AMA #2
And an answer that's been a year in the making
I did the first of these a year ago while waiting with a friend in the ER, and it went swell! In the interests of squeezing more ideas out of my head, I’m considering doing these more regularly.
Education, science facts, our little conspiracy of Eganizing the world… ask me anything! I’ll keep this thread open for 24 hours.
To kick it off, I’ll start by answering a question that
asked in the comments more than a year ago (sorry, Sarah!), and which I’ve really been meaning to answer:This is super helpful and insightful. Having an 8 year old who finds school tremendously boring (plus stressful, boring + stressful = who would ever wanna go there) has definitely opened my mind to the issues with current education system. Do you believe schools will do a better job at teaching if the main focus was fostering curiosity and creativity? If it was a requirement for teachers to prioritize connection with their students? If they added a boat load of funny? If there is a degree of novelty? And teachers are paid in six figures at minimum?
Am I thinking about this the right way? So what should schools really teach?
Good question! (And, um, happy ninth birthday to your son!)
I’d say that all of these things are necessary, but a hundred years of educational progressivism has shown us that if we focus on them, they’ll usually slip from our grasp. Egan’s insight is that there’s something deeper we need to be aiming for — showing how the subjects matter.
Lemme try out a food metaphor here: students are hungry. We all come into the world with a lot of desires (some shallow, some deep, all quite diverse) and the curriculum can be food.
When we (I’ll speak as a teacher) plan a lesson, we need to first ask ourselves, which of my students’ hungers might this content feed? Their need for beauty? For surprise? For existential fit? It doesn’t matter if it’s a lesson in math, spelling, history, or whatever: first pause and think this through. Maybe do some research on what was driving the folk who first figured it out. Fall a little in love with it yourself. And then use the tools (like 🧙♂️STORIES and 🧙♂️RIDDLES) to help your students fall in love with this, too.1
When we do that, the things you mentioned will flow fairly naturally. Kids who are fed lots of tasty food want more — they’re curious. Kids who find mealtimes delightful will play with their food, and start making their own — they’re creative. And teachers (chefs?) who regularly deliver deliciousness to their class will find that a good way to form meaningful personal connections.
As for paying teachers six figures, well, as a teacher I’m obviously not opposed, but that’s a separate education policy question. I’ll just say, as Freddie DeBoer pointed out recently, that the revealed preference of many teachers is that money is less valuable than teaching students who want to learn. If we’re trying to offer teachers what they most desire, it makes sense to start there; salary is an important, but secondary, issue.
Conspiracy to Eganize the world — I’m here for it! My question today is: What does Egan have to say about assessment? And by that, I mean “providing evidence that teaching and learning have taken place.” The quotes are to indicate the language used by the education department official asking for an assessment report in support of our registration for homeschooling. In this case, I’ve put together a parental assessment that I believe will suffice. But I’m interested to know how Egan might have proposed dealing with documenting or demonstrating learning for “the powers that be” or even just as a record for our own memories.
I had another conversation with someone recently in which they said that Science is Weird is great, but it's philosophy not science. I realized recently that maybe the reason I don't feel that way has less to do with my experiences during my PhD and post-doc (which I always assumed where what shaped my strong dislike of typical science curricula), and more to with the random series of undergraduate events in which I stumbled on Root-Bernstein's Discovering in the library while procrastinating on homework, cross-registered to take an intro philosophy of science class, and then wrote a paper on "how scientists learn how science is done" for my humanities capstone (my enthusiasm for which earned a general "fine but don't let this distract you" from engineering professors despite the fact that this was the early days of a school reinventing engineering education).
Do you think parents who use Science is Weird already understand that philosophy of science is not a waste of time? Do you think you've convinced anyone of that who didn't believe it already (I'm confident I haven't)? Is the idea that philosophy of science is irrelevant just a paradigm that will only die out when its adherents do (joking, kind of).