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Vicki Williams's avatar

The path from Egan’s theory to practice is unclear. Therefore:

1. Egan based practical advice / standards coalesce into different warring factions. There’s no clear winner and resources get wasted just trying to make the other guys look bad.

And / or

2. Egan based practical advice / standards are vague and undifferentiated from standard best practices. (Eg storytelling) Results are therefore ok, but not significantly different from the status quo.

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Education, like parenting, doesn’t really matter. Once you get passed a low baseline (don’t abuse them!), kids will be who they will be.

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Andrew Wright's avatar

What if it doesn't scale?

It seems that Egan's ideas could work very well for teachers of smaller classes who are willing to adapt their curriculum to their students needs. In a larger classroom with a wide diversity of abilities, knowledge and interests, this gets much harder. In fact, I find managing this diversity the most consistently difficult and confounding issue I face as an experienced teacher.

Because Egan teachers ask students to engage more deeply with the material, at the level of meaning rather than at the level of output, it may be more difficult to pull in students who are simply seeking to learn relevant skills and go home.

What if Egan's methods distract from the true purpose of education? What if all the students attending after-school math tutorial, grinding standardized test results and making it into competitive universities are actually going to eat the world?

Geez I feel like Riker prosecuting Data in Measure of a Man...

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