Interview on the EdSurge Podcast
Oh boy oh boy oh boy!
We’re on this week’s episode of EdSurge! Here’s the episode on Apple Podcasts, here it is on Spotify, here’s YouTube, and here it is on, y’know, just, the web.
Imaginary Interlocutor: Podcasts! They still around?
The EdSurge Podcast, for the uninitiated, may be the king of podcasts in the wild world of educational reform. (Just ask ChatGPT.) EdSurge — the organization behind it — has been identified as one of the major “innovation spotters” by the Brookings Institute.
So: kind of a big deal.
I.I.: Aesop wrote, “A man is known by the company he keeps.” On that basis, how cool are these people?
Past episodes include talking with…
Nobel-Prize-winning physicist Carl Wieman about science teaching that demonstrably works
the-greatest-education-journalist-of-our-age Annie Murphy Paul about embodied and extended cognition
flippin’ JOYCE CAROL OATES on how to teach creative writing
And, oh, with none other than fan of the substack Barbara Oakley on three! Separate! Occasions!
The host Jeff Young was probing and focused (and, frankly, charming). Giving the interview was a delight from start to finish.
And, once again, here’s the episode on Apple Podcasts, here it is on Spotify, here’s YouTube, and here it is on the web.
And I hope that I come across as pleasant and knowledgeable and such. But: I’m terribly worried that in it, I failed at something bigger: actually explaining Egan’s ideas.
The task before us
I’m not the first person to struggle with this. In Eganworld, I think this is openly understood to be challenges number one, two, and three in getting the ideas into practice.
I.I.: Why is this so hard?
A hornets’ nest o’ reasons.
To capture what he saw as the big picture of education, Egan had to create his own categories — hence terms like “Mythic/Romantic/Philosophic understanding”, “cultural/cognitive tools”, and so on. (So, communicating his ideas means explaining a bunch of terminology — or, as I tried to do in the interview, finding a way around it.)
To make his ideas applicable to the different layers of education — planning lessons, crafting curriculum, designing schools — Egan addressed many groups at once in his books. (So, communicating his ideas means figuring out which potential use an audience might make of it.)
And to ground his ideas in the broader intellectual context, Egan developed something of a meta-theory. Some of his key ideas would, if written as their own books, be shelved far from the “education” section — in history, anthropology, psychology, or epistemology. (So, communicating his ideas means deciding whether to go all epic in explaining this, or to stay mum. The first route can fail by seeming deliriously disconnected from practice; the second, by seeming too obvious and common sense.)
And I’m becoming increasingly convinced that another challenge comes from a totally separate reason that’s fiery enough for me to keep mum about for now. (Paid subscribers: maybe you’ll get a sneak-peek at this!)
But look: none of this is an excuse. To get Egan’s paradigm of education into practice, we have to figure out ways to communicate it clearly, and wonderfully.
My ACX book review of Egan’s magnum opus, The Educated Mind, was a twenty-thousand-word attempt to communicate it clearly, and I’m told by a number of people who worked with Egan that it does a good job of this!
Related: I just put up a page, here, on the book review — including links to it in multiple formats, so you can digest it easily.
But twenty-thousand words is oh-too much. We need to be able to express it powerfully standing on one foot.
Standing on one foot
In what might be the most famous story in the Talmud, a Gentile comes to troll the two greatest rabbis of the age. He vows that if either can teach him the whole Torah “while standing on one foot”, he’ll convert to Judaism.
The strict, revolution-fermenting Rabbi Shammai has no time for such nonsense and shoves him aside with a stick. The liberal, conciliatory Rabbi Hillel lifts a leg and says, “That which is hateful to you, do not do to others; this is the entire Torah, all the rest is elaboration. Now go and learn it.”
And the Gentile converts to Judaism, and everyone lives happily ever after.1
We need to craft ways to express Egan standing on one foot. And I prepped this interview hard — and I still think I don’t know how to give an elevator pitch for Egan.
Wanna help?
In the comments, I’d love any feedback you have of the interview. Stuff like:
what parts resonated with you?
what parts confused the heck out of you?
what questions do you have?
any advice for how I’m doing interviews? (not a thing I’ve trained for in the past)
In all this, I’m looking for your radically honest feedback.
And, final time, here’s the episode on Apple Podcasts, here it is on Spotify, here’s YouTube, and here it is on the web.
If you know a little about Jewish history in the Second Temple period, you’ll be able to taste the sarcasm in this conclusion. But actually the account cuts off with Hillel’s response — we’re not told if the Gentile actually converts. I find myself hoping yes, because adult circumcision ain’t a walk at the beach, and I don’t like trolls.
Since you asked for feedback, I listened to the podcast twice to think about what I could suggest.
I'll start with three main positives. First, your biggest strength is that you exude passion and enthusiasm for what you're discussing. You also shared one useful concrete strategy, to design your lessons around what feels most alive in your subject. And lastly, "re-humanizing education" is a much more accurate and vivid summary of Egan's ideas than "imaginative education", so kudos for coming up with that.
Your biggest weakness is that, for a podcast ostensibly about the power of storytelling, there weren't actually that many stories. I counted a total of three:
- Your initial discovery of Egan in the library
- The class that visited the Columbia River gorge
- The clip that Jeff found of Egan explaining why New Jersey is named after Julius Caesar
That last example is something you could easily have shared yourself. You promised that there's plenty of educational content that can be shared with kids in elementary school that is both deep and juicy. But then you didn't share a single example.
Shortly after that, Jeff cut in and inserted the clip of Egan, which illustrated your point perfectly. But next time you set yourself up like that, please share something juicy! It's the difference between talking about a feast and actually tasting it.
Also, when Jeff asked you to talk about the Egan-inspired school that you visited, you talked mostly about how lesson planning would be different. But I didn't get a picture in my head of what an Egan school would actually look like.
I think explaining Egan's ideas better is not what we need. We'll get there eventually, but you already did that pretty well in your book review.
What we're really missing are the stories. If Egan has taught us anything, it's that stories and myths are more important than rational explanations when we create a new culture. But we have hardly any stories so far, perhaps because there aren't many actual Egan schools out there.
Another approach to concentrating all of Egan’s work into one tart fruit punch, would be to follow Woody Allen’s Rabbi. When Woody asked him who was the greater man Abraham or Moses, the rabbi answered Abraham, with a good rationale. Woody replied, what about Moses, he did the 10 Commandments, and the rabbi said, OK, so Moses. I have been in a dance with Egan for years, wondering if he had any hidden consolidation of his philosophy. I had several nice email conversations with him, short but nice. Like you, I reread his work regularly. Recently, we redid our entire house and I reduced my hardcopy library from 2000 books to about 25 books. About four of them are by Kahn Egan. It would be fair to say that I shaped my career around his thinking, but I only came to it when I was in my 30s and viewed it all as a most welcome gift, a confirmation that I was not crazy. once I had read him I upped my game considerably. By the way, bravo to your blog.