I'm not familiar with Barbara Oakley, but I do have some ideas about how the layers of education you describe connect to Vervaeke's taxonomy of knowledge.
I don't pretend to be an expert on that. In fact, I've only read the basics from this post:
2. Procedural knowledge - knowing how to do things.
3. Perspectival knowledge - "knowing what it's like."
4. Participatory knowledge - "knowing that is part and parcel of how we are bound up with something else, someone else, in a process of mutual transformation, reciprocal revelation."
Vervaeke also believes that our culture is currently subject to "propositional tyranny" - i.e., we only value propositional knowledge, and ignore the importance of everything else. That's a problem because piles of facts aren't enough to provide a sense of meaning, which we can only get from the deeper levels. (That seems to match your conclusion from a previous post that "the matter with schooling is that schooling doesn't matter.")
I still don't quite understand exactly what perspectival knowledge and participatory knowledge are, or how they're different. But I think they roughly correspond to what we mean if we say that someone "thinks like a scientist" or "thinks like a journalist." I also have two examples that might help.
First example: A few years ago, I made a New Year's resolution that I wanted to learn more about the world. The implementation I came up with was to read a brief description of a different country each day and record a few key facts for each one (size, economy, political system, etc.). Then I put those notes into Anki to review them using spaced repetition.
I gave up within a week. First of all, adding one country per day was far too ambitious. But the main problem was that when I first started reading about a new country, the things I learned felt fluid and alive. Then as soon as I wrote it down in my notes and started reviewing it, nuances began to disappear, and I could feel my understanding hardening into something frozen and lifeless.
In retrospect, I think the main problem is that the kind of understanding I wanted was perspectival knowledge - what is it like to be from a particular country? And the facts I captured in my notebook were only propositional knowledge. Maybe I would have done better to ignore the facts and figures and write down one key story about each country instead, even though that doesn't fit the spaced repetition model very well.
Second example: My older son is almost two, and in the last few months his language abilities have skyrocketed. So as I watch him, I've been thinking about how language acquisition works.
My first observation is that almost everyone succeeds at speaking and understanding their native language fluently. This is so commonplace that it seems unremarkable, until we notice the staggering difference between this and the level that students generally reach in every other school subject. If the average high school graduate were as effortlessly fluent in math as the average first grader is in their native language, most people would declare mission accomplished.
My second observation is that language is intimately connected to the deeper levels in Egan's framework. Language is so important for culture that it's virtually impossible to truly understand a foreign culture without first acquiring some familiarity with the language. (I've observed this directly, since my wife's family is Chinese.) And evolution has also provided us with specific regions of the brain that are adapted for speaking and understanding language (Broca's area and Wernicke's area).
And thirdly, when they learn their native language, people generally do achieve the deeper levels of knowledge in Vervaeke's taxonomy. A native language is an intimate part of who people are and how they interpret the world. And language is also dynamic, as people actively shape it to better express themselves. (I believe this is something like what Vervaeke means by "a process of mutual transformation".)
So to conclude this very long comment, I suggest this statement as a partial solution for you:
The importance of the lower layers in Egan's framework is that we need to understand what people are like, so that we can design our education to connect with that identity to produce deeper levels of knowledge, which is the only way that what we learn can lead to a sense of meaning and purpose.
I still don't know how that design process would work, but it sounds like that's roughly where you think Barbara Oakley's work comes in. What do you think?
I've added A Mind for Numbers to my reading list, so I'm hoping that will fill in some of the gaps for me.
Your Anki project and the experience of 'flattening out' of previously fluid information is all-too familiar to me. I like to read history books and when I am reading the times and places I am studying feel real and alive. Spaced repetition helps me to remember many facts but fails to bring the periods to life in that same way? Perhaps visualization techniques would be more effective? Perhaps the key might be narrative or linking together a critical mass of information? If you have any suggestions I'd love to hear them.
As I think about it, another mistake I made was to go through countries in alphabetical order. If there were some thread linking them together, that might have helped to bring certain aspects to life.
Even studying a somewhat disparate group of countries such as "countries once colonized by the British Empire" at least shines a spotlight on the political history of each country. It also causes other features to recede into the background, but maybe that's an inevitable consequence of choosing a particular perspective.
On the other hand, "countries that start with the letter A" was not a useful group. I suppose I was trying to reach a sort of "view from nowhere", but maybe that kind of approach is doomed to feel disjointed and lifeless.
But I haven't tried any more projects like that, so I don't have much more to offer besides speculation.
Recently I decided to try and remember the Anglo-Saxon kings of England from Alfred to the Norman Conquest. On reflection, many of the things that stick best tend to incorporate at least one of Egan's tools. Gossip, for example: Eadred had a digestive illness and would suck the blood of meat and spit it out, a behavior that even by Dark Age table manners was considered rather disgusting. Or some times it might be binaries: Edward the Martyr supported Benedictine clerical reformers, Eadwig the secular lords. Sometimes it might be nesting a historical figure within a particular narrative.
Still, SRS isn't exactly compatible with bringing history fully to life. I do suppose that internalizing enough facts can increase the sense of appreciation whenever one does attempt to deeply engage with a given historical event or period.
Egan is like a philosopher: defining what a person is, how it came to be, what is its nature
Barbara Oakley is like an engineer: figuring out how to apply hard science to the problem of learning
A cognitive neuroscientist like Stanilas Dahaene is something like a physicist: figuring out the mechanics of how learning and cognition can occur
Philosophy, engineering and physics all help us understand the world from different perspectives, so why couldn't education have similar levels of understanding?
I'm not familiar with Barbara Oakley, but I do have some ideas about how the layers of education you describe connect to Vervaeke's taxonomy of knowledge.
I don't pretend to be an expert on that. In fact, I've only read the basics from this post:
https://stefanlesser.substack.com/p/four-ways-of-knowing. But I thought I'd throw some ideas out there, and maybe you and other readers can help connect the dots.
The four ways of knowing are:
1. Propositional knowledge - knowing facts.
2. Procedural knowledge - knowing how to do things.
3. Perspectival knowledge - "knowing what it's like."
4. Participatory knowledge - "knowing that is part and parcel of how we are bound up with something else, someone else, in a process of mutual transformation, reciprocal revelation."
Vervaeke also believes that our culture is currently subject to "propositional tyranny" - i.e., we only value propositional knowledge, and ignore the importance of everything else. That's a problem because piles of facts aren't enough to provide a sense of meaning, which we can only get from the deeper levels. (That seems to match your conclusion from a previous post that "the matter with schooling is that schooling doesn't matter.")
I still don't quite understand exactly what perspectival knowledge and participatory knowledge are, or how they're different. But I think they roughly correspond to what we mean if we say that someone "thinks like a scientist" or "thinks like a journalist." I also have two examples that might help.
First example: A few years ago, I made a New Year's resolution that I wanted to learn more about the world. The implementation I came up with was to read a brief description of a different country each day and record a few key facts for each one (size, economy, political system, etc.). Then I put those notes into Anki to review them using spaced repetition.
I gave up within a week. First of all, adding one country per day was far too ambitious. But the main problem was that when I first started reading about a new country, the things I learned felt fluid and alive. Then as soon as I wrote it down in my notes and started reviewing it, nuances began to disappear, and I could feel my understanding hardening into something frozen and lifeless.
In retrospect, I think the main problem is that the kind of understanding I wanted was perspectival knowledge - what is it like to be from a particular country? And the facts I captured in my notebook were only propositional knowledge. Maybe I would have done better to ignore the facts and figures and write down one key story about each country instead, even though that doesn't fit the spaced repetition model very well.
Second example: My older son is almost two, and in the last few months his language abilities have skyrocketed. So as I watch him, I've been thinking about how language acquisition works.
My first observation is that almost everyone succeeds at speaking and understanding their native language fluently. This is so commonplace that it seems unremarkable, until we notice the staggering difference between this and the level that students generally reach in every other school subject. If the average high school graduate were as effortlessly fluent in math as the average first grader is in their native language, most people would declare mission accomplished.
My second observation is that language is intimately connected to the deeper levels in Egan's framework. Language is so important for culture that it's virtually impossible to truly understand a foreign culture without first acquiring some familiarity with the language. (I've observed this directly, since my wife's family is Chinese.) And evolution has also provided us with specific regions of the brain that are adapted for speaking and understanding language (Broca's area and Wernicke's area).
And thirdly, when they learn their native language, people generally do achieve the deeper levels of knowledge in Vervaeke's taxonomy. A native language is an intimate part of who people are and how they interpret the world. And language is also dynamic, as people actively shape it to better express themselves. (I believe this is something like what Vervaeke means by "a process of mutual transformation".)
So to conclude this very long comment, I suggest this statement as a partial solution for you:
The importance of the lower layers in Egan's framework is that we need to understand what people are like, so that we can design our education to connect with that identity to produce deeper levels of knowledge, which is the only way that what we learn can lead to a sense of meaning and purpose.
I still don't know how that design process would work, but it sounds like that's roughly where you think Barbara Oakley's work comes in. What do you think?
I've added A Mind for Numbers to my reading list, so I'm hoping that will fill in some of the gaps for me.
Your Anki project and the experience of 'flattening out' of previously fluid information is all-too familiar to me. I like to read history books and when I am reading the times and places I am studying feel real and alive. Spaced repetition helps me to remember many facts but fails to bring the periods to life in that same way? Perhaps visualization techniques would be more effective? Perhaps the key might be narrative or linking together a critical mass of information? If you have any suggestions I'd love to hear them.
As I think about it, another mistake I made was to go through countries in alphabetical order. If there were some thread linking them together, that might have helped to bring certain aspects to life.
Even studying a somewhat disparate group of countries such as "countries once colonized by the British Empire" at least shines a spotlight on the political history of each country. It also causes other features to recede into the background, but maybe that's an inevitable consequence of choosing a particular perspective.
On the other hand, "countries that start with the letter A" was not a useful group. I suppose I was trying to reach a sort of "view from nowhere", but maybe that kind of approach is doomed to feel disjointed and lifeless.
But I haven't tried any more projects like that, so I don't have much more to offer besides speculation.
Recently I decided to try and remember the Anglo-Saxon kings of England from Alfred to the Norman Conquest. On reflection, many of the things that stick best tend to incorporate at least one of Egan's tools. Gossip, for example: Eadred had a digestive illness and would suck the blood of meat and spit it out, a behavior that even by Dark Age table manners was considered rather disgusting. Or some times it might be binaries: Edward the Martyr supported Benedictine clerical reformers, Eadwig the secular lords. Sometimes it might be nesting a historical figure within a particular narrative.
Still, SRS isn't exactly compatible with bringing history fully to life. I do suppose that internalizing enough facts can increase the sense of appreciation whenever one does attempt to deeply engage with a given historical event or period.
One analogy that comes to mind:
Egan is like a philosopher: defining what a person is, how it came to be, what is its nature
Barbara Oakley is like an engineer: figuring out how to apply hard science to the problem of learning
A cognitive neuroscientist like Stanilas Dahaene is something like a physicist: figuring out the mechanics of how learning and cognition can occur
Philosophy, engineering and physics all help us understand the world from different perspectives, so why couldn't education have similar levels of understanding?
I got to meet Barbara Oakley at Contact in probably 2008-9.
https://contact-conference.org/
And later interviewed her for an evolution podcast. Both of those episodes are now re-posted here.
https://randallhayes.substack.com/p/vsi-episode-19#details
https://randallhayes.substack.com/p/vsi-episode-22#details