Book club: The Mattering Instinct
Why mattering matters (in education)
Alessandro and I will be doing a dialogue on Rebecca Newberger Goldstein’s important new book The Mattering Instinct soon. Wanna be a fly on the wall?
We’ll have up a special paid-subscribers-only post with our recording, and you’ll be able to comment! We plan to put it up in two weeks — Thursday, April 2. So if you’d like to grab a copy, there’s time.
Imaginary Interlocutor: Is this a book about education?
It proposes to give a new foundation to human flourishing, so… yes.
Its bold claim is that the need to matter isn’t just one feeling among others, it’s a biological imperative that spools out of our evolutionary history. Among the questions that I want to raise with Alessandro:
is helping people matter the goal of education?
is the hunger to matter the über-tool of teaching?
how does this look different across different academic subjects?
how does this look different across different ages?
If you haven’t read any of her books before, you should know that she’s a philosopher and novelist: when she addresses a topic, it is addressed. Her works cut to the core of whatever she’s talking about, and this is no exception. If you’re interested in what it means to matter, this book has insights for you.
You can get a taste of this book in her interview with Yascha Mounk:
