The path from Egan’s theory to practice is unclear. Therefore:
1. Egan based practical advice / standards coalesce into different warring factions. There’s no clear winner and resources get wasted just trying to make the other guys look bad.
And / or
2. Egan based practical advice / standards are vague and undifferentiated from standard best practices. (Eg storytelling) Results are therefore ok, but not significantly different from the status quo.
----
Education, like parenting, doesn’t really matter. Once you get passed a low baseline (don’t abuse them!), kids will be who they will be.
It seems that Egan's ideas could work very well for teachers of smaller classes who are willing to adapt their curriculum to their students needs. In a larger classroom with a wide diversity of abilities, knowledge and interests, this gets much harder. In fact, I find managing this diversity the most consistently difficult and confounding issue I face as an experienced teacher.
Because Egan teachers ask students to engage more deeply with the material, at the level of meaning rather than at the level of output, it may be more difficult to pull in students who are simply seeking to learn relevant skills and go home.
What if Egan's methods distract from the true purpose of education? What if all the students attending after-school math tutorial, grinding standardized test results and making it into competitive universities are actually going to eat the world?
Geez I feel like Riker prosecuting Data in Measure of a Man...
Intuitively plausible failure modes off the top of my head:
-- You can't get enough qualified and motivated teachers, so you resort to teachers whose heart isn't really in it and/or who don't have the cognitive flexibility the role requires, and doing the Egan method with such teachers turns out to be worse than traditional results.
-- You do get enough teachers, but only by paying them so much that you have to charge exorbitant tuition even by private school standards. So your students tilt toward kids whose parents want the most expensive and "progressive" school possible for their kids as a status thing. Those parents aren't good partners for the approach and they instill too many psychological hangups in their kids for you to draw them into the Egan magic.
-- Or you get enough great teachers only by seeking out weirdos who would never survive in a traditional school. They have great skill and motivation, but their weirdness turns out to correlate with some other bit of nonconformist/antisocial behavior that is heavily socially disapproved (rightly or wrongly), and the bad publicity from this kills the project.
-- The teachers are great, the kids and parents are great, but the results are illegible: the students perform poorly on standardized tests, and the bad publicity from this kills the project before the longer-term advantages of the method become apparent.
-- You get bimodal results -- some students really thrive with this approach but others really don't -- and the bad publicity from the latter group outweighs the success of the former, because humans overfixate on negative news. Maybe, for example, the graduates disproportionately make great startup founders but are too bored or nonconformist to excel at "normal" jobs.
Here the initial brainstorming burst runs out. I will check back if I think of more.
"-- Or you get enough great teachers only by seeking out weirdos who would never survive in a traditional school. They have great skill and motivation, but their weirdness turns out to correlate with some other bit of nonconformist/antisocial behavior that is heavily socially disapproved (rightly or wrongly), and the bad publicity from this kills the project."
I think this is a good flag and I'll say explicitly that when you build a community around people who reject society's rules in *one* domain, you wind up with a higher risk of people who think society's rules should not bind them in regard to sex with minors.
Oct 29, 2023·edited Oct 29, 2023Liked by Brandon Hendrickson
I don't remember much about Egan in particular, as opposed to all of the other stuff about education I've read, although I did read your book reviews and have read all of your posts, but as an educator I see two obvious failure modes:
- I think the goal of turning everyone, or even a lot of people, into Socrates is not actually a good goal for society or humanity, optimizing for that sort of outcome is not my personal ideal, so having a whole school of kids that turn into little Socrates seems kind of wasteful to me...
- a devoted faculty is not the same thing as a brilliant faculty, and in education in particular, it is often the case that teachers mean well, but do not always implement things with the fidelity and skill required to actually make something work well from an educational standpoint, see also: all of the ways in which teaching something is basic as reading skills is going wrong even though we know that phonics is effective and have a multitude of excellent studies to that and. I forget who it was that wrote the article on Scott Alexander's blog about why we don't make a geniuses anymore, but I genuinely think that one of the difficulties with education is just putting bright kids with bright adults, and they're being too few bright adults hanging out with bright kids. I don't recall anything in particular about this educational methodology that will fix that fundamental modeling problem... Although I have not done a thorough relook through the literature before making this comment, this is just off the cuff and intended to help with your thought experiment.
I would like to add onto this point from Eleanor and also from Travis:
What if, when delivered to new, trainee teachers, Egan's theories are distilled down to: Teach interesting lessons! and a bunch of jargon about about binary opposites and embedding stories. I can easily see how Egan's programme could be drained of life in postgraduate education courses.
Another way of stating this is that it could be difficult to implement these theories without getting very good teachers. We needed Socrates to get Plato, but who taught Socrates? What if Egan's ideas wouldn't work well for inexperienced teachers and more talented and more experienced teachers have already internalized much of what he has to offer?
What age range are you envisioning this school going from/to? Unless it’s Pre-K through undergraduate college, you will have to put serious thought into how Eganized students transition from/into other more traditional schools. Also how they will deal with things like State required standardized tests. Even if the Eganized education is absolutely better in some metric, it won’t necessarily help if that leaves the kids at major disadvantage trying to transition to the next phase of their lives.
There is the opposite issue too! Is there going to be a cutoff age after which the school will not admit student who have not attended Egan before? Because one of the huge issues with the older classes at my kids' Montessori school is the influx of pre-teens and teens coming from traditional schooling and who have not been accostumated to Montessori style teaching. Imagine one person who has never had vocal coaching in a 20-person choir; there is going to be serious impact. Now imagine 5 of them.
Absolutely agreed. My son currently attends a Pre-K to 8th grade Montessori. Their strategy seems to start very Montessori when young, but then slowly transition in later years to something part way between that and traditional schools. E.g. 7-8 together vs three years together in a class, and more subject classes held at grade level. Also folding in of things like tests and quizzes, but none at younger grades.
I have read your blog, book review and Egan's "Deep Learning" apple article that you linked to. (BTW, your blog is utterly fantastic and has changed me.) I come here to criticize the idea of deep learning about a specific topic for everyone. First and foremost, the idea that a child can be assigned a random topic (e.g. "apples") and expect the child to have a sustained deep interest in everything connected to apples for 12 years is not plausible. It takes a certain mature perspective to see the rise and fall of the universe in the story of apples. Perhaps such a perspective could be sustained by unbelievably skilled tutoring by absolutely brilliant people. First that doesn't scale. Second, what would be sustaining the child's interest is not the apples per se but the presentation of the interconnected knowledge by brilliant tutors. An apple would simply be a reference point for all of the interconnections of existence. But the relevant locus isn't the apple but instead a way of viewing the world as grokkable, looking for cause and effect, and what one considers a good explanation.
As adults, we can see that an apple is connected to everything within 7 degrees of separation. But some of those lines of connection start to become forced. Do we show children the innovations of governance created by the Greeks in connection with apples? Sure a connection to Greek democracy in the graph of knowledge radiating out from apples exists, but the relevant locus isn't an apple, but is instead the exigencies of human existence and choosing our actions within a group of people.
For me, the most important thing to bury is the fine, finished product of knowledge that is presented to a student. Almost all of the curriculum is a presentation with what we "know" without an understanding of how we know it, how difficult it is to know something, or why someone was at some time interested in knowing it. What needs to be emphasized is how much of human existence is created by humans. Clock hands don't need to turn clockwise, nation states don't have to exist, 1+1 doesn't have to equal two.
So instead of deep learning about a specific random topic such as apples, I would like to see a curriculum designed around specific problems or questions that have occurred through out history. What do we eat and why? How do we live with other people? What is time? What is the world made of? Do a deep dive, whether weeks or months long on specific problems or questions. The goal would be to show a child that school isn't about receiving accepted knowledge, but instead to discuss interesting questions or problems that people face, how people have attempted to answer those questions in the past, the difficult process of answering those questions or solving those problems, and techniques discovered to do so. Above all, humanize everything.
-too hard to scale: bottlenecks both at the level of cultivating and training teachers + running classrooms large enough for parents to be able to afford the education through economy of scale. A lot of teaching breakthroughs don't port or scale to new environments, so this is kinda the outside view failure. But the open-ended, exploratory way you've described Egan schooling seems both great and hard to do with more than ~6 kids together?
-creates conflict over tracking/class divisions: I'm not as sure how you'd divide up students by ability/current mastery, but I definitely don't think that the current default of "everybody tries to move together by age" is very good. The trouble is that the default is treated as neutral, and rearranging students away from age and in a slightly trial by error way may spark hurt feelings (for students left "back") and competition (to move students forward for its own sake, not their good) that ultimately cause parents to fight and dissolve the school, even if it's working well.
-students succeed, parents don't like the result. A lot of alternative schools emphasize they still leave students prepared to succeed by conventional metrics (e.g. unschoolers do ok on standardized tests! this homeschooler got into Ivy League schools!). Egan's methods seem like they create learners with a taste for something other than what's on offer in the standard track, so students might "let down" their parents by stepping of the conventional success track (and it's easier for parents to say they don't care about that before it's a real concern).
A school cannot go horribly wrong based on the teaching paradigm. If you try to create a school based on a paradigm that reverses everything we know about how humans learn, you will at worst get a mediocre school with mediocre students. There will be no big disaster to point to. E.g. most of your students will learn to read even if you teach them reading in the worst possible way (see the whole language fiasco). (Education is largely glorified babysitting anyway, see e.g. The Case Against Education.)
So worst case, you will end up with a mediocre school with mediocre students. The fanatical pro-Egan-ists will p-hack the statistics until the school looks great on some carefully chosen metric. They won't be that convincing and the general trend will shift away from the idea.
Bacon said, "the subtlety of nature is greater many times over than the subtlety of argument." Feynman (probably paraphrasing Bacon) said, "the imagination of nature is far, far greater than the imagination of man." A pre-mortem is a worthy idea but nothing will be as illuminating as trying it (probably a very small pilot version; even just one lesson with one student!) and seeing what happens when the ideas interact with reality.
I have spent many, many hours trying to make sense of Egan's ideas. Criticism 1: I still don't grok it. Ok, but more seriously... (substack says "please type a shorter comment" so I will have to split my questions into replies).
On the last post I asked some questions about about the "kinds of understanding" (which I might paste below so those questions can also be addressed in future). More questions about the "kinds of understanding":
- Are there actually stages? I know others also think there are stages (e.g. Piaget, Montessori etc) so that might lend some credence to the idea, but the fact that no one can agree on what the stages are might also imply they don't actually exist? If there are stages, are they more a continuum? I think so (and I think you and Egan agree). Like the "mythic child" uses stories before they use jokes, the "romantic child" uses gossip before idealism?
- If there are stages, is there any evidence of the ordering of the "kinds of understanding"? You say "The fact that these come in a certain order in both individual kids and cultural history — Mythic, then Romantic, then Philosophic — stems from certain constraints (like the fact that it’s easier to learn to speak before we read, and that the latter kinds of understanding are helped along by the accumulation of knowledge)." You said in the video that it seems to be that you need reading and writing for the romantic tool kit, but I don't think that is true for some things in romantic, for example gossip. In fact, the list of Donald E Brown's human universals that you present in video 5 has gossip as a human universal but not reading or writing so gossip must have come before. By the way, the appendix you show in video 5 of "Education's Biggest Idea" is not, as you state, an appendix in Donald E Brown's book, rather, it is an appendix in a different book compiling universals from his book. Another example is hobbies and collections which I think at least anecdotally preliterate children/people sometimes do. When I look at some of the examples of how to teach children in the romantic stage, it seems like the methods would work for children in the mythic stage as well, e.g. "our study of earthworms may begin with the longest species, the fattest, the smallest" etc. or "the educational trick is to show the mathematics or the science or whatever as a product of ... someone’s extraordinary ingenuity, courage, treachery, compassion, and so on."
- Are the stages innate or do they need to be taught? You talk in the book review about how "teens are obsessed with gossip" and "they gravitate toward heroes" etc. And therefore we should use those things they already are attracted to to make subjects more meaningful. That all sounds reasonable, but on Wikipedia it says "Education, Egan argued, is the process of helping a student gain and wield these tools." Elsewhere Egan says about going from mythic to romantic "The tools of orality remain effective, but a whole new set develops along with literacy... [lots of examples] We need to help them exercise and exploit these tools." And wikipedia says the "tools can be helpfully grouped into five "cultural toolkits", which (excepting the first) don't develop 'naturally'." That seems to contradict using what kids are already good at and gravitate to. I will say that in the lesson plans I have seen, it looks like the tools are being used to teach content, not that the tools are actually being taught. I'm not sure I really even understand what it would mean to teach the tools - we give lessons on how to make collections and gossip? Wikipedia also says "there is no guarantee a person will gain all the toolkits — many people do not." But it seems like most people at least master romantic so does that mean that existing schools, as bad as they are, are teaching romantic without even trying?
- Why should I care about the stages when, as you say, "everyone uses some of these kinds of understanding, to at least a little extent, all the time. So even a preschool teacher has to be thinking about, say, how to bring out her students’ Philosophic understanding, even if only a little."
Questions about the triangle of socialization, academics and development:
In the second video workshop you did, you discussed a question I also had about why can't we jump between the different sides of the triangle at different times. Don't many schools already somewhat do that (e.g. the class where they learn Hamlet is more academic and the class where they learn life skills is more socialization)? You say "what Egan promises to do is not to jump us around but is to bring all of these together" and yet on p147 of The Future of Education when Egan is discussing future schools, he says "programs began by following a successful IE innovation in the previous decade, setting up a revised academic program in the mornings and a new kind of socializing program, including a revised Social Studies curriculum, and job preparation in the afternoons." (for those not familiar, IE = imaginative education, i.e. based on Egan's ideas). So it sounds like he did imagine his schools would also jump around.
I also feel that when you describe Egan's solution to the triangle problem, you change the definition of socialization. When you state the problem, you say "A school built on the socialization model will mold students to fit into the roles of society". Later, you say Egan fulfills socialization by having a "connection to the rest of humanity" (in the blog) and that students are "being socialized by, you know cavemen, by Romantic Poets, by Socrates" (in video 5). I do not think that sort of socialization will meet the goals for those who want young people to fit into their current society.
Another nitpick: in the first video, a lot of viewers answered that one of the purposes of school today seems to be "babysitting" and I don't think that fits into any of the three corners.
Questions about the "kinds of understanding" - what is their practical application?
Suppose you had two schools with amazing teachers who are going to teach in a new way. School 1 is based on all of Egan's ideas. School 2 is based on the "tools" (e.g. stories, jokes, gossip etc - all of the things that are "inside" Egan's "kinds of understanding"). All teachers in the schools are given examples and ideas about how to apply the ideas, including when they are most likely to be effective e.g. "metaphors work particularly well with students in the age range X-Y". So, what is the difference between the teaching you would see in school 1 vs 2? Is there any difference in the outcomes? What does knowing about mythic, romantic etc. add?
Next up, criticisms of the idea that students should be given a topic in first grade to study in a relatively self-directed way for the next 12 years as discussed in the Learning in Depth PDF and in book The Future of Education. Again I do actually like some of the general principles behind this idea but I think there are problems with what Egan wrote in that document.
- Egan asserts "It hones skills that transfer to learning in other content areas" but transfer has been widely studied and has proved elusive. It seems unlikely there would be transfer in this case either.
- I think the outcomes are way too optimistic: "Each student, by the end of his or her schooling, would know as much about that topic as almost anyone on earth." I can't find where it says how much time students would spend on their topic, but if I assume two hours per week, 36 weeks a year for 12 years, that's 864 hours which seems like way too little time to become an expert. Not to mention, if plenty of other students in the world are also studying their topic (e.g. the girl studying apples knew someone else who was also studying apples), the bar to being an expert would be higher.
- I see some advantages to keeping the same topic for 12 years, and I understand that you/Egan think anything can be taught to children of any age, but I still don't see a 6 year old being given a topic like WWII. Or plenty of other things that older teenagers might find interesting like say, Austrian Economics or if Egan's ideas for fixing education would work.
- "A dozen or so schools in the Vancouver, British Columbia, area have expressed interest in learning in depth. Several are preparing their staffs for a pilot project slated to begin in 2009." Is there a follow up?
- As a side point, Egan says "Instead of simply introducing students at a superficial level to the vast encyclopedia of human knowledge that constitutes the current curriculum—of which, depressingly, students retain so little when they leave grade 12—the school would become a repository of expertise." Is he suggesting that students would retain what they learn in their portfolios? That because Sara looked up where Kazakhstan was in first grade she will remember that when she leaves school? If so, that sounds amazing, so why not do that for everything we want students to remember?
And I also have some concerns that others have mentioned. Not all kids are curious enough. It will take too much extra time to teach. It is too much work for the teachers (a quote from a pretend teacher in The Future of Education "often I had to spend hours searching for more information about topics. It wasn’t that I was going to teach it all to children, but I had to do it sometimes to find out what were the most potent oppositions and images and metaphors to grab"). But I have already written far too much so I will leave those observations to others.
Next up, do the tools live up to their promise? Aren't there other effective ways of learning things too?:
- In An Imaginative Approach to Teaching, Egan is having a conversation with a teacher who asks "you’re saying that if I [the teacher] can’t get emotionally turned on by fractions or punctuation, I can’t teach them successfully?" and Egan answers "Well, you may be successful in that you will get students to learn the material adequately to pass tests, but, yes, I am saying that you will likely be unable to engage the students’ imaginations in the comma, and they won’t remember it long and it will have no real meaning for them." but is there actually evidence that they will remember it longer if it is taught his way? In The Future of Education, Egan gives an example "Do you know what state in the U.S. is named for Julius Caesar? ...[story and spoilers] What is it about such puzzles that engages our interest? And why, if you didn’t already know the answer, will you remember it forever?" Alas, I first read that a few months ago and when I read it again yesterday I had no memory of it. I do think that some of the stories, riddles etc can help people learn and remember, but sometimes they could also distract, cause people to focus on the wrong thing, or miss what is supposed to have been learnt entirely - the extra stories and riddles do use up working memory as well after all.
- Egan asserts that when educating, we must "tie the facts and skills to their deeper meaning in human experience" and "To bring knowledge to life in students’ minds we must introduce it to students in the context of the human hopes, fears, and passions in which it finds its fullest meaning.". But I think I've learnt plenty of things without any deep human meaning. For example I learn how to progress in video games. A friend might tell me about something they are interested in and I learn about it just because of my connection to them. I learn how to do some household repairs because they will make my life more comfortable. If we assume that a student understands how multiplication works and why it might be used and you also assume that knowing some times tables by heart is useful, I think using a "gimmick game" to do the repetition to reach fluency is fine.
- Egan presents a plan for how to teach the science topic of heat, and suggests using the binary of helper/destroyer. He suggests some stories etc and so far this seems fine. Then he says "There are now a thousand lesson plans available on the Internet, any of which will suggest experiments teachers can perform to enhance students’ understanding of heat. They can easily be incorporated into this unit, as long as each of them is presented as building on the theme of helper/destroyer. Usually they will work best if associated with one of the powerful stories with which the lesson began. In the process of moving from these initiating stories, students will learn that heat is a form of energy that moves from hot objects to cold ones, along with all the other usual information typically dealt with in such a unit, including debunking the common misconceptions about heat (sweaters are warm, and the like)." I just don't understand why the experiments must build on the theme of helper/destroyer. So we want students to know that heat is a form of energy that moves from hot objects to cold ones. We show a demonstration (experiment) using real objects in the real world to show this, and typically such demonstrations are already engaging for students. That also seems fine, and tying that back to the theme of helper/destroyer feels like it would just confuse or water down any learning that might have occurred during the demonstration.
Just to be clear, I think tools like stories, riddles etc can absolutely help students learn a lot of the time, but perhaps their usefulness has been overstated or they may sometimes be counterproductive. Perhaps students learn best when they are engaged with what they are learning, and having what they are learning be meaningful is one way of being engaging but not the only way. Which brings me to...
There are already lots of resources that make learning various things more engaging, or more fun, and plenty of them use at least some of Egan's tools. This is not exactly a criticism but a few questions arise such as why don't schools already use these more engaging resources (or do they)? If they did, would that solve most of the same problems that Egan is trying to solve (I think there are some homeschools/experimental schools that do try to use these resources so what can we learn from them)? What is wrong (from an Eganian perspective) with these engaging resources that do not use Egan's tools? There are way too many resources to list, but I will just give some examples. Some of these resources I thought of when I was reading Egan's suggestion of how to teach "to", "too" and "two" by personifying them. There are grammar resources that personify parts of speech e.g. Nesbitt's Grammar Land (1878), or The Sentence Family by James Hughes. Michael Clay Thompson's language arts curriculum uses the story of Mud trying to learn parts of speech in an engaging way. A bunch of Isaac Asimov's How Did We Find Out books embody Egan's ideas of telling the story of how things were discovered and how it mattered to the people who made the discoveries, for example How Did We Find Out the Earth Is Round. Hoffman Academy's free piano video lessons use stories, for example lesson 4 has a story involving a dog house to teach where D is on the piano. Video games like Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego, Math Blaster, Oregon Trail or Kerbal Space Program made learning engaging, though perhaps not all using Egan's tools. TV shows like The Magic School Bus. Basically all the "living books" that various Charlotte Mason homeschoolers use (note that almost none of those books were written for schools or even homeschoolers). Some actual courses on coursera or The Great Courses (The Teaching Company/Wondrium) that have been taught by great teachers.
For background, I have read all of this substack, your ACX book review (and comments), Egan's The Future of Education, some of An Imaginative Approach to Teaching, the Learning in Depth PDF and some of his posts on the ImaginED blog. I am naturally skeptical and have so many questions it could probably be it's own blog post but I'm going to try asking them inline here even though they are mostly not specifically about this post.
--disastrous failure is much less likely than descent into mediocrity. A lot of big ideas about education are tried around the world, but the successful ones get lucky with their combination of teachers, students, parents, and community. The first Egan schools will get those right from selection, the later ones will regress to a lower mean, and at some point the average Egan school is not better than the average school.
--Higher education pipeline problem: how do you transform the kind of people self-selected into ed degrees into Egan-loving, cultural-cognitive cognizant teachers? Perhaps you can steal some folks with philosophy degrees and get them to teach, but it seems that most teachers are not ready to spend the time to rack their brains around Egan.
The key structural issue is probably - do teachers really ‘get’ Egan’s approach; can we pull them out of the autopilot mode on an ongoing basis?
> Are teachers consistently mindful enough to take the right teaching approach for new or existing material?
> Will they not fall back to their interpretation or version of Egan, or make their own? Will they claim they ‘get’ Egan, and then still do their thing?
> Can they moderate discussions on a day to day basis in line with Egan’s approach?
> In really practical terms now, do they choose the right language to speak with pupils?
> Also, are they honest and open enough to regularly challenge themselves - and can we ensure there is an independent review (by people that also ‘get’ Egan)?
I can't think right now of particular things that apply to Egan's (since I know so very little), but I would certainly take a look at other approaches - Waldorf, Montessori, Escola da Ponte - and look at their schools and think "hm, how does this go wrong?". For an example, Montessori schools are rarely, purely Montessori and the add-ons are often contrary to the ideas of Maria Montessori.
Another issue is: "how do we train teachers (and school staff in general) for Egan?" The thing is - we were definitely not raised under that worldview, so we carry lots of bugs in our learning and teaching approach.
Of course, regulations and government overview can kill any project by demanding a standard curriculum, for an example - so, that would be a pretty big hurdle in many countries.
But none of these issues are specific to Egan's. Let me think some more... since people's interests are varied, we would have teachers dealing with all sorts of knowledge pools and trenches, but I think current technology and ability to incentivate students' research abilities got that covered.
Hmm... does Egan discusses and explores the whole neurodiversity thing? What about kids with reduced cognitive abilities? How inclusive would an Egan school be?
Ah, speaking of that, how exactly would an Egan classroom look like, particulary for middle (?) and high (?) school? I mean, teenagers. Sure, current school is boring, but even when it's not, they are pretty distractable with their social interactions. How would Egan engage those students with learning, how would you create a space for them to learn without being distracted by their peers (a major problem in my older son's class, he's 13 at a Montessori school)?
What would be the school hours? Would our students lunch together, form a sense of community? Did Egan consider that? How does personal interests interact with school curriculum? There is only so much one can get into one's head during a day and what do we prioritize - personal interests or general schooling? If our students are following their curiosity, wouldn't it be hard for the class to hold discussion on certain topics? That staff, even if motivated and funded, how many would we need? How do these teachers (or whatever their title is) discuss issues and incorporate new discoveries (or fads) in psychology, neuroscience, schooling in general, technology? Maybe the school would un-Egan-ize itself, maybe it would become too attached to what's written on the books, unable to extrapolate.
Ok, I wrote a lot, I don't think much of this is helpful for your exercise, but maybe some of these questions lead to new posts further exploring Egan's outlook.
Being the devil's advocate here, but I do worry sometimes that in an attempt to make education much more open ended and generalist, we're both setting kids up for a big disappointment when they discover that super narrow skillsets in the right domains are much more marketable, and setting society up for failure as we lose those super narrowly skilled people that keep the engines running.
The failure mode I am most curious about: can you maintain cohesion if you START from the Egan-esque premise that teachers do NOT have all the right answers.
As a serial reformer, I am periodically shocked by how often easily-falsifiable beliefs are actually central to an individual or group’s self-image. I am very eager to see if you can find a leadership style and culture that doesn’t require you (or the teachers) to have to be “right.”
I mostly have questions. My understanding of Egan is that it is a set of tools to make instruction engaging and intrinsically motivating. (You do this very well, BTW.) Let's take for granted that I 100% agree with all of Egan's ideas on how to create these lessons so kids of any age will want to pay attention and learn.
Where I am lost is what comes next. What percentage of classroom time is to be spent on these wonderful lessons? What percentage of time is to be spent on the kids DOING something besides talking? In my very short classroom experience, it doesn't really matter how connected and focused the students are when I am their leader guiding them deftly through the intricacies of a complex idea, as soon as I set them off on their own, they are still completely lost. What seems to be more effective, at least when the end goal is a standardized test that one could argue is demonstrating their readiness for college, is to give them one engaging lesson followed by 4 days of letting them practice and create on their own while gradually reducing the level of scaffolding offered based on the individual level of each student.
What sort of "work" does Egan envision students producing? I get that there is a lot of discussion happening, but does he want them to create anything? If so, does he want them to have freedom to choose what they do or is the assignment prescribed? What if they don't want to do it? Does he believe in grades? Exams? Is he worried that if there are prescribed assignments/tests/grades that it will lower instrinsic motivation? If he doesn't believe in those things and wants to give students more freedom, is he worried that students will choose the easiest path and won't be ready for college level classes?
I'm really curious what an Egan unit would look like from the engaging instruction plus discussion, through practicing concepts with reduced levels of assistance, through demonstration of mastery. My concern would be that you would start with a motivating lesson to a class of 30 high school kids and immediately lose 3 due to language barriers (I live in CA). You would likely lose another 2 due to teenage apathy and their refusal to take out their ear buds. By the time you made it to the practice stage, you would realize that there are at least 6 students who have slipped through the cracks and either have learning disabilities or for whatever reason are missing some fundamental knowledge and skills. They nodded along happily through your engaging lesson, but don't actually have some crucial pieces of information needed to put that new knowledge to use. A couple days later, you would lose another 5, because no matter how hard they try, their memories are failing them and everything starts getting jumbled together. By the time you reach the demonstrating mastery stage, you will realize another 4 have the most disorganized brains you have ever seen and while they might speak brilliantly, when they try to put their thoughts onto paper, it becomes a garbled mess. So you started with 30 and you are left with a shining 10 who are exceling beyond your wildest dreams, but one might argue that those 10 were going to shine no matter where you put them. You know, just hypothetically.
The path from Egan’s theory to practice is unclear. Therefore:
1. Egan based practical advice / standards coalesce into different warring factions. There’s no clear winner and resources get wasted just trying to make the other guys look bad.
And / or
2. Egan based practical advice / standards are vague and undifferentiated from standard best practices. (Eg storytelling) Results are therefore ok, but not significantly different from the status quo.
----
Education, like parenting, doesn’t really matter. Once you get passed a low baseline (don’t abuse them!), kids will be who they will be.
What if it doesn't scale?
It seems that Egan's ideas could work very well for teachers of smaller classes who are willing to adapt their curriculum to their students needs. In a larger classroom with a wide diversity of abilities, knowledge and interests, this gets much harder. In fact, I find managing this diversity the most consistently difficult and confounding issue I face as an experienced teacher.
Because Egan teachers ask students to engage more deeply with the material, at the level of meaning rather than at the level of output, it may be more difficult to pull in students who are simply seeking to learn relevant skills and go home.
What if Egan's methods distract from the true purpose of education? What if all the students attending after-school math tutorial, grinding standardized test results and making it into competitive universities are actually going to eat the world?
Geez I feel like Riker prosecuting Data in Measure of a Man...
Intuitively plausible failure modes off the top of my head:
-- You can't get enough qualified and motivated teachers, so you resort to teachers whose heart isn't really in it and/or who don't have the cognitive flexibility the role requires, and doing the Egan method with such teachers turns out to be worse than traditional results.
-- You do get enough teachers, but only by paying them so much that you have to charge exorbitant tuition even by private school standards. So your students tilt toward kids whose parents want the most expensive and "progressive" school possible for their kids as a status thing. Those parents aren't good partners for the approach and they instill too many psychological hangups in their kids for you to draw them into the Egan magic.
-- Or you get enough great teachers only by seeking out weirdos who would never survive in a traditional school. They have great skill and motivation, but their weirdness turns out to correlate with some other bit of nonconformist/antisocial behavior that is heavily socially disapproved (rightly or wrongly), and the bad publicity from this kills the project.
-- The teachers are great, the kids and parents are great, but the results are illegible: the students perform poorly on standardized tests, and the bad publicity from this kills the project before the longer-term advantages of the method become apparent.
-- You get bimodal results -- some students really thrive with this approach but others really don't -- and the bad publicity from the latter group outweighs the success of the former, because humans overfixate on negative news. Maybe, for example, the graduates disproportionately make great startup founders but are too bored or nonconformist to excel at "normal" jobs.
Here the initial brainstorming burst runs out. I will check back if I think of more.
"-- Or you get enough great teachers only by seeking out weirdos who would never survive in a traditional school. They have great skill and motivation, but their weirdness turns out to correlate with some other bit of nonconformist/antisocial behavior that is heavily socially disapproved (rightly or wrongly), and the bad publicity from this kills the project."
I think this is a good flag and I'll say explicitly that when you build a community around people who reject society's rules in *one* domain, you wind up with a higher risk of people who think society's rules should not bind them in regard to sex with minors.
I don't remember much about Egan in particular, as opposed to all of the other stuff about education I've read, although I did read your book reviews and have read all of your posts, but as an educator I see two obvious failure modes:
- I think the goal of turning everyone, or even a lot of people, into Socrates is not actually a good goal for society or humanity, optimizing for that sort of outcome is not my personal ideal, so having a whole school of kids that turn into little Socrates seems kind of wasteful to me...
- a devoted faculty is not the same thing as a brilliant faculty, and in education in particular, it is often the case that teachers mean well, but do not always implement things with the fidelity and skill required to actually make something work well from an educational standpoint, see also: all of the ways in which teaching something is basic as reading skills is going wrong even though we know that phonics is effective and have a multitude of excellent studies to that and. I forget who it was that wrote the article on Scott Alexander's blog about why we don't make a geniuses anymore, but I genuinely think that one of the difficulties with education is just putting bright kids with bright adults, and they're being too few bright adults hanging out with bright kids. I don't recall anything in particular about this educational methodology that will fix that fundamental modeling problem... Although I have not done a thorough relook through the literature before making this comment, this is just off the cuff and intended to help with your thought experiment.
I would like to add onto this point from Eleanor and also from Travis:
What if, when delivered to new, trainee teachers, Egan's theories are distilled down to: Teach interesting lessons! and a bunch of jargon about about binary opposites and embedding stories. I can easily see how Egan's programme could be drained of life in postgraduate education courses.
Another way of stating this is that it could be difficult to implement these theories without getting very good teachers. We needed Socrates to get Plato, but who taught Socrates? What if Egan's ideas wouldn't work well for inexperienced teachers and more talented and more experienced teachers have already internalized much of what he has to offer?
What age range are you envisioning this school going from/to? Unless it’s Pre-K through undergraduate college, you will have to put serious thought into how Eganized students transition from/into other more traditional schools. Also how they will deal with things like State required standardized tests. Even if the Eganized education is absolutely better in some metric, it won’t necessarily help if that leaves the kids at major disadvantage trying to transition to the next phase of their lives.
There is the opposite issue too! Is there going to be a cutoff age after which the school will not admit student who have not attended Egan before? Because one of the huge issues with the older classes at my kids' Montessori school is the influx of pre-teens and teens coming from traditional schooling and who have not been accostumated to Montessori style teaching. Imagine one person who has never had vocal coaching in a 20-person choir; there is going to be serious impact. Now imagine 5 of them.
This is a good point, and also an issue with other types of schooling like Montessori.
Absolutely agreed. My son currently attends a Pre-K to 8th grade Montessori. Their strategy seems to start very Montessori when young, but then slowly transition in later years to something part way between that and traditional schools. E.g. 7-8 together vs three years together in a class, and more subject classes held at grade level. Also folding in of things like tests and quizzes, but none at younger grades.
I have read your blog, book review and Egan's "Deep Learning" apple article that you linked to. (BTW, your blog is utterly fantastic and has changed me.) I come here to criticize the idea of deep learning about a specific topic for everyone. First and foremost, the idea that a child can be assigned a random topic (e.g. "apples") and expect the child to have a sustained deep interest in everything connected to apples for 12 years is not plausible. It takes a certain mature perspective to see the rise and fall of the universe in the story of apples. Perhaps such a perspective could be sustained by unbelievably skilled tutoring by absolutely brilliant people. First that doesn't scale. Second, what would be sustaining the child's interest is not the apples per se but the presentation of the interconnected knowledge by brilliant tutors. An apple would simply be a reference point for all of the interconnections of existence. But the relevant locus isn't the apple but instead a way of viewing the world as grokkable, looking for cause and effect, and what one considers a good explanation.
As adults, we can see that an apple is connected to everything within 7 degrees of separation. But some of those lines of connection start to become forced. Do we show children the innovations of governance created by the Greeks in connection with apples? Sure a connection to Greek democracy in the graph of knowledge radiating out from apples exists, but the relevant locus isn't an apple, but is instead the exigencies of human existence and choosing our actions within a group of people.
For me, the most important thing to bury is the fine, finished product of knowledge that is presented to a student. Almost all of the curriculum is a presentation with what we "know" without an understanding of how we know it, how difficult it is to know something, or why someone was at some time interested in knowing it. What needs to be emphasized is how much of human existence is created by humans. Clock hands don't need to turn clockwise, nation states don't have to exist, 1+1 doesn't have to equal two.
So instead of deep learning about a specific random topic such as apples, I would like to see a curriculum designed around specific problems or questions that have occurred through out history. What do we eat and why? How do we live with other people? What is time? What is the world made of? Do a deep dive, whether weeks or months long on specific problems or questions. The goal would be to show a child that school isn't about receiving accepted knowledge, but instead to discuss interesting questions or problems that people face, how people have attempted to answer those questions in the past, the difficult process of answering those questions or solving those problems, and techniques discovered to do so. Above all, humanize everything.
A couple brief, only lightly informed ideas:
-too hard to scale: bottlenecks both at the level of cultivating and training teachers + running classrooms large enough for parents to be able to afford the education through economy of scale. A lot of teaching breakthroughs don't port or scale to new environments, so this is kinda the outside view failure. But the open-ended, exploratory way you've described Egan schooling seems both great and hard to do with more than ~6 kids together?
-creates conflict over tracking/class divisions: I'm not as sure how you'd divide up students by ability/current mastery, but I definitely don't think that the current default of "everybody tries to move together by age" is very good. The trouble is that the default is treated as neutral, and rearranging students away from age and in a slightly trial by error way may spark hurt feelings (for students left "back") and competition (to move students forward for its own sake, not their good) that ultimately cause parents to fight and dissolve the school, even if it's working well.
-students succeed, parents don't like the result. A lot of alternative schools emphasize they still leave students prepared to succeed by conventional metrics (e.g. unschoolers do ok on standardized tests! this homeschooler got into Ivy League schools!). Egan's methods seem like they create learners with a taste for something other than what's on offer in the standard track, so students might "let down" their parents by stepping of the conventional success track (and it's easier for parents to say they don't care about that before it's a real concern).
A school cannot go horribly wrong based on the teaching paradigm. If you try to create a school based on a paradigm that reverses everything we know about how humans learn, you will at worst get a mediocre school with mediocre students. There will be no big disaster to point to. E.g. most of your students will learn to read even if you teach them reading in the worst possible way (see the whole language fiasco). (Education is largely glorified babysitting anyway, see e.g. The Case Against Education.)
So worst case, you will end up with a mediocre school with mediocre students. The fanatical pro-Egan-ists will p-hack the statistics until the school looks great on some carefully chosen metric. They won't be that convincing and the general trend will shift away from the idea.
Bacon said, "the subtlety of nature is greater many times over than the subtlety of argument." Feynman (probably paraphrasing Bacon) said, "the imagination of nature is far, far greater than the imagination of man." A pre-mortem is a worthy idea but nothing will be as illuminating as trying it (probably a very small pilot version; even just one lesson with one student!) and seeing what happens when the ideas interact with reality.
I have spent many, many hours trying to make sense of Egan's ideas. Criticism 1: I still don't grok it. Ok, but more seriously... (substack says "please type a shorter comment" so I will have to split my questions into replies).
On the last post I asked some questions about about the "kinds of understanding" (which I might paste below so those questions can also be addressed in future). More questions about the "kinds of understanding":
- Are there actually stages? I know others also think there are stages (e.g. Piaget, Montessori etc) so that might lend some credence to the idea, but the fact that no one can agree on what the stages are might also imply they don't actually exist? If there are stages, are they more a continuum? I think so (and I think you and Egan agree). Like the "mythic child" uses stories before they use jokes, the "romantic child" uses gossip before idealism?
- If there are stages, is there any evidence of the ordering of the "kinds of understanding"? You say "The fact that these come in a certain order in both individual kids and cultural history — Mythic, then Romantic, then Philosophic — stems from certain constraints (like the fact that it’s easier to learn to speak before we read, and that the latter kinds of understanding are helped along by the accumulation of knowledge)." You said in the video that it seems to be that you need reading and writing for the romantic tool kit, but I don't think that is true for some things in romantic, for example gossip. In fact, the list of Donald E Brown's human universals that you present in video 5 has gossip as a human universal but not reading or writing so gossip must have come before. By the way, the appendix you show in video 5 of "Education's Biggest Idea" is not, as you state, an appendix in Donald E Brown's book, rather, it is an appendix in a different book compiling universals from his book. Another example is hobbies and collections which I think at least anecdotally preliterate children/people sometimes do. When I look at some of the examples of how to teach children in the romantic stage, it seems like the methods would work for children in the mythic stage as well, e.g. "our study of earthworms may begin with the longest species, the fattest, the smallest" etc. or "the educational trick is to show the mathematics or the science or whatever as a product of ... someone’s extraordinary ingenuity, courage, treachery, compassion, and so on."
- Are the stages innate or do they need to be taught? You talk in the book review about how "teens are obsessed with gossip" and "they gravitate toward heroes" etc. And therefore we should use those things they already are attracted to to make subjects more meaningful. That all sounds reasonable, but on Wikipedia it says "Education, Egan argued, is the process of helping a student gain and wield these tools." Elsewhere Egan says about going from mythic to romantic "The tools of orality remain effective, but a whole new set develops along with literacy... [lots of examples] We need to help them exercise and exploit these tools." And wikipedia says the "tools can be helpfully grouped into five "cultural toolkits", which (excepting the first) don't develop 'naturally'." That seems to contradict using what kids are already good at and gravitate to. I will say that in the lesson plans I have seen, it looks like the tools are being used to teach content, not that the tools are actually being taught. I'm not sure I really even understand what it would mean to teach the tools - we give lessons on how to make collections and gossip? Wikipedia also says "there is no guarantee a person will gain all the toolkits — many people do not." But it seems like most people at least master romantic so does that mean that existing schools, as bad as they are, are teaching romantic without even trying?
- Why should I care about the stages when, as you say, "everyone uses some of these kinds of understanding, to at least a little extent, all the time. So even a preschool teacher has to be thinking about, say, how to bring out her students’ Philosophic understanding, even if only a little."
(copied from the last blog post)
Questions about the triangle of socialization, academics and development:
In the second video workshop you did, you discussed a question I also had about why can't we jump between the different sides of the triangle at different times. Don't many schools already somewhat do that (e.g. the class where they learn Hamlet is more academic and the class where they learn life skills is more socialization)? You say "what Egan promises to do is not to jump us around but is to bring all of these together" and yet on p147 of The Future of Education when Egan is discussing future schools, he says "programs began by following a successful IE innovation in the previous decade, setting up a revised academic program in the mornings and a new kind of socializing program, including a revised Social Studies curriculum, and job preparation in the afternoons." (for those not familiar, IE = imaginative education, i.e. based on Egan's ideas). So it sounds like he did imagine his schools would also jump around.
I also feel that when you describe Egan's solution to the triangle problem, you change the definition of socialization. When you state the problem, you say "A school built on the socialization model will mold students to fit into the roles of society". Later, you say Egan fulfills socialization by having a "connection to the rest of humanity" (in the blog) and that students are "being socialized by, you know cavemen, by Romantic Poets, by Socrates" (in video 5). I do not think that sort of socialization will meet the goals for those who want young people to fit into their current society.
Another nitpick: in the first video, a lot of viewers answered that one of the purposes of school today seems to be "babysitting" and I don't think that fits into any of the three corners.
Questions about the "kinds of understanding" - what is their practical application?
Suppose you had two schools with amazing teachers who are going to teach in a new way. School 1 is based on all of Egan's ideas. School 2 is based on the "tools" (e.g. stories, jokes, gossip etc - all of the things that are "inside" Egan's "kinds of understanding"). All teachers in the schools are given examples and ideas about how to apply the ideas, including when they are most likely to be effective e.g. "metaphors work particularly well with students in the age range X-Y". So, what is the difference between the teaching you would see in school 1 vs 2? Is there any difference in the outcomes? What does knowing about mythic, romantic etc. add?
Next up, criticisms of the idea that students should be given a topic in first grade to study in a relatively self-directed way for the next 12 years as discussed in the Learning in Depth PDF and in book The Future of Education. Again I do actually like some of the general principles behind this idea but I think there are problems with what Egan wrote in that document.
- Egan asserts "It hones skills that transfer to learning in other content areas" but transfer has been widely studied and has proved elusive. It seems unlikely there would be transfer in this case either.
- I think the outcomes are way too optimistic: "Each student, by the end of his or her schooling, would know as much about that topic as almost anyone on earth." I can't find where it says how much time students would spend on their topic, but if I assume two hours per week, 36 weeks a year for 12 years, that's 864 hours which seems like way too little time to become an expert. Not to mention, if plenty of other students in the world are also studying their topic (e.g. the girl studying apples knew someone else who was also studying apples), the bar to being an expert would be higher.
- I see some advantages to keeping the same topic for 12 years, and I understand that you/Egan think anything can be taught to children of any age, but I still don't see a 6 year old being given a topic like WWII. Or plenty of other things that older teenagers might find interesting like say, Austrian Economics or if Egan's ideas for fixing education would work.
- "A dozen or so schools in the Vancouver, British Columbia, area have expressed interest in learning in depth. Several are preparing their staffs for a pilot project slated to begin in 2009." Is there a follow up?
- As a side point, Egan says "Instead of simply introducing students at a superficial level to the vast encyclopedia of human knowledge that constitutes the current curriculum—of which, depressingly, students retain so little when they leave grade 12—the school would become a repository of expertise." Is he suggesting that students would retain what they learn in their portfolios? That because Sara looked up where Kazakhstan was in first grade she will remember that when she leaves school? If so, that sounds amazing, so why not do that for everything we want students to remember?
And I also have some concerns that others have mentioned. Not all kids are curious enough. It will take too much extra time to teach. It is too much work for the teachers (a quote from a pretend teacher in The Future of Education "often I had to spend hours searching for more information about topics. It wasn’t that I was going to teach it all to children, but I had to do it sometimes to find out what were the most potent oppositions and images and metaphors to grab"). But I have already written far too much so I will leave those observations to others.
Next up, do the tools live up to their promise? Aren't there other effective ways of learning things too?:
- In An Imaginative Approach to Teaching, Egan is having a conversation with a teacher who asks "you’re saying that if I [the teacher] can’t get emotionally turned on by fractions or punctuation, I can’t teach them successfully?" and Egan answers "Well, you may be successful in that you will get students to learn the material adequately to pass tests, but, yes, I am saying that you will likely be unable to engage the students’ imaginations in the comma, and they won’t remember it long and it will have no real meaning for them." but is there actually evidence that they will remember it longer if it is taught his way? In The Future of Education, Egan gives an example "Do you know what state in the U.S. is named for Julius Caesar? ...[story and spoilers] What is it about such puzzles that engages our interest? And why, if you didn’t already know the answer, will you remember it forever?" Alas, I first read that a few months ago and when I read it again yesterday I had no memory of it. I do think that some of the stories, riddles etc can help people learn and remember, but sometimes they could also distract, cause people to focus on the wrong thing, or miss what is supposed to have been learnt entirely - the extra stories and riddles do use up working memory as well after all.
- Egan asserts that when educating, we must "tie the facts and skills to their deeper meaning in human experience" and "To bring knowledge to life in students’ minds we must introduce it to students in the context of the human hopes, fears, and passions in which it finds its fullest meaning.". But I think I've learnt plenty of things without any deep human meaning. For example I learn how to progress in video games. A friend might tell me about something they are interested in and I learn about it just because of my connection to them. I learn how to do some household repairs because they will make my life more comfortable. If we assume that a student understands how multiplication works and why it might be used and you also assume that knowing some times tables by heart is useful, I think using a "gimmick game" to do the repetition to reach fluency is fine.
- Egan presents a plan for how to teach the science topic of heat, and suggests using the binary of helper/destroyer. He suggests some stories etc and so far this seems fine. Then he says "There are now a thousand lesson plans available on the Internet, any of which will suggest experiments teachers can perform to enhance students’ understanding of heat. They can easily be incorporated into this unit, as long as each of them is presented as building on the theme of helper/destroyer. Usually they will work best if associated with one of the powerful stories with which the lesson began. In the process of moving from these initiating stories, students will learn that heat is a form of energy that moves from hot objects to cold ones, along with all the other usual information typically dealt with in such a unit, including debunking the common misconceptions about heat (sweaters are warm, and the like)." I just don't understand why the experiments must build on the theme of helper/destroyer. So we want students to know that heat is a form of energy that moves from hot objects to cold ones. We show a demonstration (experiment) using real objects in the real world to show this, and typically such demonstrations are already engaging for students. That also seems fine, and tying that back to the theme of helper/destroyer feels like it would just confuse or water down any learning that might have occurred during the demonstration.
Just to be clear, I think tools like stories, riddles etc can absolutely help students learn a lot of the time, but perhaps their usefulness has been overstated or they may sometimes be counterproductive. Perhaps students learn best when they are engaged with what they are learning, and having what they are learning be meaningful is one way of being engaging but not the only way. Which brings me to...
There are already lots of resources that make learning various things more engaging, or more fun, and plenty of them use at least some of Egan's tools. This is not exactly a criticism but a few questions arise such as why don't schools already use these more engaging resources (or do they)? If they did, would that solve most of the same problems that Egan is trying to solve (I think there are some homeschools/experimental schools that do try to use these resources so what can we learn from them)? What is wrong (from an Eganian perspective) with these engaging resources that do not use Egan's tools? There are way too many resources to list, but I will just give some examples. Some of these resources I thought of when I was reading Egan's suggestion of how to teach "to", "too" and "two" by personifying them. There are grammar resources that personify parts of speech e.g. Nesbitt's Grammar Land (1878), or The Sentence Family by James Hughes. Michael Clay Thompson's language arts curriculum uses the story of Mud trying to learn parts of speech in an engaging way. A bunch of Isaac Asimov's How Did We Find Out books embody Egan's ideas of telling the story of how things were discovered and how it mattered to the people who made the discoveries, for example How Did We Find Out the Earth Is Round. Hoffman Academy's free piano video lessons use stories, for example lesson 4 has a story involving a dog house to teach where D is on the piano. Video games like Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego, Math Blaster, Oregon Trail or Kerbal Space Program made learning engaging, though perhaps not all using Egan's tools. TV shows like The Magic School Bus. Basically all the "living books" that various Charlotte Mason homeschoolers use (note that almost none of those books were written for schools or even homeschoolers). Some actual courses on coursera or The Great Courses (The Teaching Company/Wondrium) that have been taught by great teachers.
For background, I have read all of this substack, your ACX book review (and comments), Egan's The Future of Education, some of An Imaginative Approach to Teaching, the Learning in Depth PDF and some of his posts on the ImaginED blog. I am naturally skeptical and have so many questions it could probably be it's own blog post but I'm going to try asking them inline here even though they are mostly not specifically about this post.
I will add to the few who have said similar:
--disastrous failure is much less likely than descent into mediocrity. A lot of big ideas about education are tried around the world, but the successful ones get lucky with their combination of teachers, students, parents, and community. The first Egan schools will get those right from selection, the later ones will regress to a lower mean, and at some point the average Egan school is not better than the average school.
--Higher education pipeline problem: how do you transform the kind of people self-selected into ed degrees into Egan-loving, cultural-cognitive cognizant teachers? Perhaps you can steal some folks with philosophy degrees and get them to teach, but it seems that most teachers are not ready to spend the time to rack their brains around Egan.
But heck I’m hoping you figure this thing out :)
The key structural issue is probably - do teachers really ‘get’ Egan’s approach; can we pull them out of the autopilot mode on an ongoing basis?
> Are teachers consistently mindful enough to take the right teaching approach for new or existing material?
> Will they not fall back to their interpretation or version of Egan, or make their own? Will they claim they ‘get’ Egan, and then still do their thing?
> Can they moderate discussions on a day to day basis in line with Egan’s approach?
> In really practical terms now, do they choose the right language to speak with pupils?
> Also, are they honest and open enough to regularly challenge themselves - and can we ensure there is an independent review (by people that also ‘get’ Egan)?
I can't think right now of particular things that apply to Egan's (since I know so very little), but I would certainly take a look at other approaches - Waldorf, Montessori, Escola da Ponte - and look at their schools and think "hm, how does this go wrong?". For an example, Montessori schools are rarely, purely Montessori and the add-ons are often contrary to the ideas of Maria Montessori.
Another issue is: "how do we train teachers (and school staff in general) for Egan?" The thing is - we were definitely not raised under that worldview, so we carry lots of bugs in our learning and teaching approach.
Of course, regulations and government overview can kill any project by demanding a standard curriculum, for an example - so, that would be a pretty big hurdle in many countries.
But none of these issues are specific to Egan's. Let me think some more... since people's interests are varied, we would have teachers dealing with all sorts of knowledge pools and trenches, but I think current technology and ability to incentivate students' research abilities got that covered.
Hmm... does Egan discusses and explores the whole neurodiversity thing? What about kids with reduced cognitive abilities? How inclusive would an Egan school be?
Ah, speaking of that, how exactly would an Egan classroom look like, particulary for middle (?) and high (?) school? I mean, teenagers. Sure, current school is boring, but even when it's not, they are pretty distractable with their social interactions. How would Egan engage those students with learning, how would you create a space for them to learn without being distracted by their peers (a major problem in my older son's class, he's 13 at a Montessori school)?
What would be the school hours? Would our students lunch together, form a sense of community? Did Egan consider that? How does personal interests interact with school curriculum? There is only so much one can get into one's head during a day and what do we prioritize - personal interests or general schooling? If our students are following their curiosity, wouldn't it be hard for the class to hold discussion on certain topics? That staff, even if motivated and funded, how many would we need? How do these teachers (or whatever their title is) discuss issues and incorporate new discoveries (or fads) in psychology, neuroscience, schooling in general, technology? Maybe the school would un-Egan-ize itself, maybe it would become too attached to what's written on the books, unable to extrapolate.
Ok, I wrote a lot, I don't think much of this is helpful for your exercise, but maybe some of these questions lead to new posts further exploring Egan's outlook.
Being the devil's advocate here, but I do worry sometimes that in an attempt to make education much more open ended and generalist, we're both setting kids up for a big disappointment when they discover that super narrow skillsets in the right domains are much more marketable, and setting society up for failure as we lose those super narrowly skilled people that keep the engines running.
The failure mode I am most curious about: can you maintain cohesion if you START from the Egan-esque premise that teachers do NOT have all the right answers.
As a serial reformer, I am periodically shocked by how often easily-falsifiable beliefs are actually central to an individual or group’s self-image. I am very eager to see if you can find a leadership style and culture that doesn’t require you (or the teachers) to have to be “right.”
I mostly have questions. My understanding of Egan is that it is a set of tools to make instruction engaging and intrinsically motivating. (You do this very well, BTW.) Let's take for granted that I 100% agree with all of Egan's ideas on how to create these lessons so kids of any age will want to pay attention and learn.
Where I am lost is what comes next. What percentage of classroom time is to be spent on these wonderful lessons? What percentage of time is to be spent on the kids DOING something besides talking? In my very short classroom experience, it doesn't really matter how connected and focused the students are when I am their leader guiding them deftly through the intricacies of a complex idea, as soon as I set them off on their own, they are still completely lost. What seems to be more effective, at least when the end goal is a standardized test that one could argue is demonstrating their readiness for college, is to give them one engaging lesson followed by 4 days of letting them practice and create on their own while gradually reducing the level of scaffolding offered based on the individual level of each student.
What sort of "work" does Egan envision students producing? I get that there is a lot of discussion happening, but does he want them to create anything? If so, does he want them to have freedom to choose what they do or is the assignment prescribed? What if they don't want to do it? Does he believe in grades? Exams? Is he worried that if there are prescribed assignments/tests/grades that it will lower instrinsic motivation? If he doesn't believe in those things and wants to give students more freedom, is he worried that students will choose the easiest path and won't be ready for college level classes?
I'm really curious what an Egan unit would look like from the engaging instruction plus discussion, through practicing concepts with reduced levels of assistance, through demonstration of mastery. My concern would be that you would start with a motivating lesson to a class of 30 high school kids and immediately lose 3 due to language barriers (I live in CA). You would likely lose another 2 due to teenage apathy and their refusal to take out their ear buds. By the time you made it to the practice stage, you would realize that there are at least 6 students who have slipped through the cracks and either have learning disabilities or for whatever reason are missing some fundamental knowledge and skills. They nodded along happily through your engaging lesson, but don't actually have some crucial pieces of information needed to put that new knowledge to use. A couple days later, you would lose another 5, because no matter how hard they try, their memories are failing them and everything starts getting jumbled together. By the time you reach the demonstrating mastery stage, you will realize another 4 have the most disorganized brains you have ever seen and while they might speak brilliantly, when they try to put their thoughts onto paper, it becomes a garbled mess. So you started with 30 and you are left with a shining 10 who are exceling beyond your wildest dreams, but one might argue that those 10 were going to shine no matter where you put them. You know, just hypothetically.