I think the thing that resonates the most with me here is the random selection of a topic. Kids have such a poor understanding of how experience shapes their preference. They are under the impression that they can predict what will be boring to them. I think it’s total nonsense. It’s in the nature of the interesting aspects of things to be hidden. You can’t see what’s interesting about a thing before you start playing with it. The good stuff is always below the surface. You can’t see it. And if you only go into what you think you’ll enjoy, you never get to observe that you have no idea what will be interesting to you. You never get to learn how real learning is a real adventure, a real quest, with real surprises and real plot-twists. How I wish I could get my kids to grok that! Of course, this is quite in contrast with the follow-your-dream message they imbibe in the gallons from the surrounding culture. Tough sell.
E. D. Hirsch, in one or another of his curmudgeonly books, says that Educational Progressivism is just American Romantic philosophy at school, and more and more I agree with him! And I think that's what we're seeing with the push toward "follow your dreams" and "our job is to remove barriers so you can be independent".
That said, I *like* Romantic philosophy! I think it has its place in education, and Egan most certainly did. — cf. "Romantic Understanding". (Also, he think Coleridge and Wordsworth qualify among the greatest educational philosophers — see his lost chapter on the history of the imagination: http://ierg.ca/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/History-of-Imagination.pdf)
Anyhoo, I think that allowing kids to a good deal of choice in what they study really can result in wonderful things — LiD is actually built around a heck of a lot of freedom. Yet (of course) I'm in deep agreement with you that some of the joy of LiD is that there's no initial choice!
It suddenly occurs to me that I have no principled way of distinguishing what's "good" choice, and what's "bad".
I'm interested to know how LiD would have worked in the pre-internet world, which was presumably the one Egan designed it for. How would parents of average means in some small town got their child to be a world expert on apples?
I remember a time when, as a child, the extent of information available to me was what my parents and teachers knew, and what was in the papers and on TV when we watched it, and what books my town's library had. Sometimes we took a trip to the Big City and got to visit the bookshops and stock up on new sources of knowledge. What a different world where there's so much available online, for free - though getting wisdom out of mere information hasn't got that much easier.
In his LiD book, he actually listed as a potential objection "the internet will make this TOO easy". (I think he first conceived of LiD around 2008/9, when he was writing one of the fiction chapters of "The Future of Education"; "Learning in Depth" came out the next year.) I'm forgetting now how he ANSWERED it (I'll try to remember to look it up, and report back), but it's interesting that he thought that having the internet might be a bigger problem than NOT having the internet!
That's really interesting - there's certainly things the internet doesn't help with, like the attitude "why learn things when you can just look them up" (which sadly seems to have infected some teacher-training colleges as well) and the way so much of it is designed to grab your attention away from what you were originally doing.
I’ve been thinking about where I see this. One thing I like about Egan is that he seems to play to the natural strengths of children. I don’t know how much time you spend with littles these days, but they seem to always have A THING. This enthusiasm is one of the things I worry school will squash out of her. Older kids seem less likely to have A THING. Do you think this is a strength of kids that naturally wanes or is squashing it a school system failure?
I also think this is what grad school is like. For me anyway. Obviously I learned a lot, but I also think that experience made me a fundamentally better thinker. Which is all to say that this rings very true to me.
Ooo! Bologna! That’s my second favorite city in the world! If we do this in person, let’s meet there! (The university has a gorgeous old anatomy theatre for dissections with wooden statues showing muscle structure.)
Good luck with your experiment! I’m still wondering why LiD seemed to have been launched with considerable fanfare, but doesn’t appear to have gotten substantial traction. Hopefully you will have a better understanding of the potential and pitfalls after your Summer of Entrepreneurship. :-)
I think the thing that resonates the most with me here is the random selection of a topic. Kids have such a poor understanding of how experience shapes their preference. They are under the impression that they can predict what will be boring to them. I think it’s total nonsense. It’s in the nature of the interesting aspects of things to be hidden. You can’t see what’s interesting about a thing before you start playing with it. The good stuff is always below the surface. You can’t see it. And if you only go into what you think you’ll enjoy, you never get to observe that you have no idea what will be interesting to you. You never get to learn how real learning is a real adventure, a real quest, with real surprises and real plot-twists. How I wish I could get my kids to grok that! Of course, this is quite in contrast with the follow-your-dream message they imbibe in the gallons from the surrounding culture. Tough sell.
E. D. Hirsch, in one or another of his curmudgeonly books, says that Educational Progressivism is just American Romantic philosophy at school, and more and more I agree with him! And I think that's what we're seeing with the push toward "follow your dreams" and "our job is to remove barriers so you can be independent".
That said, I *like* Romantic philosophy! I think it has its place in education, and Egan most certainly did. — cf. "Romantic Understanding". (Also, he think Coleridge and Wordsworth qualify among the greatest educational philosophers — see his lost chapter on the history of the imagination: http://ierg.ca/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/History-of-Imagination.pdf)
Anyhoo, I think that allowing kids to a good deal of choice in what they study really can result in wonderful things — LiD is actually built around a heck of a lot of freedom. Yet (of course) I'm in deep agreement with you that some of the joy of LiD is that there's no initial choice!
It suddenly occurs to me that I have no principled way of distinguishing what's "good" choice, and what's "bad".
Thanks for the provocation!
I'm interested to know how LiD would have worked in the pre-internet world, which was presumably the one Egan designed it for. How would parents of average means in some small town got their child to be a world expert on apples?
I remember a time when, as a child, the extent of information available to me was what my parents and teachers knew, and what was in the papers and on TV when we watched it, and what books my town's library had. Sometimes we took a trip to the Big City and got to visit the bookshops and stock up on new sources of knowledge. What a different world where there's so much available online, for free - though getting wisdom out of mere information hasn't got that much easier.
In his LiD book, he actually listed as a potential objection "the internet will make this TOO easy". (I think he first conceived of LiD around 2008/9, when he was writing one of the fiction chapters of "The Future of Education"; "Learning in Depth" came out the next year.) I'm forgetting now how he ANSWERED it (I'll try to remember to look it up, and report back), but it's interesting that he thought that having the internet might be a bigger problem than NOT having the internet!
That's really interesting - there's certainly things the internet doesn't help with, like the attitude "why learn things when you can just look them up" (which sadly seems to have infected some teacher-training colleges as well) and the way so much of it is designed to grab your attention away from what you were originally doing.
I’ve been thinking about where I see this. One thing I like about Egan is that he seems to play to the natural strengths of children. I don’t know how much time you spend with littles these days, but they seem to always have A THING. This enthusiasm is one of the things I worry school will squash out of her. Older kids seem less likely to have A THING. Do you think this is a strength of kids that naturally wanes or is squashing it a school system failure?
I also think this is what grad school is like. For me anyway. Obviously I learned a lot, but I also think that experience made me a fundamentally better thinker. Which is all to say that this rings very true to me.
Ooo! Bologna! That’s my second favorite city in the world! If we do this in person, let’s meet there! (The university has a gorgeous old anatomy theatre for dissections with wooden statues showing muscle structure.)
hope at some point you can share your experience of doing "version of Learning in Depth — a year-long “Zoology in Depth” program at elementary school"
Good luck with your experiment! I’m still wondering why LiD seemed to have been launched with considerable fanfare, but doesn’t appear to have gotten substantial traction. Hopefully you will have a better understanding of the potential and pitfalls after your Summer of Entrepreneurship. :-)