Hey, all! In my never-ending quest to actually write this blog (in this, a period of helping people actually create what we’re talking about), I’ve decided to try something new. I’ve lately been exchanging letters about Egan education with a fellow homeschool dad. Our correspondence has actually become quite voluminous, and he’s given me permission to share both my responses and his letters (well, most of them).
His name is Elias, and he’s told me it’s okay if I publicly describe him as “eccentric”, and also “very, very eccentric”. He said it’s on-brand for him, which honestly is a strange expression to hear from a person who’s living with his wife and three kids in an abandoned Pentecostal church in the woods. (Also, he mostly sends me hand-written letters, some written with what appears to be . . . quill?)
I’ll be sharing these mostly in order. In this one, we talk about what one practice might be the anchor of an Egan homeschooling education. Elias writes:
The wireframes were working for us, but I’m missing so many of the pieces, and you have gone radio silent—WHY?!—on the whole process. So I have to know: will this project be left unfinished?
Hullo, Elias!
I apologize profusely for — goodness, it feels overwrought to say “abandoning you in your hour of need”, but I’ve gotten other emails from people who were counting on my series of “Egan education practices”. (One of them actually pulled his kids out of school because he thought he could depend on them!)
But here’s what I’ll do: answer your questions, and put them up on the blog for everyone to see. I’m hopeful that corresponding might make these easier for me to write.
And can you perhaps start back in with the thing that I need most: a reference point. We four homeschoolers (I’m counting myself) have so many different projects in process. I think we need a moment of convergence—an anchor in our day, a foundational practice that can be adjusted for each of us—that we can use to chart our progress and to reassure and remind ourselves that we are proceeding according to Egan’s principles. That’s my first question.
Hmm — I’m hearing you say that you’re looking for one daily practice that can be the linchpin of an Egan education. If that’s right, I suppose I could suggest a number of things.
The Big Spiral History course that we’re making is (1) fully Eganized, (2) simple, (3) easy, (4) quick, and (5) a long list of other adjectives that basically mean “simple, easy, and quick”. So, that could be helpful! And like I’ve said elsewhere, history (particularly when welded to Big History) is the glue that binds everything together. It connects everything that we teach and learn into the big story of life, the universe, and everything.
And if that doesn’t float your boat, you could make the geography curriculum (the one that I wrote up earlier this year) the anchor. Geography is such low-hanging fruit for Eganization — every place is filled with wonder, and the books that we suggested there (especially the Atlas Obscura guides) make it so easy to tap into that wonder. And geography is the handmaiden of history.
But — but! — if you want something more general, can I suggest something very different — the Memory Box?
I’ve written a bit about the Memory Box on the blog, but I don’t think that I’ve expressed how central we see it being for Egan education.
So, in short: every day, take a few minutes to reflect, and then write down one meaningful thing that you learned.
We can Eganize this simple process further, though, by making it a ritual.
Note that I didn’t say “make a habit of it”. My favorite college professor — Dr. Karen Bruhn, whose PhD was in Religious Studies — once asked us what’s the difference between a “ritual” and a “habit”. I’ve been reflecting on that for decades now, and I think the answer is “the experience of meaning”. We don’t want the Memory Box to be an automatic practice—we want it be rich with meaning.
So, some ideas for how to ritualize the Memory Box:
Keep to one time of day and one spot in your home.
Dim the lights, and then add in a special light — a candle,1 a lantern, or a particular lamp.
Put on some “reflection-inducing” music — Arvo Pärt’s “Spiegel im Spiegel” or Bach’s “Aria” from the Goldberg Variations wouldn’t be a terrible place to start. (Note that these also gently time-bracket the exercise.)
Repeat the words that prompt it. I’m thinking of something histrionic like “All that we’ve learned today will be forgotten; what do you want to save from the fire?” This, of course, can evolve (as good rituals do).
Most importantly, limit yourself to one card.
(And then, just in case you don’t remember, review these in spaced repetitions! I’ve sketched out one method of doing so that’s also ritual-heavy… at the low, low cost of being moon-based and kinda eccentric. But I guess that’s “on-brand” for you?)
A fun wrinkle here: the first time I met Kieran Egan, I presented him with two ideas. The second was Big Spiral History, to which he reacted very positively. The first, though, was spaced-repetition flashcards (specifically, Anki), to which he reacted very . . . politely.
“Ah yes”, I recall him saying, “Hermann Ebbinghaus’s work. I believe I once taught about that when I was roped into teaching psychology of education.”
(Reading his memoir, I later discovered that Kieran had a rather low view of educational psychology. Teaching that course, in fact, was the spark that led him to conclude that a confusion of educational psychology with curriculum theory was a slice of what’s wrong with education, but that’s a different story.)
But I think Kieran was wrong about this one, and for an interesting reason: I think in spaced-repetition he was only seeing the “remembering”, and missing the “forgetting”.
Yeah, I’m not being clear. How can I put this better?
Egan’s philosophy of education, as you wrote, is a sprawling complex of complexes. It’s hard work to beat it into forms that can be used easily without losing the philosophy’s power. There are “ways of understanding” and “tools” and “narrativization” and other things besides. But the beating heart of the whole philosophy is meaning-making.
On one level, any kind of memory is meaningful, because our memories are part of our selves. This is literally true: a memory is a linking of neurons, a literal adding of glutamate receptors in a synapse. Every time you forget something, you’re losing part of yourself. You’re being erased a little bit every hour of the day. (And can you tell that Alzheimer’s runs in my family? I have frequent occasions to meditate on forgetting.) To retain a memory is to secure a bit of ourselves.
But there’s another level to it: choosing what to remember — what to enter into our spaced-repetition system — is an opportunity to reflect on what’s meaningful to us. That gives it extra meaning! And then the repetitions of that piece of information (over the next days and weeks and years) are chances to deepen and extend its meaning, and to connect it up with the other meaningful things we’ve learned.
Meaning, meaning, meaning. Not bad for an activity that takes something like 10 minutes a day.
There’s more to the letter — we go into talking about how to teach reading — but that’s a good place to stop for a blog post. If you’re new here, you might enjoy these two earlier posts about spaced repetition:
I wanted to joke and say “a candle, if you’re a danger-loving maniac who’ll risk burning his house down!” as a way to make fun of safetyist parents . . . but honestly, hearing you talk about your home setup, lighting a candle could be a bit too dangerous for you. Stay safe.