Interview on Learning Stack
And greetings new subscribers from Astral Codex Ten!
A big challenge in hammering out new ideas about education is that, here in the early 21st century, there are precious few places where people are talking about education seriously.
is working to change that. A former history teacher, he has a master’s in educational technology from Johns Hopkins. As another person with a master’s in educational-something-something from a big-name university, I know enough to not be impressed by that… except that his master’s thesis was a brutal takedown of one of the best-funded reform movements in education.So, a person to watch.
He’s the co-founder of Eduaide.ai, and is running a podcast/substack called The Learning Stack. My favorite interview thus far is the one he did with the great traditionalist math teacher
. Thomas wants the podcast to be one of the serious places to have conversations about education — a place where it’s okay to say “actually, I’ve looked into the evidence backing your proposal, and it’s weak!”
Imaginary Interlocutor: Why you gotta be a jerk, Brandon?
Look, I’m from the American Midwest; every pore of my skin exudes niceness. But one of the things I discovered that at the academic level, educational theory is stuck on “positivity”. In a college of education, it’s considered extremely socially awkward to, say, point out at a dinner that someone’s entire line of research is grounded in absolutely no evidence at all.1 Now, presumably there’s some perfect balance to be struck between these two extremes…
…but right now, most of the field could stand to shift a few steps to the right.2
Anyhoo, Thomas interviewed me a few months ago! I’ve been procrastinating putting it up, because I thought it strategic to wait until after I got a mass of new subscribers from Astral Codex Ten am a procrastinator.
You can listen to it on Spotify, on Apple, or on Substack.
I think you’ll find his questions sharp and quick. (Imagine Tyler Cowen, except maniacally focused on the subject of learning.) I don’t think I did as good a job as an interviewee as I usually do — my working theory is that I’m better at dialogue, and didn’t do my usual trick of turning the interview into a dialogue by asking for his take on the questions.
Anyhoo, Thomas was kind enough to put up not just the recording, but also a written summary of it as well.
If you’re a new subscriber, I’ve also done other interviews — on the Bayesian Conspiracy, EdSurge, and ContraMinds. I’ve just put up a new page for all of them:
(If you’d like to invite me to be on a podcast, I’ve put some information about how to do that up there, too.)
An aside:
The comments section on my guest ACX post was really quite lively; it allowed me to make some points more clearly than I usually do in my posts here. Some of my favorite threads were
this Debbie-Downer pushback on what hopes we can have for schools,
this disagreement about how to make things “relevant” for middle schoolers, and
this observation about the rhyming scheme in Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poem “Ozymandias”.
Thanks to everyone who participated there.
Ask me how I know!
Possibly everyone except for Freddie deBoer, who provides the crucial ecosystemic role of keeping the rest of us honest.