The book review
The new kind of education this newsletter is forever crowing about is grounded on the paradigm of Kieran Egan, a recently-deceased educational philosopher. His ideas are famously hard to distill; in 2023 I hurled myself into explaining them as clearly as possible for the Astral Codex Ten book review contest. I chose Egan’s 1997 opus, The Educated Mind. My entry won… which was the start of this newsletter.
If you find the ideas in this newsletter intriguing, you probably want to read the book review.1 It gives the big picture, and shows how even the details of what we’re doing draw their power from the whole.
The review itself
Oh my it’s long. (In the comments to the book review, someone wrote “Next year, someone will submit an entire book, and we won’t notice.”)
The book review can be found online on Astral Codex Ten. If reading on paper is your thing, a beautifully-formatted PDF of it can be found here. And Ross Richey (who runs the newsletter and podcast We Are Not Saved) was kind enough to spend three hours recording it as an episode of the Astral Codex podcast. You can listen to that episode on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, on the web, or, y’know, wherever you listen to podcasts (look up “Astral Codex Ten”, and then “The Educated Mind”).
The stuff behind the review
The summaries
Again: Egan’s ideas are famously hard to distill. I knew that to have a chance of success, I’d need to re-read his book THOROUGHLY.
I started in, and began to underline one sentence — the key idea — from each and every paragraph.
Then I went back through and summarized each of those sentences in my own words, in pen, in the margin.
Then I went back through and typed those up so they’d flow together. Each paragraph was turned into a sentence, each section became a paragraph, and each chapter become a document.2
Imaginary Interlocutor: Pics or it didn’t happen!
They’re all yours! Here are the distillations of the first five chapters:
The workshops
Then I realized that this wouldn’t be enough — I had to Eganize Egan. I had to find a way to express his paradigm through the elements of story. So I reached out to some trusted homeschooling parents, and did a draft 1-hour workshop, in which I presented his ideas.
It… didn’t go well. It was stillborn, a trainwreck, a dumpster fire behind an oily rag factory. Its failure was complete.
It made me realize that I wasn’t yet ready to squeeze Egan’s paradigm into an hour. So I scheduled five hour-long workshops, in each of which I’d express one of the load-bearing chapters of his book.3
They each went about two hours.
Sigh.
But it was in those workshops — which I’ve now put on YouTube — that I first beat out my new way of expressing Egan’s paradigm. If “listening to, and maybe occasionally glancing at, really long YouTube videos” is your thing, have at it!
Um, you can also read Egan’s book! But honestly, he wrote a lot, and most of it was more approachable. If you’d like some suggestions, I give some in a post.
I call this “book distillation”, and I used to have high schoolers do it on particularly hard philosophy books. Thanks to Mortimer Adler’s How to Read a Book for the inspiration.
There are some other chapters in Educated Mind: an imaginative Q-and-A, a chapter on what this means for the curriculum, and a chapter on what this means for classroom teaching. I brought insights from those — especially the curriculum chapter — into the workshops.