that followed) caught me by surprise: I don’t think I claimed that people are naturally curious! In fact, I once gave a presentation that Egan attended arguing that we should never, ever, ever say the word “curiosity” when talking about education.3
Why not? Anyone who’s taught kids for a semester knows that some are curious — some delightfully, extraordinarily, sometimes terrifying so. But anyone who’s taught kids for a week knows that some really don’t seem to be.
In educationally Progressivist circles, this is one of those things that Everyone Knows But It’s Sometimes Awkward to Talk About™.
Whelp: educating kids well means, first and foremost, accepting them as they are.
Which is all to say: yeah, we shouldn’t anchor a philosophy of education in the assumption that students’ innate curiosity will do a lot of the heavy lifting.
Egan’s theory doesn’t do that. It holds an important role for curiosity — but in a rather different way than Progressive theories.
Curiosity is for the young
When children are very young, jeez are we motivated by curiosity. Everything in the world is colorful! and textured! and flavorful! This is so much so that, when watching a baby, you’re rarely more than a few moments away from probable death.
As another commenter writes:
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.
We’re mammals, so this makes sense. Young mammals go through a period of extreme curiosity where they’re interested in almost everything. This allows them to learn a lot about, well, a lot — a powerful evolutionary strategy for animals who can then thrive in many different environments.4
This is all to say, curiosity shows up early for all of us, then (for most of us) declines.
Interest is for the old
Curiosity is general: someone who’s curious is interested in all sorts of things. It’s a psychological trait. Interests are specific: someone who’s interested in dinosaurs may or may not be interested in astronomy or rock collecting. They’re the result of particular experiences.
An important move of education, Egan says, is to leverage young kids’ curiosity to develop specific interests that will sustain them as they get older.
We develop interests by helping students amass knowledge about the world. But we don’t just shovel facts into their heads (as some proponents of traditional education suggest we do).5 Instead, we lead kids into meaningful, emotion-laden experiences with the world (see Post #2 — “The Hole in the Heart of Education” — for more on that).
Sound impossible? Explaining how to do that is what Egan’s practical work is all about. (Goodness, I haven’t even raised one of his simplest, best-est tricks — “Learning in Depth”. So much to do, so little time…)
In short: if we’re asking whether people are naturally curious, we’re probably coming at the question from the wrong end. Almost all people are curious enough when they’re young; we should feed that curiosity, and grow it into interests — the more diverse and deep, the better.
3. Comments expressing a desperate pessimism about improving education
One commenter writes:
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.
“Doomed and alien kind of beauty” would be a great band name and (in the right context) the nicest thing that anyone had said about my appearance in a long time. Thanks for bringing such elegance into this conversation! More substantively: I definitely feel this way sometimes because of the track record school systems have with good ideas.
Once upon a time I studied under an important historian of education. The intuition that I developed is this:
there is nothing so simple the system will not screw it up
Just as an example: it’s obvious that, if you know how to speak English but want to learn how to read it too, you should learn the various combinations between the 26 letters and 33 sounds they can. It’s so obvious, in fact, that the “whole-word” approach — in which kids were forced to struggle to memorize each word individually like they were learning Chinese — was doomed to spread through English-language schooling.
Then it was obvious that this “whole-word” approach wasn’t supported by any evidence (and the moment cognitive psychology was invented couldn’t withstand five minutes of scrutiny), so it was inevitable that a still-stupider method (the “whole language” approach) would arise to take its place.
Finally, after a slow-rolling tsunami of human misery of people who had not been taught to read culminated in governments stepping in to force schools to teach phonics, some schools resorted to over-teaching it, spending far too much time of the school day to boring to be useful.6
Someday we’ll discover that every superintendent’s office is equipped with a cursed monkey’s paw, and all this will make sense.
I mean, my goodness, if I ever found a button which, if pressed, would suddenly get the educational establishment swooning over Egan, I would think hard about building a metal cage over it and sinking it in the ocean.
Which is all to say: sometimes, I too despair about the ability to improve educational systems. But this is too important an endeavor to succumb to pessimism and gloominess.
I put my hope in the notion that even radical improvement is possible in new and small systems. New schools, new microschools, and even new school networks are popping up all the time. And beyond that, there’s the vibrant world of homeschooling, where a hundred flowers bloom, a hundred schools of thought contend every week. We live in a time of incredible educational experimentation!
I think, as someone trying to help reboot education, it makes sense to start there.
4. Comments expressing a desperate pessimism about improving education because most people are dumb
Some disagreements were more fundamental. This commenter begins by calling attention to my quotation of Egan’s obituary:
“He was devoted to the dream that ‘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.
Amongst all the snark here (I’m allergic to snark myself, but can recognize the top-shelf stuff when I smell it), there’s a lot of wisdom. I wish more people in education were capable of indulging such dark thoughts.
Because the educational reform world really is replete with claims that sound a lot like “our program will turn all children into Picasso/von Neumann/Mozart”. It’s based on the (false! faaaaaalse!) assumptions that kids are blank slates and that there are no limits to human potential. When I was younger, I was sucked in by this sort of rhetoric — wasted years!7
Now I recognize this stuff to be bilge water, romantic sentimentality, pseudoscientific nonsense. And it does bad things. As the commenter wrote, it makes people feel cheated when it inevitably fails. Worse still: if they don’t recognize the con, they’ll go on thinking something was uniquely wrong with their kid.8
Given how I wrote about The Educated Mind, I understand how someone could assume Egan was in this vein, but he most assuredly wasn’t.
Demonstrating that will take some time; I’ll be making changes to some upcoming posts to reflect this. (I’m thankful for getting to make this course-correction sooner rather than later.) For the moment, I’ll suggest this: for the majority of kids, there’s a middle ground between the promise of “take this course and your child will become God-Emperor of Dune!” and “the best you can hope for, ma’am, is for your child to be able spell their name correctly, and honestly is it so very important they remember every last vowel?”
And that middle ground is pretty great.
A realistic hope for what most kids are able to do involves being interested in much of what they learn, turning it over in their heads, sharing it with others, and connecting it to other stuff. It involves kids looking forward to going to class to learn more. Heck, it might even be described as “intellectually vibrant”.
Even if it doesn’t include replicating the level of genius shown by Newton and Shakespeare and Raphael, it might involve enjoying the fruit of their genius, and (in some meaningful way) participating in it, making it part of themselves.
I suspect even this is too far for some of the pessimists who commented. I’d love to understand their position better — where do we part ways? If you’re one of them, I’d love to chat and explore this. A comments section is too low-bandwidth; I’d love to have a phone call. Please get in touch.
5. Comments arguing that all this is nonsense because we don’t have good evidence
Let me quote that first comment again, because it’s so good:
“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?”
We need evidence.
Because of course I wasn’t speaking the whole truth when I said, at the top, that the secret sauce of modern science is merely a commitment to staying in argument. That’s part of what Strevens argues, but the change that allowed scientists to stay in argument was a new agreement that empirical evidence is the only sort of evidence that counts.
Individual scientists could be motivated by whatever — beauty, justice, God, a belief that ghosts are real9 — but when they argued among other scientists, they had to bring the empirical data.
In the review, I criticized Egan for not investing more of his career organizing studies exploring the effects of his system. I wish I had made the critique deeper — or even tried harder to fathom what made him hold back from this. (Egan writes frankly about why he believes most educational research is bunk in the final chapter of his book Getting It Wrong from the Beginning: Our Progressivist Inheritance from Herbert Spencer, John Dewey, and Jean Piaget. I’ll admit that I’ve never been able to understand what he says there; this should make a good substack post in the future.)
So let me raise the $64,000 question: how might we (as a nominally-connected group of people who are excited about the possibilities that Egan’s paradigm seems to open up — or, conversely, who are eager to prove that the paradigm is BS) find good evidence for or against it?
I mean this seriously. Egan is dead. His work isn’t much read outside his geographically-diverse but numerically-small group of followers. The number of people who became interested in his ideas (whether as lovers or haters) by reading the ACX book review may have grown by a significant percent.
If you’re invested in whether Egan’s ideas can transform schooling,10 you have a real chance to help with this work.
How might we get evidence? Where should we look? How might experiments be run? Do you have any experience conducting educational studies, or are looking for the opportunity to do so (perhaps for a degree program)? Do you have a background in data science, and want to volunteer your magic powers? Want to volunteer your own children as guinea pigs guinea pigs?11
(I do, for the record, know a little about how to conduct educational studies. Read a couple books, took a course in graduate school, that sort of thing. But I haven’t touched those books in years, and the course on educational research methods was taught by someone who had mentally checked out a decade or more before they walked into the first class.12 So. If it’s good studies we want… we probably shouldn’t be relying on me to run it.)
I’d be happy to connect people and contribute to the conversation. I also own the rights to what I’ve been told is the most fully-fleshed out globally-available set of Egan-based lessons — my videos at Science is WEIRD. I’m happy to offer free access to those for any research purposes, should that prove helpful.
I might not be turning on the comments regularly until I’m able to pay someone to serve as a moderator, but I’m thinking of doing a special comments-enabled post that’s just focused on brainstorming how we might get good data. In the meantime, if you have any notions on how this might be done, ping me!
(How, you ask? I’m not particularly hidden, and you’re clever. You can figure something out.)
But wait, there’s more!
I’m only halfway through, but I’ll cut out here — I’m committing to doing a post each week, and next weekend I’m giving a keynote at an autism conference, so slicing this post in half will be JUST FINE BY ME. (And “I liked your 22,000-word book review, and only wish it had been 44,000” wasn’t actually one of the comments I saw on the page, so I bet most of y’all will be okay with this.)
Coming up next week:
Comments in favor of pain
Comments about chimpanzees
Comments suggesting that most young children are NOT in fact idiots
Comments noting that the Somatic was given short shrift
Comments recommending DOING stuff, not just FEELING stuff
Stay tuned.
I’m unsure as whether it’s consider best practices to include or exclude the names of the commenters on the book review. On the one hand, I could consider someone’s words their intellectual property — if I don’t include their names, am I stealing? On the other, maybe someone who’s cool with their name being in the comments on one substack isn’t cool with their name being in another — if I do include their names, am I breaching their privacy? Per my general life philosophy, I’ve reconciled this by choosing the option that allowed me to be lazier: hence, no names. I’m open to suggestions on this in the future. (I also cleaned up small typos in the comments, because I tried not to, and failed.)
Oh goodness, that’s like an exact quote of Egan! Do you see how bad I’ve got it?
This was back in the days when his group held an annual conference. Good days, those. (Also, free wine.)
My friend Katie The Occupational Therapist (not her legal name) points out that sometimes babies and kids truly aren’t curious — and that this is typically a sign that something is off cognitively, metabolically, sensorially, or whatever. If this is your kid, you might want to bring it up with your pediatrician. (I’m not Emily Oster, but I do play her online.)
Lookin’ at you, E. D. Hirsch. (But seriously, I really like your work!)
Matt Yglesias has covered this beautifully.
Well, probably not wasted — it’s helpful to believe such foolish things for a while. Lets you explore odd idea spaces, and get used to the pain of changing your mind. (And if that’s not an example of damning with faint praise, I don’t know what is.)
It’s not just the reformers who exhibit a pathological sunniness: the mainstream educational world sometimes seems unable to look at how its students routinely turn out. For example, I’ve talked to people who believe that every high school student should — nay, must! — study Shakespeare who really seem to believe that if they do, they’ll become an analytical thinker and an empathetic listener and understand their connection to the Great Conversation and blah blah blah. Now, I really like reading Shakespeare. I’m even in favor of bringing much more Shakespeare into schooling — but not like we’re currently doing it, because holy crap everyone knows this just makes a lot of people hate Shakespeare and everyone knows we know this and why are we eliding this fact? It terrifies me that people seem willfully blind to the real-world effects of the policies they support.
Okay, Strevens doesn’t mention ghosts, but he does emphasize that it’s useful when scientists have their own hidden weirdo opinions. We all benefit when individuals are exploring the bizarre outlands of idea-space, and we all lose when science is pitched to conventionally-minded people. If we ever do a book club for paid subscribers, we should really read his book.
And can I just say that if you aren’t, kudos on reading this far! (Also, why?)
Yeah, we can be honest about it. But look, everyone loves guinea pigs!
Literally the worst class I ever took. It was so bad I spent time with the deans trying to get the professor fired… and it was then I learned the true meaning of the word “tenure”.