Of Egan and excellence

And of mastery and metaphors (and bloggers and banter, I could do this all day)

The question of the month:

What’s the role of excellence in the sort of education we’re creating?

I had a wonderful conversation with an expert about this recently, and fear that I biffed my answer. But first, a bit of backstory.

1: LessOnline

Last month I attended LessOnline, the annual rationalist blogger conference in San Francisco. If this newsletter is the closest you get to the rationalist community, feel free to skip this section! But otherwise…

LessOnline is a conference (“unconference”? “block party for geeks”?) bringing together some of the best writers and thinkers in the rationalist-and-rationalist-adjacent spheres.¹ It was held on the gorgeous Lighthaven campus in Berkeley, California, a hodgepodge of nook-filled buildings and unspeakably gorgeous outdoor spaces all so human that it might have been designed by the ghost of Christopher Alexander himself.

Five-hundred-ish attendees milled about, getting into random intense conversations about such things as metaethics, the AI apocalypse, the undeciphered alphabet of Linear B,² and neuroscience. Anyone could launch a breakout session, and anyone did! Noteables included…

• Justin

  Kuiper
  , a scriptwriter for The Film Theorists, explaining how to build a YouTube channel leveraging clickbait-y titles to explore intellectual questions

• Justis Mills
  , LessWrong’s writing guru, giving tips on what not to obsess about in blogging, and

• Austin Chen
  , cofounder of Manifund, explaining how to start weird businesses.

And so many, many other things: chocolate tastings and Walt Whitman readings and p(doom) panels and an impromptu posture clinic. One highlight was when I read the name tag of a woman across the dining room as the very same name as one of the paid subscribers to this newsletter, and geekily ran the Bayesian probability to determine if she was same person.³

The attendees were, to a person, insanely well-read. Conversations skipped preambles: you could start with the assumption that the rando you were talking to already understood 80% of the fundamentals in whatever topic you’d alighted on, and you could cut to the big questions. At one point huddled around a fire far past midnight, Matt Arnold of the

Fluidity Forum Newsletter

exclaimed “the conversations here really are world-class”, and I could tell he was right because I was talking to Matt Arnold!

This was the conference’s second year, and my first. It’s expensive, and I don’t like spending money, but if they hold it next year, I plan to be back — if you think you might enjoy meeting me there, think about attending. My hunch is that they’ll do it again around the end of May.

The biggest highlight for me, though, was doing a public dialogue with Jack Despain Zhou.

2: You might know Jack!

Jack — better known online as TracingWoodgrains⁴ — has been one of my favorite writers for years. Like (I assume) all of us, his first claim to fame was winning one of Scott Alexander’s writing contests with a long essay about education. Since then he’s gained fame as a journalist, breaking stories both national and important and utterly provincial (yet seriously mind-bending).

I’ve been following him for a long time. But earlier this year he seized my attention by announcing that he was starting an organization — the Center for Educational Progress. He laid out his reasons in a personal blog post. A taste:

It’s not that my school was bad, as schools go. It was a reasonably affluent elementary school in suburban Utah County. And it’s not like my teachers were cruel or bad or even unpleasant—almost every educator in my life has seemed to genuinely want the best for me. But they had many kids to pay attention to. For me, school started slow, it stayed slow, and for my entire childhood, I learned that school was the place where I toss in some hastily scrawled work at the last minute and get a gold star.

The whole way through—start to finish—I wanted something else. Something sharper, grander, more serious. Something that I had a vague picture of, that I fundamentally felt should exist, but that I could not find.

An intrusive thought, again and again: something has gone terribly wrong in education.

So you can imagine how excited I was when he invited me to do a breakout session to get to the bottom of our disagreements.

3: Schools should pursue excellence

Jack has a clear vision: schools should help students build skills. This is grounded in a moral seriousness I admire. In the end, I’m going to give a critique of it, but first let me share some choice quotes from his (excellent) manifesto, “Schools Should Pursue Excellence”:⁵

it is possible and worthwhile for students at all levels to push themselves to their limits.

Education…. is a never-ending upward climb along which people should be enabled to proceed as far and as fast as they can.

To reignite the flame of progress in schools, we must embrace the pursuit of excellence.

If this sounds like boilerplate “rah-rah education!” stuff to you, you should understand the context. Jack is pounding his fist on one of the big red buttons in the rationalist community. For years, the conversation there has been framed by two people: Freddie deBoer, author of The Cult of Smart: How Our Broken Education System Perpetuates Social Injustice, and Bryan Caplan, author of The Case against Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money. The two disagree about almost everything — deBoer is a Marxist organizer and Caplan is a libertarian economist — but they come together to agree that schools don’t work.⁶

Look: I love both of these books. They’re the most clear-headed educational writing I’ve read, and both Jack and I agree that schools mostly don’t work. And beyond that, I love both deBoer and Caplan as thinkers: they frequently help me see huge problems in the world I’d otherwise miss. But I think their effect on the conversation about education, among rationalists, has had a bad effect: their (evidence-backed! correct!) arguments that schools don’t work slides into the conviction that schools can’t work. One puts down their books thinking that education innovation is a game for fools.

Scott Alexander, whose blog might be the center of the rationalist movement, laid out the case for this stronger conviction a year ago in his post “A Theoretical Case Against Education”. There wasn’t much pushback from the community.

Jack and I agree that schools mostly don’t work — and we both think they can. Here, I’m grateful for the work he’s doing.

Jack is optimistic for a very simple reason: we’ve all experienced effective education. In our dialogue, he cited learning Chinese. It’s very hard to learn Chinese as an adult! And yet you can purchase books on Chinese, watch YouTube videos, go to classes, and if you have the proper motivation and healthy human brain, you can learn it. The fact that some education works means that the most pessimistic takes can’t be correct.

Jack points out it’s not just Chinese:

[W]e’ve barely begun to imagine how well education can work.

We’re ready to try the policies that education schools don’t like. Direct instruction works. Acceleration works. Ability grouping works. Aristocratic tutoring works. The pursuit of excellence is not only possible, it is pleading to be tried. We already know what changes to start with—the failure to implement is one of will. We’re ready to do the work.

Jack is so good at arguing this. Unlike most reformers, he begins with an honest assessment of how profoundly schools, at present, fail at their basic job. But unlike most of the rest of the rationalists, he argues that they can. He channels his intensity into righteous fury, which (I can now say from experience) makes him a lot of fun at parties. He is a source of thrilling, happy argument, and one of my favorite people to talk to about education.

Which is good — because we have a deep divide between us!

4: Our disagreement, in a nutshell

We shared a stage for an hour, asking questions of each other to get to the bottom of where we disagree. Here’s my recollection of how the sixty minutes went:

Jack: Schools should be machines that help students construct skills.
Me: Yes! But that means we should put a lot of time into helping students fall in love with the academic subjects.
Jack: Yes.

In the talk, we discovered that while we had different emphases, we couldn’t find anything specific that we disagreed on. Great! Wonderful! A happy scene of harmony!

However, that’s not how some of the folks in the audience heard it. As one attendee told me afterwards:

in every instance in which you and Jack disagreed, I side with Jack.

Aw crap. Reflecting on this, I suspect fear that what a lot of the audience interpreted me as saying something like:

learning is fun! we should put serious skill-building to the side, and invest more energy in helping kids explore topics so they become curious. If we do that, we can trust that they’ll develop excellence later.

If this is indeed how I came across: dang it. I despise that approach to education. I’m very much on the side of building serious mastery — not for nothing did I spend fifteen years studying deliberate practice, microscaffolding, and spaced repetition, and learning to apply them to create an SAT curriculum that actually improved kids’ scores.⁷

The education we’re building is intensely skill-focused. In the short-term, it delivers more knowledge, understanding, and opportunities to build mastery than even most of the flavors of education that (superficially) make a bigger deal of skills. In the long-term, I suspect (and look forward to someday trying to measure), it will deliver much more.

If that’s true — and in the comments, please poke me with critical questions — then why did I suck so badly at explaining this? And what’s the deep disagreement that (I suspect) still divides Jack and me?

5: Why did I suck at talking about skill?

Imaginary Interlocutor: I think I can save us all a bunch of time. Was it because you’re focused on elementary school, and he’s focused on high school?

No, not at all.

It is true that I spend a lot of time these days thinking about the lower grades. Our ultimate goals are to enable parents and schools to do Egan education all the way from preschool to high school, but like Lao Tzu said, “A journey of a thousand miles begins by nailing down the g**d**** elementary school curriculum.” But we’re making these intellectually rich — far richer than any elementary school curriculum that we know of presently existing.⁸

So, nope. But I think there are two other reasons I failed to communicate how much skill we’re building at all levels. (Note: if you’re more into practicalities than theory, feel free to jump to the next section.)

Reason #1: Not taking a side in the Prog/Trad war

It’s useful, when chatting about education, to recognize that all our conversations about it take place inside a century-long war. On one side sit the Traditionalists, who believe the purpose of education is something like “transmit the accumulated knowledge and cultural inheritance of civilization”. They emphasize rigor, discipline, and authority. They often favor structured curricula, clear hierarchies, and the centrality of subjects like math, science, and classic literature. To them, students are apprentices in a long tradition; schools are temples to intellectual order.

On the other side sit the Progressivists, who believe the purpose of education is to foster the growth of the child. They emphasize curiosity, creativity, and relevance. They often favor project-based learning, emotional engagement, and curricula tailored to the student’s interests and experiences. To them, students are developing organisms or co-creators of knowledge; schools are laboratories for democratic life.

Which is to say that people have two “boxes” for educational ideas, and their brains will naturally try to put new ideas in one of the two.

Imaginary Interlocutor: I’ve read your book review — how does this war jibe with the “SAD triangle” Egan laid out?

Egan observed that we ask schools to perform three different jobs:

This (I think) was a way of talking about this war without poking anyone in the eye. But, deciphered, Traditionalists mostly live on the left side, and Progressivists on the right.

Imaginary Interlocutor: Which of these camps does Egan education fit into?

None of them! And I’m belatedly realizing that, rhetorically, this is a huge problem, because it means that Progressivists are prone to see Egan education as evil Traditionalism, and Traditionalists are prone to see it as icky Progressivism. If you sit on the fence, you get shot from both sides: this is an old story.

Egan recognized this, and in fact some of the most fun parts of his book The Future of Education explore this through fictional dialogues.

Imaginary Interlocutor: So Egan education is, like, halfway between them, right?

The full answer to this is complex, and I’ll (by necessity) be answering it as I go through my series of workshops this summer, which’ll lay out what the first four years of Egan education can look like across the subjects.

The clearest answer I can give right now is —

1. No, Egan education is a third thing.

2. It’s a third thing that gives a lot of the academics that Traditionalists want, and a lot of the personal development that Progressivists want.

3. It’s a different kind of approach that doesn’t answer all the questions that Traditionalists & Progressivists ask, and so, in practice, educators who use it will still need to lean toward Traditionalism, Progressivism, or in the middle.

Reason #2: Using an organic metaphor

Once upon a time I was having coffee with the cultural theorist Joe Brewer, co-author of Dumb Ideas for Smart Kids. And he told me that, when you communicate new educational ideas to people, you need to make a choice: do you want to use an organic metaphor, or a mechanical one? Which metaphor you choose, he suggested, ends up choosing a lot for you.

Pick one.

Choose “organic” and you’ll focus on environments, interdependence, and growth. Students are seedlings, classes are ecosystems, teachers are gardeners. The goal is to nurture flourishing, which means respect, care, and patience.

Choose “mechanical”, however, and you’ll focus on efficiency, precision, and standardization. Students are raw materials, classes are gears, teachers are technicians. The goal is to improve the production, which means measurement, measurement, measurement.

I still think this is sage advice. At the time, I was about to start a microschool in Seattle. And in Seattle, the market for alternative education leans toward touchy-feely, emotional stuff (or at least I thought so at the time). So I decided to go “organic”… and now I realize I’ve never gone back to reconsider that choice.

Maybe that was a mistake? Or maybe I need to do some clever metaphor jujitsu, and point to a third thing — say, the molecular machines that all organic matter is made up of:

At the moment, I’m not sure. If you have notions, share ‘em in the comments.

6: Mastery is harder than you think

Imaginary Interlocutor: I’m confused — do you and Jack actually disagree with each other, or not?

This is something we both want to keep exploring. I suspect, at least, that we approach the question of excellence differently.

Let me try — and presumably fail! — to sketch how we might differ. I don’t want to put words in his mouth, so let me instead imagine this as a conversation through two cartoon-y advocates of our respective sides.

Proponent of Excellence (POE): We need to help students pursue excellence.

Egan educator (EE): Agreed! The question is, how?

POE: Happily, scientists have been working for years to answer that question. While this will always be an evolving science, we already have so many of the building blocks. We know how to teach kids to read, to focus, to lock in long-term memories, and so much more. Meanwhile most schools are committed to ideas of teaching that spurn everything we’ve come to understand about cognitive science! The Center for Educational Progress has compiled a reading list for anyone interested in learning more.

EE: I’m a fan of most of those books, but I think mastery is actually harder than you think.

POE: Oh, I definitely don’t think mastery is easy — it requires focus, the ability to withstand a little suffering, and persistence over years.

EE: Agreed, but that’s just mastery of the school curriculum. Mastery of the actual ideas that scholars have devised is much harder still.

POE: I’m not sure I’m seeing the difference you’re positing here.

EE: Maybe it’ll be clearer if I use a different term to describe what I’m talking about. “Mastery” is about getting the academic curriculum into our heads. “Brilliance” is about more: coming to understand the curriculum so deeply that they become utterly simple, tools that we whip out and use to understand the complex world.

POE: But to get to brilliance you first have to go through mastery, right?

EE: Yes.

POE: Then doesn’t it make sense to first focus on getting to mastery, and then moving onto brilliance?

EE: Not necessarily: you may want to first invest in the motivation and deeper skills to get to brilliance. A metaphor: in my last year of college a friend and I started hiking Phoenix’s Camelback Mountain every week. It rises about 1,400 feet above the local terrain, and (in my memory) took about 90 minutes round-trip. This isn’t really that big. Camelback isn’t actually a “mountain”, it’s a butte — a big chunk of sandstone. It was a good, hard hike for someone who was as out of shape as me.

Fourteen hundred feet

POE: Fun story! Feel free to make your point anytime.

EE: Mastery is Camelback: you can just start walking up it. Brilliance is more like Mt. Rainier. Rainier is 14,000 feet tall; it takes more than 12 hours to hike it. You have to prepare for it physically and mentally. It helps to invest in the proper gear. Sometimes, unprepared people die going up. The moral of the story: before you start your hike, know what mountain you’re climbing, and prepare accordingly.

Fourteen thousand feet

POE: How does one “prepare” to develop brilliance?

EE: Brilliance requires much more than diligence in doing your classwork: it requires calling the ideas to mind outside of school, of questioning them and applying them in new ways. To be brilliant in trigonometry, you need to be estimating the heights of buildings and clouds as you stroll outside. To be brilliant in writing, you need to be wrestling with sentences as you read The Lord of the Rings on a Saturday afternoon. In other words, it helps to be a little obsessed with what you’re learning in school.

POE: Sure, but everyone already has their own random obsessions; we should let people differentiate and focus on developing the skills they’re best at. This is why I’m not just an educational traditionalist who demands everyone learn the same “core curriculum” — I’m also an educational progressivist who believes that we can have multiple routes of excellence, based on students’ interests.

EE: There’s real wisdom in this. But there’s also a blind spot: educational progressivism often treats “interests” as inborn, and beyond our ability to help cultivate.

POE: Surely that’s sometimes correct: we’ve all known a kid who’s obsessed with trains, or with anime, or whatever. Their interest seems hard-wired.

EE: Absolutely, there are obviously genetic components to interests — but there are also cultural ones. How else could we explain why people in the ’80s got really into solving Rubik’s cubes, why kids in the ’90s spent large fractions of their free time reading Goosebumps, or why teens in the aughts formed part of their identity around Harry Potter? Or why today’s idealistic college students know a lot more of scholarly terms like “intersectionality” and “microagressions” and “gaslighting” than we did at their age?

POE: I mean, idiosyncratic cultural reasons? Now we’re outside the light that hard science can cast on cognition.

EE: But some of the social sciences can! A modern understanding of education needs to pull from all the human sciences. Schools need to make use of the tools of culture that anthropology and cultural psychology have chronicled — especially stories, emotional binaries, gossip, a fascination with limits, and a lust for the extremes.

POE: To what end?

EE: To infect kids with the fascination of the academic subjects. To nudge students, in everything we do, toward becoming relentlessly curious about these topics. To making them see that these things matter, that they help us engage with the true, the beautiful, and the good, that being entering into these centuries-long conversations is a way to expand yourself as a person and to gain real power in the world.

POE: You’re making me nervous; this is the sort of language that unserious educators often use to hide the fact that they’re not really teaching anything serious.

EE: Yes; welcome to my personal hell.

And truly, this is the sort of educational goal that’s so much easier said than done! Better educational rhetoric will not save us. That’s why I’ve been working so hard to put together a guide for what this approach to education can look like, now, with your own kids, in the workshop series for parents I’ll be starting in a couple weeks. It’ll be nice to be able to point to specifics in that, rather than just talking theory.

7: In Sum

Real mastery is harder than most people think. The tools that educational traditionalists often push for — drills, direct instruction, spaced repetition — are absolutely needed, but they’re not enough.

Now, there are actually quite a few things that this approach to education can offer to help make mastery easier. There are tools that make it easier to pay attention. There are tools that make complex concepts much simpler to understand. There are tools that lock memories into student’s minds. All these tools are useful, though this post doesn’t address them.

But to help people become brilliant, we need the big guns: we need to pick up the tools that give birth to political, social, and religious movements and use them to help infect kids with the love of math, writing, science, and so on.

Pulling these things together has not yet been done at scale. It’s a part of the challenge that lies before us. And oh, is it fun to get to create.

If you find Jack’s work in education interesting, you’ll want to subscribe to the newsletter from The Center for Educational Progress:

And if you like the work that I’m doing — and are even willing to forgive the fact that it can take me a solid month to write up the experiences I had at a conference! — you can support me through a paid subscription.

1. Most people in the rationalist community will hem and haw as to whether they’re really “rationalists”, so the phrase rationalist-and-rationalist-adjacent gets used quite a lot.

2. This came up twice in conversation with different people, for some reason? Anyone else who was there, did this happen to you, too?

3. She was! Hi, Emma!

4. Ten points for Ravenclaw if you catch the reference.

5. Co-written, I should add, by the excellent Liliana Tara.

6. Not that either deBoer or Caplan would call themselves “rationalists”! But they both wield sway inside the community, and set set the frame for the conversation. Not for nothing did I cite both in my book review of Kieran Egan’s Educated Mind.

7. “Well yes, obviously SAT coaching improves scores.” Actually, no! Most SAT prep doesn’t, at least not beyond a little bit. But it can if you build it around cognitive science — this is where my Deep Practice Book came from.

8. I typically avoid talking about Science is WEIRD on here — I’m allergic to things that seem “sales-y” — but if you doubt my sincerity here, note that we back up these claims with a guarantee: elementary and middle schoolers will learn as much science in a month as they did in the last year or their money back. Which people take advantage of occasionally!