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.
Assessment might be the biggest current hole in Egan education. Egan gave it so little of his attention, and the stuff he wrote about it was very abstract. That’s not to say that he was OPPOSED to assessment — my feeling is that he thought that, when you’re getting a real education, it (1) largely happens naturally (between student & teacher), and that (2) the ways we currently do it are more-or-less good enough.
Well: I should say that he critiqued Ralph Tyler’s “objectives” model (think: numbers, and a factory assembly line), and cites Elliot Eisner’s model (think: stories, and becoming a connoisseur of the arts) approvingly. But beyond that, he sorta punts. And I don’t say that dismissively: I have the exact same biases. I cannot, cannot get excited over assessment.
Thankfully, others in Eganworld are working to fix this. I’ve heard that one of the people at Simon Fraser University (I forget whom! if anyone knows, let me know) has a whole course on this. Alessandro has been thinking about it, too. Here’s a taste: if a goal in Egan education is to help students wield cognitive tools, then how can we assess that? And how can we use assessments not just to try and judge a student’s skills without interfering, but to help students form those skills?
That’s led me to think that we should look to more traditional modes of education (e.g. induction into becoming a shaman, martial arts academies…) for wild ideas.
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).
Great questions, and I wish I had anything like good answers. I'd be really interested in knowing how parents think about philosophy of science, insofar as they know what it is — I'd guess that most don't (even if they do intuit some of the issues). If you'd be interested in making a survey in Google Forms, I'd be delighted to send it out!
With that proviso:
1. >> "Do you think parents who use Science is WEIRD already understand that philosophy of science is not a waste of time?"
I'd guess that anyone with a strong aversion to philosophy weeds themselves out pretty quickly.
2. >> " Do you think you've convinced anyone of that who didn't believe it already (I'm confident I haven't)?"
I suspect that most people are unaware of this academic fight (as to whether philosophy of science is bunk). I'd be surprised if I've convinced any of the haters, mostly because (A) I'm not trying to, and (B) it's weird for them to keep paying me to stay in something they hate! But I suspect that I've gotten some people who didn't know about this fight to appreciate philosophy more.
3. >> "Is the idea that philosophy of science is irrelevant just a paradigm that will only die out when its adherents do (joking, kind of)?"
Ha! I'm the dictionary definition of a humanities person who's been converted to the church of science (I moved from actively avoiding science classes to creating them), so I understand the assumption that philosophy of science is bunk. But I think that's DUMB, and dumb in ways that are growing more serious by the day: from the outside, at least, this perspective that some scientists have ("what we're doing works; we don't need to explain why") can be misapprehended as "we're the professionals, so trust us, shut up, and keep giving us grants". Sometimes that misapprehension is honest and sometimes it's dishonest; either way, it's Very Bad News for science. Scientists need to make their case again and again as to why we should trust their institutions. And, frankly, their institutions are imperfect. Sometimes, as we've seen in the Replication Crisis, they're houses of cards! (This is something I'll be exploring in the course "Believe it or not: Psychic Abilities" in the summer of 2027.) So scientists need to get a clearer understanding of what makes science work.
A question for you — who are these people who see a class that's 5% philosophy as meaning 0% science? That's seems to me like such a weird take. Like, when they were kids, were they bitten by a philosopher? What leads to this level of antipathy?
Loosely related: How do you teach the scientific method in your Science Is WEIRD classes?
When I was homeschooled, my parents (who both did STEM careers - I was born to be a nerd) taught us that the most fundamental truth to learn about science was the scientific method.
My impression now is that it's okay to teach the scientific method as a lie to children. But in practice, there is no such thing.
Instead, each field has its own disparate methods. And while they could be loosely grouped into a "scientific attitude" or a "scientific aesthetic", there's not a clear set of conditions that demarcate which questions or ideas are scientific and which ones aren't.
Completely agreed that scientists need to have a clearer understanding of what makes science work. But it feels like people either share that view already, or else find it a dangerous one to hold. I witnessed no overt fraud in my time in science (mostly engineering, technically, but the line between bio(medical) engineering and biology is a weird one) but I witnessed so much failure to provide direct instruction even about the most basic things like how to actually do statistical analysis correctly that resulted in so much bad science so I'm lost as to how anyone could think we can't do better.
Among homeschoolers who prioritize academics I think there is a tension between wanting to do better than public school and wanting to hedge bets by duplicating public school. This leads to an obsession with whether or not a given curriculum is "complete," an exhaustion from (I think but I'm biased) trying to use too many curricula rather than a few good ones, and a strong desire for efficiency (not so much measured in learning per time as adult anxiety about doing enough assuaged per time). I think that a lot more than 5% of what's in SiW doesn't feel how parents expect science curricula to feel which means it doesn't assuage anxiety, unless you happen to be anxious about how useless most science curricula are. SiW strikes me as an efficient way to help kids form a mental model of the universe with which to understand the science others are doing and do their own if they wish. But building a mental model of the universe is a lot more work than just checking off state standards via time for learning, and if you feel like you need to do the latter even if you do the former I guess you could end up thinking that SiW would be a fine extra but you just don't have time for it on top of the actual "essentials" of doing science public school style.
How much of the Egan approach applies when you are educating within a particular, relatively homogenous culture/worldview? Reading your original ACX book review, I got the impression that at least part of the problem with optimizing school for “socialization” was the question of “which values do we socialize towards.” But let’s say you’re educating a group of children within a conservative, Christian culture. Is this problem solved, and does the Egan approach lose some value?
Relatedly, how much of the Egan approach applies when you have selected for children who find education inherently meaningful? It seems like a lot of energy is spent framing subjects in a way that draws attention to their most fundamental meaning - what if your students took this as a given?
>> "let’s say you’re educating a group of children within a conservative, Christian culture. Is this [socialization] problem solved, and does the Egan approach lose some value?"
Forming a school around a hardcore group of believers (Christian, social-justice progressive, Randian, or otherwise) makes it easier to pull out some of the meaning in the academic content, and supercharge the education. (I suddenly realize this is what I wrote about in NAMED VIRTUES° — https://losttools.substack.com/p/named-virtues) But it opens up another problem: disagreement and debate are key for forming Philosophic understanding (to say nothing of Ironic!). This, in fact, is what you sometimes see when otherwise-great classical education goes awry. (I'm actually reading a book right now that touches on this — Reviel Netz's "Why the Ancient Greeks Matter". He talks about how, when debating culture shut down in the 200s CE, education stagnated.)
tl;dr — Egan education might suggest that such groups find ways to bring in more disagreement.
>> "Relatedly, how much of the Egan approach applies when you have selected for children who find education inherently meaningful?"
The interesting thing here is to think about the difference between kids finding "education" as meaningful, and kids experiencing what's meaningful in the diverse things they're learning. How is arithmetic meaningful? How is a geometric proof? (As Netz points out, each of those, historically, have almost OPPOSITE flavors; it took the genius of Muslims like al-Khwarizmi to unite them together in algebra.)
tl;dr — Egan education is precisely what kids who already find education meaningful are hungry for!
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.
Assessment might be the biggest current hole in Egan education. Egan gave it so little of his attention, and the stuff he wrote about it was very abstract. That’s not to say that he was OPPOSED to assessment — my feeling is that he thought that, when you’re getting a real education, it (1) largely happens naturally (between student & teacher), and that (2) the ways we currently do it are more-or-less good enough.
Well: I should say that he critiqued Ralph Tyler’s “objectives” model (think: numbers, and a factory assembly line), and cites Elliot Eisner’s model (think: stories, and becoming a connoisseur of the arts) approvingly. But beyond that, he sorta punts. And I don’t say that dismissively: I have the exact same biases. I cannot, cannot get excited over assessment.
Thankfully, others in Eganworld are working to fix this. I’ve heard that one of the people at Simon Fraser University (I forget whom! if anyone knows, let me know) has a whole course on this. Alessandro has been thinking about it, too. Here’s a taste: if a goal in Egan education is to help students wield cognitive tools, then how can we assess that? And how can we use assessments not just to try and judge a student’s skills without interfering, but to help students form those skills?
That’s led me to think that we should look to more traditional modes of education (e.g. induction into becoming a shaman, martial arts academies…) for wild ideas.
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).
Great questions, and I wish I had anything like good answers. I'd be really interested in knowing how parents think about philosophy of science, insofar as they know what it is — I'd guess that most don't (even if they do intuit some of the issues). If you'd be interested in making a survey in Google Forms, I'd be delighted to send it out!
With that proviso:
1. >> "Do you think parents who use Science is WEIRD already understand that philosophy of science is not a waste of time?"
I'd guess that anyone with a strong aversion to philosophy weeds themselves out pretty quickly.
2. >> " Do you think you've convinced anyone of that who didn't believe it already (I'm confident I haven't)?"
I suspect that most people are unaware of this academic fight (as to whether philosophy of science is bunk). I'd be surprised if I've convinced any of the haters, mostly because (A) I'm not trying to, and (B) it's weird for them to keep paying me to stay in something they hate! But I suspect that I've gotten some people who didn't know about this fight to appreciate philosophy more.
3. >> "Is the idea that philosophy of science is irrelevant just a paradigm that will only die out when its adherents do (joking, kind of)?"
Ha! I'm the dictionary definition of a humanities person who's been converted to the church of science (I moved from actively avoiding science classes to creating them), so I understand the assumption that philosophy of science is bunk. But I think that's DUMB, and dumb in ways that are growing more serious by the day: from the outside, at least, this perspective that some scientists have ("what we're doing works; we don't need to explain why") can be misapprehended as "we're the professionals, so trust us, shut up, and keep giving us grants". Sometimes that misapprehension is honest and sometimes it's dishonest; either way, it's Very Bad News for science. Scientists need to make their case again and again as to why we should trust their institutions. And, frankly, their institutions are imperfect. Sometimes, as we've seen in the Replication Crisis, they're houses of cards! (This is something I'll be exploring in the course "Believe it or not: Psychic Abilities" in the summer of 2027.) So scientists need to get a clearer understanding of what makes science work.
A question for you — who are these people who see a class that's 5% philosophy as meaning 0% science? That's seems to me like such a weird take. Like, when they were kids, were they bitten by a philosopher? What leads to this level of antipathy?
Loosely related: How do you teach the scientific method in your Science Is WEIRD classes?
When I was homeschooled, my parents (who both did STEM careers - I was born to be a nerd) taught us that the most fundamental truth to learn about science was the scientific method.
My impression now is that it's okay to teach the scientific method as a lie to children. But in practice, there is no such thing.
Instead, each field has its own disparate methods. And while they could be loosely grouped into a "scientific attitude" or a "scientific aesthetic", there's not a clear set of conditions that demarcate which questions or ideas are scientific and which ones aren't.
Completely agreed that scientists need to have a clearer understanding of what makes science work. But it feels like people either share that view already, or else find it a dangerous one to hold. I witnessed no overt fraud in my time in science (mostly engineering, technically, but the line between bio(medical) engineering and biology is a weird one) but I witnessed so much failure to provide direct instruction even about the most basic things like how to actually do statistical analysis correctly that resulted in so much bad science so I'm lost as to how anyone could think we can't do better.
Among homeschoolers who prioritize academics I think there is a tension between wanting to do better than public school and wanting to hedge bets by duplicating public school. This leads to an obsession with whether or not a given curriculum is "complete," an exhaustion from (I think but I'm biased) trying to use too many curricula rather than a few good ones, and a strong desire for efficiency (not so much measured in learning per time as adult anxiety about doing enough assuaged per time). I think that a lot more than 5% of what's in SiW doesn't feel how parents expect science curricula to feel which means it doesn't assuage anxiety, unless you happen to be anxious about how useless most science curricula are. SiW strikes me as an efficient way to help kids form a mental model of the universe with which to understand the science others are doing and do their own if they wish. But building a mental model of the universe is a lot more work than just checking off state standards via time for learning, and if you feel like you need to do the latter even if you do the former I guess you could end up thinking that SiW would be a fine extra but you just don't have time for it on top of the actual "essentials" of doing science public school style.
How much of the Egan approach applies when you are educating within a particular, relatively homogenous culture/worldview? Reading your original ACX book review, I got the impression that at least part of the problem with optimizing school for “socialization” was the question of “which values do we socialize towards.” But let’s say you’re educating a group of children within a conservative, Christian culture. Is this problem solved, and does the Egan approach lose some value?
Relatedly, how much of the Egan approach applies when you have selected for children who find education inherently meaningful? It seems like a lot of energy is spent framing subjects in a way that draws attention to their most fundamental meaning - what if your students took this as a given?
>> "let’s say you’re educating a group of children within a conservative, Christian culture. Is this [socialization] problem solved, and does the Egan approach lose some value?"
Forming a school around a hardcore group of believers (Christian, social-justice progressive, Randian, or otherwise) makes it easier to pull out some of the meaning in the academic content, and supercharge the education. (I suddenly realize this is what I wrote about in NAMED VIRTUES° — https://losttools.substack.com/p/named-virtues) But it opens up another problem: disagreement and debate are key for forming Philosophic understanding (to say nothing of Ironic!). This, in fact, is what you sometimes see when otherwise-great classical education goes awry. (I'm actually reading a book right now that touches on this — Reviel Netz's "Why the Ancient Greeks Matter". He talks about how, when debating culture shut down in the 200s CE, education stagnated.)
tl;dr — Egan education might suggest that such groups find ways to bring in more disagreement.
>> "Relatedly, how much of the Egan approach applies when you have selected for children who find education inherently meaningful?"
The interesting thing here is to think about the difference between kids finding "education" as meaningful, and kids experiencing what's meaningful in the diverse things they're learning. How is arithmetic meaningful? How is a geometric proof? (As Netz points out, each of those, historically, have almost OPPOSITE flavors; it took the genius of Muslims like al-Khwarizmi to unite them together in algebra.)
tl;dr — Egan education is precisely what kids who already find education meaningful are hungry for!
Truly excellent questions; thanks for them.