Hi hi! Haven’t commented since that first comment (exams, what are you gonna do), but happily paid to subscribe!
I love this. My friends and I loved reading those kiddie biographies for this very reason (if you’re in the US you might have seen them, the Who Was…? series). I learned more history from those and the American Girl Doll books in the library than I ever did from a textbook in middle school. Little Golden Books has also expanded into child-friendly biographies; I saw Rita Moreno, Ronald Reagan, and King Charles III at my local bookstore last month.
The only thing that troubles me takes me back to the binaries. Your Buddha video was fantastic, and I loved how you focused on “pain/pleasure.” I know you might be able to fix this with diversity of stories and with well-informed teachers, but as kids are forming a self-concept they glom onto what makes them them. The villains in complex historical stories might get unconsciously flattened down to one-dimensional bad guys, perhaps sowing the seeds of bias. The heroes, who in real history might have been complicated, might get unconsciously inflated.
I don’t think I’m explaining myself very well, so let me use an anecdote. I used to tutor in an area that was heavily populated by members of a specific ethnic group I am not a a part of. The school curriculum required that I help the kids understand the unacknowledged genocide of this ethnic group through stories and worksheets on its anniversary. This political situation is very real, very active, and very scary, with a relevant impact on many relatives of the students. I took this approach at first, but soon realized the students, even the ones not a part of the group, had taken it and run with it too far.
People who were not like them? Compared to members of the oppressive ethnic group. People who had mildly annoyed them? Compared to members of the oppressive ethnic group. It became shorthand for anyone who didn’t fit or wasn’t good or heroic. It seemed that they genuinely began to dehumanize members of the other group, and dehumanizing anyone is an absolute no for me for any of my students. This went away immediately the next year, when we went in on names and dates instead.
I don’t think that there’s anything wrong with teaching history as a story. I just think that stories are good places for children to play and explore wild natural binaries and identify with goodness and heroism and understand how we got to where we are. I just think we have to be careful when situations are active and close to home— and we never quite know what those are for any particular group. Our tendency to Disnefy must be kept firmly in check. Many of those Little Golden biographies feel quite obviously sanitized; making difficult stuff appropriate for younger ages without talking down is harder than you would expect for the average person and I imagine the newer Egan-trained teacher. (See the bio of King Charles III: he and Diana split because he liked the country and she liked the city.) It’s a fine line to walk sometimes between appropriate and intellectually honest. Names and dates give sterility and clinical distance, in a way.
Thank you so much for this post and it’s an honor to subscribe!
I think, in my original post, that I could have added some of this — that to tell a story is to play with fire. Every simple story necessarily needs to choose a point of view, which comes with a sense of what's good and what's bad. This means we have to be mindful of which stories we're telling, which POVs we're picking, what the kids are hearing as good and bad.
Of course, there's really no way around this. The false way out (as you said) is to reduce history to names and dates — but kids will still read their own simple stories and values into even those. The only way out is through — to tell more stories, from more perspectives.
You're entirely right that this is hard, and a responsibility we don't want to dump entirely on teachers (even as we respect their wisdom to discern what the students are doing with these things).
On the topic of storytelling, Brandon, are you by chance familiar with Michael Dorer's book, The Deep Well of Time? The stories in his book are the most beautiful renditions of the Montessori Great Lessons that I've heard thus far. They are SO carefully and beautifully crafted and just so, so good and just full of wonder.
In writing these stories Dorer also borrowed some techniques/approaches that Jerome Berryman incorporated into his Godly Play stories. In my experiences as a Godly Play storyteller I've found that in order for me to properly tell one of these stories, I have to be able to tell it by heart, and "by heart" I don't mean memorized. I need to know it so well that it has also become my story to share. To do that, even though the stories are short, I still used to spend hours over the course of a week practicing the one story I was presenting that week to make sure I was happy with the timing, inflection of my voice, how/where/when I moved the story materials, etc. Some of the shortest story scripts required the most preparation because every word, every action, every pause was that much more significant. Often times it was a story I already knew (spiral curriculum) so I just needed to refresh/revisit but that still took time to get it just right. And I wonder how many teachers could/would carve out this kind of time on a regular basis without taking something else out. Or maybe that's what's needed?
I think there's also an art to excellent storytelling, so we'd want to add storytelling training in teacher education to really see the full benefit. If it were added to the curriculum, I wonder what teachers would think? Would they find it more generally helpful? For me this training has been helpful in a wide variety of settings -- I've leveraged it in a wide variety of "meaning making" opportunities, ranging from how I retell childhood stories to my kids, how I have facilitated Equine Facilitated Learning sessions, all the way to how I've framed a fundraising campaign for my kids school.
I think there's a lot here to explore around storytelling, this is just some quick popcorn thoughts. I'm curious to read what others share!
I had NOT heard of Dorer, but on your recommendation, I've just purchased his new book on how to use story to teach grammar — thanks!
Thanks for your reflection on what it took to be a Godly Play teacher. For those of you who don't know Godly Play, it's a Montessori-inspired curriculum developed in Episcopal churches for teaching Sunday School. I had the pleasure of teaching it in the late aught's (perhaps oddly, as an atheist, and at the bequest of a priest who's since become an alchemist).
I found a number of things wonderful about the Godly Play curriculum that I think we might want to bring into any curriculum-tools that our community would develop:
* they're specific, and rich in meaning
* they've been well-crafted — you can tell they've been worked and re-worked dozens (or perhaps hundreds) of times
* they're physically beautiful — they come in wooden boxes; any pieces are also made of wood
The one thing that I didn't like about them is that they don't focus on stories. I know, I know — everyone usually lauds them for their stories! But the stories (in my memory) were usually very simple (like the parables), and jumped right to philosophy-oriented questions. After I finished all the Godly Play lessons the church had, I found myself crafting more narrative-driven stories from the Bible — of Sampson, of the Nativity, and one month-long saga of Abraham.
(That said, every time I think about the church year, I think about that Godly Play lesson.)
Your observations, of course, on how LONG it took to prep those lessons are crucial (and I share them). I have two ideas on how to help lesson that. (Probably I have more, but, I have these too!)
The first is that we should have a video example of someone telling each story for teachers to watch (and ideally more than one example). Why? As you said, so much of storytelling is in the small things — emphases, facial expressions, pauses... And that's not communicated well over text. Obviously, this isn't something we can start with — it's something to build to.
The second is even further in the future. If we are ever able to do our own teacher training, teachers should train on the specific stories that they're likely to be teaching. As someone who cares about the craft of the curriculum, it maddens me to no end when I consider that teachers are not taught to master teaching specific things! (It'd be like training dentists to perform "oral health" in general, and never taught to remove a cavity.) Teaching is a craft; the details matter. This, in my wife's experience of Montessori training, is one of the things that it does right.
I don't want to derail things here away from your post but I'm so curious to hear more about your comment about how Godly Play doesn't focus on stories - I have actually experienced the opposite.
Yes! I think having sample videos showing multiple teachers telling a story would be great. I have had the chance to watch a lot of different GP trainers present stories and I pick up something from each one of them. I think having training "genetic diversity" is so important and results in stronger practitioners.
And I fully agree with your second point! Part of Deep Well explores how to craft and present a story but reading a book about a topic and having the experience (ideally with some mentoring/support, ideally) and doing it yourself are two different things. I've seen several stories presented in the "Godly Play way" (mostly biographies of important people) and I tried to craft one myself at a number of years ago and it was HARD! Also I hadn't realized Dorer had a new book out -- after I finish the Egan books I have on my bookshelf, I'll have to track down a copy of that one!
Not a derailing at all! Really, our different interpretations of Godly Play suggest that I'm being ambiguous when I talk about "story" in a way that's essential to unpack.
How about this: would you be willing to point to a specific Godly Play lesson which has a good story that we can look at online? (Are any online?) Then I can be more clear about what I mean when I say I found them lacking as stories, without having to rely on my presumably-off-in-crucial-ways memories.
(By the way, sorry for my lag in replying. I had responded immediately, but somehow my computer had eaten the answer. By the time I realized it, my brain was off to other shiny things.)
I am not sure if any of the stories are available online, at least not official copies. Some people may have skirted the copywrite laws. I'll see what I can find/do.
I'm guessing our different experiences here stem from different interpretations of "story." I'm also suspecting that Egan's definition of a good story just differs from Berryman's, though they both hold such a similar core and central value in the role of stories in education that I'm super curious if they ever met.... I'll have to ask Jerome Berryman if he ever crossed paths with Egan (in the interest of full disclosure, I serve on the Godly Play Foundation board of directors, and I've recommended Science is Weird to several of my fellow board directors who have young kids.)
Hello! I've been meaning to comment for a while, especially on the math posts as I teach math in higher ed for a living - but ironically I didn't have the time because I was busy marking end-of-year math tests. I'll try and become a regular contributor now my teaching load is lower next semester.
There's a lot I loved in this post, especially the campfire bit - I forget who it was who said "if you want a group of boys to sit quietly around a circle, put a campfire in the middle". My hunch would be Baden-Powell, speaking of which, the original Scouting for Boys was a sequence of chapters called "campfire yarns". Many of them were linked to practical skills the boys were supposed to learn and even do tests on (but you got badges so it was the cool kind of tests), and that storytelling ... started a worldwide youth movement. There's a lot we don't want to copy from the original scouting movement, but the stories bit, we can absolutely take that.
I can recommend the book "Why Don't Students Like School?" by D. T. Willingham to anyone who liked the ACX review of Egan - the two complement each other well. Willingham is a cognitive scientist and presents what he says are some of the principles for education that have the strongest scientific evidence behind them - and comes to conclusions very close to those of Egan, at least as far as I understand from this substack so far. He suggests that a good lesson tells a story - there's a whole chapter on that, in which one of the sections is headed "Try organising a lesson plan around the conflict". And yes, Star Wars gets mentioned in that chapter too.
Even Hirsch's conservative-leaning Common Core foundation seems to have got a better idea of history teaching than the social studies curriculum that's rightly being criticised here. Just looking at the page for their K-2 materials on History and Geography we see samples of the Yanomami tribe in the Amazon, Macchu Pichu, we're told that Central America produces coffee and bananas, and we get an introduction to the ancient Spartans. By Grade 2 they've covered ancient India, China, Greece, Japan, Mexico, Egypt, and Mesopotamia, and heard about the U.S. Civil War. Maybe some of those materials need revising for historical accuracy - the "Spartans" for example seems to mean the top 5-10% of Spartan society who were not slaves, and they weren't as militarily successful as they pretended - but the idea that by Grade 3 children have learnt that there's many different cultures around the world that do things very differently, sounds right to me.
Yeah yeah, Willingham! I will ALSO recommend his “Why Don't Students Like School?" — it’s one of the handful of intellectually solid (but easy to read) books on education (that actually tells you new stuff). It might even be the best thing produced by the mainstream Traditionalist movement (if you're new to that, check out educationrickshaw.com).
And ditto Hirsch's Common Core. For anyone who doesn’t know Hirsch, I might recommend starting with his short book "The Knowledge Deficit" (amazon.com/dp/0618872256). His Common Core curriculum has the virtues of (1) being a thing people can follow, so much so that (2) there are actually schools that practice it! (There's one in my town; I've been meaning to visit it.)
If I have anything useful to add here, it’s that I think both Willingham’s and Hirsch’s approaches only take us maybe 10% as far as where Egan brings us. Both are focused on “content”; Willingham from the perspective of “knowing stuff enables us to think better” and Hirsch from the perspective of “knowing particular stuff about the world enables us to be good citizens”. (Both also hit the bell of “knowing stuff makes us better readers”.)
All of those are true, and importantly true. But Egan’s (weird, hard-to-convey-without-sounding-like-a-crazy-person) “we are all recapitulating history and so let’s pay attention to these five kinds of understanding you’ve never heard about before” approach rockets us way further toward inventing a curriculum fit for humans.
But, hey, I’m deep fans of both authors (I think I’ve literally sent fan mail to both). Maybe someday we could do a “if you liked x, you might especially like this idea from Egan” series of posts. If anyone wants to sketch something like this up for Willingham or Hirsch (or someone else — Montessori? John Taylor Gatto? Sir Ken Robinson?), I’d be interested, and could perhaps point to it on this substack.
Actually, let me be specific about what I find lacking in what I've IMAGINED a Common Knowledge history curriculum to have: well-told stories. From what I've read — and if anyone has special information about this, reach out to me, and I'll gift you a week's paid subscription so you can share it here — the Common Knowledge curriculum says "this week, talk about Sparta; here are some bullet points to touch on". Egan would counsel us to tell a compelling story about Sparta — not only will kids pay better attention (and remember it more), they'll be able to DO more with it in the future. Factoids are flat; a story is like a three-dimensional object that we can all see differently, and see more of the more we think of it.
Egan's history curriculum also will BUILD on stories to (a little in elementary school, a little more in middle school, and a LOT in high school) ask the big questions: why did Europe conquer the world, rather than, say, New Guinea? Why do cultures differ (and agree) on what's beautiful? Why is there injustice? Profound human experience is always a stone-throw's away with an Egan curriculum in a way that it's not with Hirsch's.
Or at least, that's my (fairly ignorant) perspective.
Your insights are captivating! I have a few observations. In some respects, the potency and relevance of stories in Egan's educational philosophy require critical evaluation.
- Firstly, I believe a more enriching and meaningful utilization of stories is to foster not only narrative thinking but also paradigmatic thinking, akin to Bruner's perspective. This is particularly true for elementary school, especially from a socio-cultural standpoint (see, e.g., Vygotsky, Davydov, Hadegaard), gradually laying the foundation for romantic understanding and literacy by integrating stories with other cognitive tools in complex teaching units. So, starting with a diverse range of stories is sensible, but it also makes sense to progress, as primary school advances, towards more varied learning experiences within a narrative framework.
- The passage where you contemplate the physical setting for storytelling is eloquent. There is much to discuss regarding how a story is presented to children. Personally, I think it's crucial to highlight the risk of "ideological manipulation" concealed behind the monological sharing of a story (I believe stories should be 'broken' and reconstructed together with children, catalyzing their questions and creative/critical ideas), as well as the risk of communicative fallacy (it's easy to convince ourselves that a story we passionately share has precise effects on children's understanding when, in reality, their imagination has moved elsewhere or, especially due to linguistic fragility, hasn't moved at all).
- The true hidden superpower of the narrative approach, as I interpret Egan personally, doesn't lie in the literal use of stories but in the narrative development of learning/teaching paths (beginning with a tension linked to the emotionally significant sense of the topic and progressing towards the refinement of knowledge and the mediation/resolution/re-launch of the initial tension).
I believe all these points are present, more or less explicitly, in your text. I just wanted to add my perspective from the standpoint of someone studying Egan in relation to primary school teaching and teacher training!
Hi hi! Haven’t commented since that first comment (exams, what are you gonna do), but happily paid to subscribe!
I love this. My friends and I loved reading those kiddie biographies for this very reason (if you’re in the US you might have seen them, the Who Was…? series). I learned more history from those and the American Girl Doll books in the library than I ever did from a textbook in middle school. Little Golden Books has also expanded into child-friendly biographies; I saw Rita Moreno, Ronald Reagan, and King Charles III at my local bookstore last month.
The only thing that troubles me takes me back to the binaries. Your Buddha video was fantastic, and I loved how you focused on “pain/pleasure.” I know you might be able to fix this with diversity of stories and with well-informed teachers, but as kids are forming a self-concept they glom onto what makes them them. The villains in complex historical stories might get unconsciously flattened down to one-dimensional bad guys, perhaps sowing the seeds of bias. The heroes, who in real history might have been complicated, might get unconsciously inflated.
I don’t think I’m explaining myself very well, so let me use an anecdote. I used to tutor in an area that was heavily populated by members of a specific ethnic group I am not a a part of. The school curriculum required that I help the kids understand the unacknowledged genocide of this ethnic group through stories and worksheets on its anniversary. This political situation is very real, very active, and very scary, with a relevant impact on many relatives of the students. I took this approach at first, but soon realized the students, even the ones not a part of the group, had taken it and run with it too far.
People who were not like them? Compared to members of the oppressive ethnic group. People who had mildly annoyed them? Compared to members of the oppressive ethnic group. It became shorthand for anyone who didn’t fit or wasn’t good or heroic. It seemed that they genuinely began to dehumanize members of the other group, and dehumanizing anyone is an absolute no for me for any of my students. This went away immediately the next year, when we went in on names and dates instead.
I don’t think that there’s anything wrong with teaching history as a story. I just think that stories are good places for children to play and explore wild natural binaries and identify with goodness and heroism and understand how we got to where we are. I just think we have to be careful when situations are active and close to home— and we never quite know what those are for any particular group. Our tendency to Disnefy must be kept firmly in check. Many of those Little Golden biographies feel quite obviously sanitized; making difficult stuff appropriate for younger ages without talking down is harder than you would expect for the average person and I imagine the newer Egan-trained teacher. (See the bio of King Charles III: he and Diana split because he liked the country and she liked the city.) It’s a fine line to walk sometimes between appropriate and intellectually honest. Names and dates give sterility and clinical distance, in a way.
Thank you so much for this post and it’s an honor to subscribe!
A real problem, stated vividly — perfect!
I think, in my original post, that I could have added some of this — that to tell a story is to play with fire. Every simple story necessarily needs to choose a point of view, which comes with a sense of what's good and what's bad. This means we have to be mindful of which stories we're telling, which POVs we're picking, what the kids are hearing as good and bad.
Of course, there's really no way around this. The false way out (as you said) is to reduce history to names and dates — but kids will still read their own simple stories and values into even those. The only way out is through — to tell more stories, from more perspectives.
You're entirely right that this is hard, and a responsibility we don't want to dump entirely on teachers (even as we respect their wisdom to discern what the students are doing with these things).
Thanks for this.
On the topic of storytelling, Brandon, are you by chance familiar with Michael Dorer's book, The Deep Well of Time? The stories in his book are the most beautiful renditions of the Montessori Great Lessons that I've heard thus far. They are SO carefully and beautifully crafted and just so, so good and just full of wonder.
In writing these stories Dorer also borrowed some techniques/approaches that Jerome Berryman incorporated into his Godly Play stories. In my experiences as a Godly Play storyteller I've found that in order for me to properly tell one of these stories, I have to be able to tell it by heart, and "by heart" I don't mean memorized. I need to know it so well that it has also become my story to share. To do that, even though the stories are short, I still used to spend hours over the course of a week practicing the one story I was presenting that week to make sure I was happy with the timing, inflection of my voice, how/where/when I moved the story materials, etc. Some of the shortest story scripts required the most preparation because every word, every action, every pause was that much more significant. Often times it was a story I already knew (spiral curriculum) so I just needed to refresh/revisit but that still took time to get it just right. And I wonder how many teachers could/would carve out this kind of time on a regular basis without taking something else out. Or maybe that's what's needed?
I think there's also an art to excellent storytelling, so we'd want to add storytelling training in teacher education to really see the full benefit. If it were added to the curriculum, I wonder what teachers would think? Would they find it more generally helpful? For me this training has been helpful in a wide variety of settings -- I've leveraged it in a wide variety of "meaning making" opportunities, ranging from how I retell childhood stories to my kids, how I have facilitated Equine Facilitated Learning sessions, all the way to how I've framed a fundraising campaign for my kids school.
I think there's a lot here to explore around storytelling, this is just some quick popcorn thoughts. I'm curious to read what others share!
I had NOT heard of Dorer, but on your recommendation, I've just purchased his new book on how to use story to teach grammar — thanks!
Thanks for your reflection on what it took to be a Godly Play teacher. For those of you who don't know Godly Play, it's a Montessori-inspired curriculum developed in Episcopal churches for teaching Sunday School. I had the pleasure of teaching it in the late aught's (perhaps oddly, as an atheist, and at the bequest of a priest who's since become an alchemist).
I found a number of things wonderful about the Godly Play curriculum that I think we might want to bring into any curriculum-tools that our community would develop:
* they're specific, and rich in meaning
* they've been well-crafted — you can tell they've been worked and re-worked dozens (or perhaps hundreds) of times
* they're physically beautiful — they come in wooden boxes; any pieces are also made of wood
The one thing that I didn't like about them is that they don't focus on stories. I know, I know — everyone usually lauds them for their stories! But the stories (in my memory) were usually very simple (like the parables), and jumped right to philosophy-oriented questions. After I finished all the Godly Play lessons the church had, I found myself crafting more narrative-driven stories from the Bible — of Sampson, of the Nativity, and one month-long saga of Abraham.
(That said, every time I think about the church year, I think about that Godly Play lesson.)
Your observations, of course, on how LONG it took to prep those lessons are crucial (and I share them). I have two ideas on how to help lesson that. (Probably I have more, but, I have these too!)
The first is that we should have a video example of someone telling each story for teachers to watch (and ideally more than one example). Why? As you said, so much of storytelling is in the small things — emphases, facial expressions, pauses... And that's not communicated well over text. Obviously, this isn't something we can start with — it's something to build to.
The second is even further in the future. If we are ever able to do our own teacher training, teachers should train on the specific stories that they're likely to be teaching. As someone who cares about the craft of the curriculum, it maddens me to no end when I consider that teachers are not taught to master teaching specific things! (It'd be like training dentists to perform "oral health" in general, and never taught to remove a cavity.) Teaching is a craft; the details matter. This, in my wife's experience of Montessori training, is one of the things that it does right.
I don't want to derail things here away from your post but I'm so curious to hear more about your comment about how Godly Play doesn't focus on stories - I have actually experienced the opposite.
Yes! I think having sample videos showing multiple teachers telling a story would be great. I have had the chance to watch a lot of different GP trainers present stories and I pick up something from each one of them. I think having training "genetic diversity" is so important and results in stronger practitioners.
And I fully agree with your second point! Part of Deep Well explores how to craft and present a story but reading a book about a topic and having the experience (ideally with some mentoring/support, ideally) and doing it yourself are two different things. I've seen several stories presented in the "Godly Play way" (mostly biographies of important people) and I tried to craft one myself at a number of years ago and it was HARD! Also I hadn't realized Dorer had a new book out -- after I finish the Egan books I have on my bookshelf, I'll have to track down a copy of that one!
Not a derailing at all! Really, our different interpretations of Godly Play suggest that I'm being ambiguous when I talk about "story" in a way that's essential to unpack.
How about this: would you be willing to point to a specific Godly Play lesson which has a good story that we can look at online? (Are any online?) Then I can be more clear about what I mean when I say I found them lacking as stories, without having to rely on my presumably-off-in-crucial-ways memories.
(By the way, sorry for my lag in replying. I had responded immediately, but somehow my computer had eaten the answer. By the time I realized it, my brain was off to other shiny things.)
I am not sure if any of the stories are available online, at least not official copies. Some people may have skirted the copywrite laws. I'll see what I can find/do.
I'm guessing our different experiences here stem from different interpretations of "story." I'm also suspecting that Egan's definition of a good story just differs from Berryman's, though they both hold such a similar core and central value in the role of stories in education that I'm super curious if they ever met.... I'll have to ask Jerome Berryman if he ever crossed paths with Egan (in the interest of full disclosure, I serve on the Godly Play Foundation board of directors, and I've recommended Science is Weird to several of my fellow board directors who have young kids.)
Hello! I've been meaning to comment for a while, especially on the math posts as I teach math in higher ed for a living - but ironically I didn't have the time because I was busy marking end-of-year math tests. I'll try and become a regular contributor now my teaching load is lower next semester.
There's a lot I loved in this post, especially the campfire bit - I forget who it was who said "if you want a group of boys to sit quietly around a circle, put a campfire in the middle". My hunch would be Baden-Powell, speaking of which, the original Scouting for Boys was a sequence of chapters called "campfire yarns". Many of them were linked to practical skills the boys were supposed to learn and even do tests on (but you got badges so it was the cool kind of tests), and that storytelling ... started a worldwide youth movement. There's a lot we don't want to copy from the original scouting movement, but the stories bit, we can absolutely take that.
I can recommend the book "Why Don't Students Like School?" by D. T. Willingham to anyone who liked the ACX review of Egan - the two complement each other well. Willingham is a cognitive scientist and presents what he says are some of the principles for education that have the strongest scientific evidence behind them - and comes to conclusions very close to those of Egan, at least as far as I understand from this substack so far. He suggests that a good lesson tells a story - there's a whole chapter on that, in which one of the sections is headed "Try organising a lesson plan around the conflict". And yes, Star Wars gets mentioned in that chapter too.
Even Hirsch's conservative-leaning Common Core foundation seems to have got a better idea of history teaching than the social studies curriculum that's rightly being criticised here. Just looking at the page for their K-2 materials on History and Geography we see samples of the Yanomami tribe in the Amazon, Macchu Pichu, we're told that Central America produces coffee and bananas, and we get an introduction to the ancient Spartans. By Grade 2 they've covered ancient India, China, Greece, Japan, Mexico, Egypt, and Mesopotamia, and heard about the U.S. Civil War. Maybe some of those materials need revising for historical accuracy - the "Spartans" for example seems to mean the top 5-10% of Spartan society who were not slaves, and they weren't as militarily successful as they pretended - but the idea that by Grade 3 children have learnt that there's many different cultures around the world that do things very differently, sounds right to me.
Yeah yeah, Willingham! I will ALSO recommend his “Why Don't Students Like School?" — it’s one of the handful of intellectually solid (but easy to read) books on education (that actually tells you new stuff). It might even be the best thing produced by the mainstream Traditionalist movement (if you're new to that, check out educationrickshaw.com).
And ditto Hirsch's Common Core. For anyone who doesn’t know Hirsch, I might recommend starting with his short book "The Knowledge Deficit" (amazon.com/dp/0618872256). His Common Core curriculum has the virtues of (1) being a thing people can follow, so much so that (2) there are actually schools that practice it! (There's one in my town; I've been meaning to visit it.)
If I have anything useful to add here, it’s that I think both Willingham’s and Hirsch’s approaches only take us maybe 10% as far as where Egan brings us. Both are focused on “content”; Willingham from the perspective of “knowing stuff enables us to think better” and Hirsch from the perspective of “knowing particular stuff about the world enables us to be good citizens”. (Both also hit the bell of “knowing stuff makes us better readers”.)
All of those are true, and importantly true. But Egan’s (weird, hard-to-convey-without-sounding-like-a-crazy-person) “we are all recapitulating history and so let’s pay attention to these five kinds of understanding you’ve never heard about before” approach rockets us way further toward inventing a curriculum fit for humans.
But, hey, I’m deep fans of both authors (I think I’ve literally sent fan mail to both). Maybe someday we could do a “if you liked x, you might especially like this idea from Egan” series of posts. If anyone wants to sketch something like this up for Willingham or Hirsch (or someone else — Montessori? John Taylor Gatto? Sir Ken Robinson?), I’d be interested, and could perhaps point to it on this substack.
Actually, let me be specific about what I find lacking in what I've IMAGINED a Common Knowledge history curriculum to have: well-told stories. From what I've read — and if anyone has special information about this, reach out to me, and I'll gift you a week's paid subscription so you can share it here — the Common Knowledge curriculum says "this week, talk about Sparta; here are some bullet points to touch on". Egan would counsel us to tell a compelling story about Sparta — not only will kids pay better attention (and remember it more), they'll be able to DO more with it in the future. Factoids are flat; a story is like a three-dimensional object that we can all see differently, and see more of the more we think of it.
Egan's history curriculum also will BUILD on stories to (a little in elementary school, a little more in middle school, and a LOT in high school) ask the big questions: why did Europe conquer the world, rather than, say, New Guinea? Why do cultures differ (and agree) on what's beautiful? Why is there injustice? Profound human experience is always a stone-throw's away with an Egan curriculum in a way that it's not with Hirsch's.
Or at least, that's my (fairly ignorant) perspective.
Your insights are captivating! I have a few observations. In some respects, the potency and relevance of stories in Egan's educational philosophy require critical evaluation.
- Firstly, I believe a more enriching and meaningful utilization of stories is to foster not only narrative thinking but also paradigmatic thinking, akin to Bruner's perspective. This is particularly true for elementary school, especially from a socio-cultural standpoint (see, e.g., Vygotsky, Davydov, Hadegaard), gradually laying the foundation for romantic understanding and literacy by integrating stories with other cognitive tools in complex teaching units. So, starting with a diverse range of stories is sensible, but it also makes sense to progress, as primary school advances, towards more varied learning experiences within a narrative framework.
- The passage where you contemplate the physical setting for storytelling is eloquent. There is much to discuss regarding how a story is presented to children. Personally, I think it's crucial to highlight the risk of "ideological manipulation" concealed behind the monological sharing of a story (I believe stories should be 'broken' and reconstructed together with children, catalyzing their questions and creative/critical ideas), as well as the risk of communicative fallacy (it's easy to convince ourselves that a story we passionately share has precise effects on children's understanding when, in reality, their imagination has moved elsewhere or, especially due to linguistic fragility, hasn't moved at all).
- The true hidden superpower of the narrative approach, as I interpret Egan personally, doesn't lie in the literal use of stories but in the narrative development of learning/teaching paths (beginning with a tension linked to the emotionally significant sense of the topic and progressing towards the refinement of knowledge and the mediation/resolution/re-launch of the initial tension).
I believe all these points are present, more or less explicitly, in your text. I just wanted to add my perspective from the standpoint of someone studying Egan in relation to primary school teaching and teacher training!