1. Thanks for coming to my TED talk
“What’s going on? Where am I? Why did you put that bag over my head?”
Every once in a while I find myself in a conversation with someone who thinks that schools are essentially fine: perhaps they could use more funding, or could benefit from “best practices” teaching strategies or whatever, but basically, they’re doing about as well as we, in the real world, can expect schools to do.
I tend to disagree.
Q: In schools, kids learn reading and math. Isn’t that enough?
Compared to what schools could help them understand? No, I don’t think so.
I think a new kind of schooling can cultivate understanding, expertise, creativity, curiosity, and wonder. I think it can graduate people who have meaningful relationships with the characters of history, the great works of literature, philosophy, and world religions. I think it can get people excited about global economics, human psychology, and ethics. I think it can cultivate people who want to make a dent in the universe.
I think we can create “talent hotbeds” of thinking — to tap into the engines that produced the Greek Miracle in ancient Athens, the Islamic Golden Age, and the Enlightenment.
I think a new kind of schooling can do this for regular folk — not just high-IQ kids. And I think it can do it now — without waiting for the AI revolution, the end of poverty, or the coming of the messiah.
Q: Cut the romantic crap — on average, students are average. Few people are brilliant.
Yes, thank you (though I did actually know the middle-school definition of average). I know that “we can produce genius, now!” has been the drumbeat of every failed educational movement over the last century.
And all that would be enough to make me despair of significantly improving schools… except that I see genius bubbling up in kids all the time — in conversations, in sports, in hobbies… really, almost everywhere but the classroom.
Human genius, upon walking into a classroom, evaporates.
I think this is one of the most obvious truths — and I think it should make us very hopeful that massive improvement is (at least) possible.
How, now?
Kieran Egan died last year.
His life-long project was to find ways to (as his obituary puts it) “enrich the lives of children, enabling them to reach their full (and individual) potential”.
His insight was that, to understand how education really works, we should spend less time peering down into students’ brains and more time looking out, across geography and history, to see how cultures succeeded in forming people who could survive and thrive.
His legacy is a sprawling, heady framework — usually referred to as “Imaginative Education” — that he worked out through approximately seventeen billion books.
His framework, however, isn’t complete in itself. (He insisted on this point.) Rather, it opens up whole new sorts of ways we might be able to improve schooling.
The purpose of this blog is to interrogate his ideas, and lay the intellectual groundwork for how we can create new kinds of schooling.
(The plural there — “new kinds” — seems important. Egan did sketch out, if lightly, one vision he imagined his framework could be applied. Frankly, I love his vision — but there are many, many, many other kinds of schools that his conceptual framework could lead to.)
Who’s this blog for?
If you’re a teacher, I think you’ll find some of the posts here immediately relevant — regardless of whether you teach college, high school, middle school, elementary school, or preschool, and regardless of whether you teach science, math, the humanities, the social sciences, the arts, or foosball.
(There probably will be a bit more about science, here, just because that’s what I focus on in my work at Science is WEIRD.)
If you’re a homeschooler, I think you’ll find even more of the posts relevant: our task, as homeschoolers (and here I need to point out that I’m a typical homeschooling dad, which means, alas, I do very little of the actual homeschooling) isn’t just to do the teaching, but to craft an entire philosophy of education.
If your life requires you to communicate anything important to anyone (perhaps you’re a Methodist minister, a drug and alcohol counselor, a UX engineer, or a would-be YouTube influencer!) you’ll probably find at least some of this useful.
But while there are aspects of this that will be immediately applicable, I’m really writing for folk who are interested in the ideas that we’ve built schooling on — and who want to re-examine them so as to build new kinds of schools.
What’s the blog about?
Education — which is to say, almost everything.
It’s going to be “ambitious” in the word’s literal meaning — “having a large ambit”. Because of what Egan thought education actually is (and more on that soon), there are a huge number of topics that we’ll need to walk around.
Look for us to bring in various perspectives on psychology — cognitive, sociocultural, and evolutionary, for starters. We’ll sniff around intelligence, and spend a long time on expertise. I spend a lot of time thinking about ADHD and the autism spectrum, and Egan’s approach also has light to shed on other forms of neurodiversity and learning disorders.
Understanding what education really is requires knowing quite a bit of history — not just the history of schooling and ideas but of Big History: the 13.8-billion-year narrative of life, the Universe, and everything.
(Egan’s framework also doubles as a theory of human history. Does that make you nervous? It should! Most educational paradigms that link up to a “theory of everything” are, at least in certain regards, absolutely bonkers — looking at your, Rudolf Steiner! But Egan would argue that it’s the very smallness of our picture of education that’s holding us back. I’ve come to agree with him.)
The one thing we won’t have anything to do with is politics, except when we truly, absolutely, need to. As Eliezer writes, “politics is the mind killer”. I know I’m launching this blog at the slow beginning of an American election cycle, but you shouldn’t be able to tell if Trump gets elected, if Biden gets re-elected, or if a rabid llama gets installed as “Supreme Chancellor” from reading this blog. If and when I open up the comments (I have… issues with comments), we’ll have unbreakable, if-you-do-this-watch-how-fast-you-get-banned rules about even veering toward politics and culture war issues.
Anyhoo, that’s the ambit. The chewy core of the blog will be exploring ideas of how whole school systems can be re-humanized.
What’s the game plan?
This is going to get strange and spicy, so I’ll start with a few posts that build the conceptual foundations.
For the first few posts, I’ll draw the hole at the heart of most visions of education, and sketch Egan’s vision of what schools can become.
Then I’ll veer and go all theoretical — asking how we should think about “the mind”, and showing how previous theories of education have gone awry by missing something important (and, I’ll admit up front, very weird).
After that, I’ll try to give a sense of what Egan’s framework of education actually is. This is generally acknowledged (amongst Egan-heads worldwide) to be impossible. Egan wasn’t the sort of thinker whose ideas fit nicely into a TED talk. Honestly, part of my quest in taking on this substack is to figure out clearer ways of communicating that.
And after all that… well, this is going to get strange, fast. I’ll defend the much-ridiculed Jerome Bruner quote that “any subject can be taught effectively in some intellectually honest form to any child at any stage of development”. I’ll argue that we can bring almost every student through their own European Enlightenment, even as I sing the praises of Indigenous Knowledge Systems.
I’ll explain why a “jokes class” is load-bearing for elementary-school math and why anthropology is obligatory for middle schoolers. I’ll point out what young-earth creationists can teach geologists.
I’ll limn out the basic disagreements between different visions of education, and give hot takes about Montessori, “hands-on learning”, classical education, and more.
I’ll ask “but what does the evidence say?” (and hopefully get your help).
I’ll pontificate as to why “social studies” was the original sin of modern schooling. I’ll show why we’re forced to take IQ seriously, even as I pick a fight with Freddie deBoer (PRAY FOR ME).
Before you know it, I’ll be trying to convince you that everyone should learn about Bigfoot in middle school, and the paranormal in high school.
I’ll submit for your consideration a bunch of Egan-inspired projects I’ve been working on over the years — in science, math, reading, history, and so on. And I’ll lay some of my own Science is WEIRD lessons down on the examination table where we’ll vivisect them for our mutual edification.
Enough blather. Let’s start!