Is Egan education serious?

The working title was "Why you should teach kids flowers have vaginas", but that seemed too clickbaity

Your flowers are wrong.

Science is WEIRD has attracted some criticism lately on how we teach science, and I’d like your thoughts on how to respond!

Imaginary Interlocutor: You don’t usually talk about Science is WEIRD here; why now?

Indeed, I try not to! To me, it smacks of marketing.¹ I’m bringing it in here because I think these critiques are some that people are going to throw at any Egan education — at least, before they understand what’s really going on.

And that’s because the pedagogical secret of Egan education is also its marketing Achilles heel: when you do it well, you engage incredibly high-level ideas exactly by doing things that strike people as “fun”, “unserious”, and “not academic”.

So I think it’s necessary for us to learn how to communicate that we do both of these at the same time, and talk about Egan education in a way that doesn’t invite these misunderstandings.

I.I.: You say “misunderstandings”, but are you sure the critiques are wrong?

I’m convinced they’re nearly entirely wrong — but you can decide for yourself. Here are some of the critiques we’ve heard:

• we’re not teaching “hard science”

• we use incorrect terminology (especially: we say that flowers have “penises” and “vaginas”)

• we’re just delving into random topics, rather than teaching anything substantial

• there’s no way that one curriculum could work for kids from 8 to 15

(We’ve heard some other concerns, too — like whether any place can really be welcoming for both liberal and conservative families, how we engage neurodiversity, and whether we’re welcoming of LGBTQIA kids. Also, there’s a rumor going around that I’m a flat Earther! For the moment I’ll stick to the objections over how we teach science. If you want to see the other stuff, subscribe to our occasional Science is WEIRD emails; I’ll send out one of those when I put all this up on that website.)

As you read this, consider if I could be saying any of this in a way that’s more clear. I’d love your thoughts in the comments.

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1: Do we teach "hard science"?

I.I.: It look like your program emphasizes how “fun” science is. That’s good, but it’s no replacement for a real science curriculum that teaches hard science. Do you teach hard science?

The short answer would be “oh my GOODNESS yes we do, you have no idea”, but I want to steelman this, so I’ll give a more precise answer: “that depends on what one means by ‘hard science’”.

If someone is looking for a curriculum that has a lot of math, then nope, that’s not what we do. This year (in “Fire is Weird”) we’ll introduce balancing equations, but even then, we’ll never have as much of it as a traditional high school math curriculum.

So if one defines “hard” as “full of math”, then nope — we’re not “hard science”.

But.

Another definition of “hard” is “focuses on the most fundamental ideas that explain the world”. And if that’s the definition you’re using, then holy crap do we do hard science! Just in the last six weeks we’ve uncovered:

• Newton’;s corpuscular theory of light

• Huygen’s wave theory

• The electromagnetic spectrum

• Young’s double slit experiment, and how we measure wavelengths 

• Einstein’s photon theory

• Wave–particle duality

• Lasers, UV light, x-rays, and gamma rays

• Carcinogens and radiation

• Galilean relativity

• Einsteinian special relativity

I say “uncovered” (rather than “covered”) for a reason. We’re not just talking about these ideas — we unveil them analytically, having students understand the experiments behind these theories. It’s easy, for example, to “teach” quantum mechanics by just yammering on about some of its weirder implications. (If you know a science-eager 12-year-old, ask them about Schrödinger’s cat.) But this just gives kids a bunch of cool-sounding stories. We walk them through the experiments that these theories are meant to explain. For example, instead of talking about wave–particle duality by waving our hands and saying “someone, light is both a particle AND a wave, woo, woo, isn’t science weird?!”, we unpack the double-slit experiment: a photon goes places that only a wave could get to, but when it arrives, we always see it as a dot. What the heck? Then we introduce the weird ideas that science-y kids will hear about (the Copenhagen Interpretation, the consciousness principle, the multiverse) as attempts to make sense of what we can all witness.

And this is just one topic. We tackle a new topic every six weeks, and the ideas build on each other. There’s good evidence that this sort of integrated curriculum generally leads to better understanding. For a sketch of some of the specific concepts we're hitting over the whole six-year spiral, check out scienceisWEIRD.com/concepts.

So is this curriculum great for elementary and middle schoolers who are hoping to go into a STEM field? Yes! Professional scientists need both a discipline-centering quantitative understanding and a real-world-centering quantitative understanding of what they're studying. For more about this, see scienceisWEIRD.com/high-school.

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2: Do we use incorrect terms?

I.I.: On your website, you use quite a few incorrect terms. This seems to suggest you’re soft on accuracy.

Excellent question. The answer to this gets at the core of what we do.

In science education, there’s a strong temptation to identify “proper terminology” with “accurate understanding” — that is, if the kids can say the right words, that's a good indication they know what they’re talking about. The trouble is that this ignores the fact that words can get in the way of an accurate understanding. (This insight isn't by any means new to us — it's one of the essential insights of educational progressivism going back centuries; maybe the best version of it was when Howard Gardner showed that Ivy League grads who knew all the right words had all of the wrong concepts. Think people who could talk about “axial tilt” but then say “it’s hot in summer because the Earth is closer to the Sun”.)

So what we do (from almost the first lesson) is to problematize scientific terminology.² We explore where a term like “planets” or “orbits” come from, highlighting how they oftentimes represent older misunderstandings of how the world works.

For a fun take on this, you might enjoy a blog post I wrote, summarizing that second lesson:

We show that even when terms are not actively unhelpful, they develop out of specialist communities whose needs were not the same as ours. Professional geochemists need precise terminology to distinguish a zillion kinds of minerals; folk who are coming to this knowledge for the first time need names and metaphors that fit immediately into our minds to make everything snap into place. Just because the first group are the experts, that doesn’t mean we should start by using their words. (They often show some, um, challenges in communication.)

But none of that stops us from using correct terms — we just don’t use them first. There’s value in amassing a scientific vocabulary. (This is most important when we’re talking about anatomy, so we can understand what our doctors are telling us about our bodies!) We do put a focus on learning technical terminology, spending quite a bit of time to talk about the Greek and Latin roots that the terms come from (so they’ll be more likely to stick in our memory). But we usually start by using metaphors.

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3: Why do we say that flowers have penises and vaginas?

I.I.: I’m especially worried about the incorrect terms I see you using about anatomy — e.g., using “penis” and “vagina” for the pistil and stamen of plants.

That’s understandable… but you probably want to know the context.

First, as we say on our website, when we teach this (in “Apples are Weird”, coming up in the spring) we introduce students to both the official terminology of flower parts —

• pistil

• stigma

• style

• stamen

• anther

• filament…

and to the metaphors (vaginas, penises). But why do we use metaphors to connect plants and animals?

Because botanists do, too! The official scientific term for what comes under the stigma is the “ovary”. And this is because plants and animals are connected. We’re kin to each other: it would be inappropriate to have totally different terms for corresponding structures. And since biologists are already using human terms to make sense of some parts of the flower, it’s not clear to us what the problem is with using other human terms to make sense of more of it — especially when this wakes students up to the centrality of sex across the kingdoms of life.

That all said, in thinking through this criticism, Amy-the-science-advisor and I realized that an even more accurate metaphor for “stamen” is testes, and we’ll probably be going with that this year. (This is an excellent example where engaging with criticism makes education better.)³

But there’s a deeper misunderstanding here: the real choice isn’t between using terms and using metaphors, because terms usually are metaphors. They’re frozen metaphors — stuck forever at the moment of their birth, which was often before we really understood what was going on. Once you know to look for this, you see it everywhere.

Just to stick to flower examples, the word “pistil” is just an alternate spelling of “pestle”, as in “that pricey stone bowl you bought at Pier 1 to grind up your boozhy ancient grains.” But that’s just a metaphor for what this part of the flower look like. It doesn’t at all get to the reality we now understand: it’s the whole female reproductive system. And the word “anther” is just the Greek word for “flower”, which misses the reality that it’s the whole male reproductive system. (Yes, most flowers have both!)

The real division isn’t, then, between “terms” and “metaphors”, but between choosing words that emphasize the big picture or ones the small details. We start by going general, so people of all ages can quickly understand the essence of what’s going on.

I.I.: Doesn’t using words like “penis” and “vagina” distract from teaching?

It can distract the kids when it’s not done well. But there’s a cost to avoiding it: it’s important to us to de-stigmatize these words. When we avoid them, we’re contributing to the sense that parts of our body are taboo, even in science — and it’s a short step between being taboo and being icky. This is a value judgment, but: nobody’s body is icky. We think it important that a science curriculum, whenever possible, helps us see that.

I.I.: But don’t these words scare away parents?

Indeed, a conservative Muslim friend actually pulled his kids out of our course over it. I’m still kicking myself for that situation — all it would have taken was notifying parents ahead of time that we were going to do this, and any who chose could have skipped that lesson.

Which is why that’s what we do now. In fact, it’s ironic that in making a big deal of how we notify parents ahead of time that we use these metaphors, we’ve apparently branded ourselves as “that curriculum that’s always talking about penises and vaginas” — which is the opposite of true!

I.I.: Do cultural progressives also have any problem with this?

A few folk who identify as culturally progressive have objected to the fact that our sex ed class isn’t mandatory. They suggested that making it optional isn’t inclusive — and I can imagine them expressing the same concern about our notifying parents before the lesson on flowers.

I can understand the logic here — but it’s important to us that we’re not telling parents when to introduce their kids to these topics. We aim to be radically inclusive, and that means welcoming families who come from more traditional cultures (which, globally, is more than 50% of people). And in general, we find that all parents usually appreciate having options.

But you can’t make everyone happy. At the end of the day, you’ve got to try to respect other people’s values, and be willing to pay for your own.

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4: Are we missing the big picture for "random topics"?

I.I.: I’m looking at your topics, and they seem… niche. Your program seems to miss the bigger picture and key details necessary for a complete science curriculum. 

No — but I understand how someone could misunderstand us as doing that, even if they carefully read our website. What we do is teach the big picture through random topics. Every topic becomes a door into the fundamental discoveries of different branches of modern science. And note that, though we joke that the topics are random, they’re actually not. (It’s interesting that nearly all of them can be represented by emojis: a sign that they’re the sorts of topics that people think about regularly.)

This is very much a feature of the curriculum, rather than a bug. Because in truth one thing that progressivist reformers have been complaining about for more than a century is how much of the academic curriculum seems disconnected from everyday concerns: you can get a 100% on a chemistry exam, but never be prompted to consider how everything that you eat IS chemicals. (And you can do that and still not realize that you ARE chemicals!) When we anchor the most fundamental discoveries of science in things that kids see or think about all the time, we turn science from “a subject I learn about in school” into “an exploration of reality”.

5: Do we cover the required topics?

I.I.: Still, your program seems to leave out other topics necessary to meet the requirement for one year of biology, physics, and earth science.

I think that, if you look into the concepts we’re covering, you’ll see that’s not true. 

We didn’t start Science is WEIRD by sitting down and pouring over a list of standards. (In my bones, I think that any curriculum that starts with standards is making things harder on itself. Maybe someone could make such a curriculum come alive, but I’m not that skilled.) That said, we've taken care to make sure what we teach does cover the content in the Next Generation Science Standards (the “NGSS”, to its friends and enemies — you can see more at scienceisWEIRD.com/standards). Moreover we train kids in what the reformers who wrote those standards say is lacking in traditional classes: scientific thinking. (That's why each of our lessons is structured as a riddle that kids work to solve, rather than as content to soak up.)

I.I.: How about the periodic table? I’ve heard of people who’ve been in Science is WEIRD for a whole year without hearing about it!

True! And there's purpose in that. The short version of it is that the scope & sequence of the science curriculum is misordered: the fault of its being crystallized in the years after scientists had devised the periodic table, but before they had figured out what atoms actually were.

The traditional thing to do is to put the periodic table first… but really, that's silly. Why start by memorizing a table of things you don't really understand (e.g. how many kids could tell you two facts about boron?), when you can first learn how matter works? That’s why in the second topic of our first year (“Water is Weird”) we help kids understand…

• atoms

• molecules

• protons

• electrons

• electron orbitals

• covalent bonds

And, once again, these aren’t just definitions for them, or pictures — we have them imagine themselves shrunken down to be a picometer tall, and to imagine what an oxygen atom would look like.

I.I.: How about pulleys? I’m looking around your website, and you seem to never mention them!

I’m embarrassed to say that, at present, this is correct. We don’t have any lessons on the six classical simple machines… and that’s because I  so resented the amount of time I had to spend on those in elementary school (how much productive intellectual work can one do on a wedge, anyway?) that we only mention them incidentally. The reason that I’m embarrassed by this is that pulleys are really weird, and frankly, we should find an excuse to talk about them. That said, I’ll also note that the NGSS doesn’t actually require pulleys to be taught at any age, and while we’re in the minority, we’re not alone — there are other curriculums that don’t cover them.

6: How can one curriculum work for multiple ages?

I.I.: You say that Science is WEIRD is designed for kids from 8 to 15. But knowledge builds over time: a curriculum that works for an 8-year-old wouldn’t be appropriate for a 15-year-old (and vice versa).

I understand completely if someone suspects that, say, “wave–particle duality” can't be taught to an 8-year-old. And yet, we do teach these things to a wide span of ages, and we don’t make this claim lightly. One of the science-PhD moms whose kids take our classes says:

What I love about your classes is that what is appropriate for a 15-year-old, you also make appropriate for an 8-year-old, while somehow not talking down to the 15-year-old. They all get a lot out of it. This is a talent.

We do this by working tremendously hard at each lesson (about 15 hours goes into each one) and by making full use of a new educational philosophy, one hatched by Kieran Egan. I've given presentations on how to do this at educational conferences, and do so online for free: if you're interested, take a look at scienceisWEIRD.com/atoms and scienceisWEIRD.com/egan.

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Back to the meta-question

So, now how can I respond to these concerns more clearly? (For context, assume this text will go up on a new page on scienceisWEIRD.com.)

1. And “marketing” smacks of “self-aggrandizement”. I live in Minnesota, and here in Lake Wobegon, everyone is above average; people look down at anyone who puts on airs.

2. “Words, turds” is what I tell my own kids, though I don’t say that in class.

3. We don’t go into the full metaphor system, but if you’d like some more: “pollen” ≈ sperm, “stamen” ≈ testes, “anther” ≈ seminal gland, “pistil” ≈ vagina, “stigma” ≈ cervical entrance, “style” ≈ cervical canal, and “ovary” ≈ ovary. I’ll let you puzzle out what the corresponding metaphor for a “penis” is, in a plant. Hint: buzz, buzz.