(2023-08-21) Hendrickson Book Review The Educated Mind

Brandon Hendrickson: Your Book Review: The Educated Mind. Could a new kind of school make the world rational? I discovered the work of Kieran Egan in a dreary academic library. The book I happened to find — Getting it Wrong from the Beginning — was an evisceration of progressive schools. As I worked at one at the time, I got a kick out of this.

Egan’s account went to the root, deeper than any critique I had found. Better yet, as I read more, I discovered he was against traditionalist education, too — and that he had constructed a new paradigm that incorporated the best of both.

I was a teacher, and had at that point in my life begun to despair that all the flashy exciting educational theories

*Each approach promised to elevate their students’ ability to reason and live well in the world, but the adults I saw coming out of their programs seemed not terribly different from people who didn’t.

They seemed just about as likely to become climate deniers or climate doomers as the average normie, just as likely to become staunch anti-vaxxers or covid isolationists.*

I began to systematically experiment with it — using it to teach science, math, history, world religions, philosophy, to students from elementary school to college

Kieran Egan

taught at Simon Fraser University.

As a young man, he became a novice at a Franciscan monastery. By the time he died, he was an atheist, but — he would make clear — a Catholic atheist

he won the Grawmeyer Award — perhaps educational theory’s highest prize.

He died last year

This is a review of his 1997 book, The Educated Mind: How Cognitive Tools Shape Our Understanding.

at the root of his paradigm is a novel theory about why schools, as they are now, don’t work

Part 1: Why don’t schools work? (Schooling)

A school is a hole we fill with money

“Despite, or because, the vast expenditures of money and energy, finding anyone inside or outside the education system who is content with its performance is difficult.”

Imagine a group of 100 American adults, chosen at random. They’ve sat through years of science lessons, so you decide to ask them some basic questions. What will they know?

Bryan Caplan, in his book The Case Against Education, cites surveys of what Americans know about basic scientific concepts

of the hundred adults

only 54 know that the Earth goes around the Sun

only 29 know that ordinary (as opposed to GMO) tomatoes have genes

Researchers at Johns Hopkins, M.I.T., and other well-regarded universities have documented that students who receive honor grades in college-level physics courses are frequently unable to solve basic problems and questions encountered in a form slightly different from that on which they have been formally instructed and tested.”

Okay, but schools teach reading, writing, and math… right?
Basic literacy and numeracy: yes. Adult-level: no.

while 78% could “calculate the cost of a sandwich and a salad, using prices from a menu”, only 13% could “calculate an employee’s share of health insurance costs for a year, using a table that shows how the employee’s monthly cost varies with income and family size”.

The usual suspects

Ask around, and you’ll find people’s mouths overflowing with answers. “Lazy teachers!” cry some; “unaccountable administrators” grumble others.

Egan’s not having any of it. He thinks all these players are caught in a bigger, stickier web. Egan’s villain is an idea.

What’s the job we’ve been giving them? If we rifle through history, Egan suggests we’ll find three potential answers.

Job 1: Shape kids for society

Egan dubs this job “socialization”

Fresh off the death of his mentor Socrates, Plato argued that, however wonderful the benefits of socialization, the adults that it produced were the slaves of convention. So long as people were shaped by socialization, they were doomed to repeat the follies of the past

Egan dubs this job “academics”. A school built on the academic model will help students reflect on reality.

Job 2: Fill kids’ minds with truth

Job 3: Cultivate each kid’s uniqueness

1762, Jean-Jacques Rousseau looked out at his fellow academically-trained European intellectuals, and called them asses loaded with books

We should work hard to understand what a child’s nature is, and plan accordingly.

Egan dubs this job “development”.

Egan wants you to know they’re all crap. None of them, by themselves, can give us the kinds of schools we want.

there’s no way a purely developmental approach could possibly work!

I can attest from personal experience that even fairly serious attempts to raise children in an accepting community of peers often crash and burn when faced with actual human nature.

Fine, fine. I’m not a fan of socialization, but I’ll ask the question — what’s wrong with it? The funny thing is that of the three, this is the only one that has shown its ability to work for a long stretch of time!

That said, it would be impossible for schooling today to seek only to socialize. That would require that members of a society share values, and fundamentally agree that their society is good

Which combination is best?

What’s the problem in combining academics with development?

lots of kids don’t naturally want to be academics.

what we’re reminded of, when we see these historically, is that these jobs were meant to supplant each other. Put together, they sabotage each other.

Of the three possible jobs, which are we asking mainstream schools to perform? Egan answers: all three.

What about alternative schools?

Radical unschooling is in the upper-right, classical education (with its focus on feeding kids “the best that’s been thought or said”) is in the upper-left, and votech is in the bottom corner

I’ve worked with radical unschoolers, and while their skills have often been lopsided (not learning math is an acknowledged issue in the community), they’ve all at least exhibited a zeal for learning the topics they’ve been interested in. (Video games, frequently.)

a massive study in the early 2000s that asked which kinds of schools actually improved student test scores controlling for the effects of socioeconomics. What it found was that only two types of schools stood out: Catholic schools that were operated by a religious order (e.g. the Jesuits — not local parish schools), and vocational schools.

At the moment, the conversation about schools in the United States, at least, seems to have hit an all-time pessimistic blech. Fredrik deBoer speaks for a lot of people when he says “Even the most optimistic reading of the research literature suggests that almost nothing moves the needle in academic outcomes. Almost nothing we try works.”

perhaps you have your own pet reform proposal. Sure — add it to the heap! What Egan suggests, though, is that so long as we’re bopping around this triangle of jobs, we won’t be able to get the schools that we want.

Part 2: A new kind of elementary school

Ironically, Egan thinks it's all the fault of Plato and Rousseau. Hidden in the ways that both the academicists and developmentalist think about education is an assumption: that children’s reasoning is basically the same as adult reasoning, but lesser.

Egan actually does think that there’s an intensity to how children perceive the world that we lose

This notion of “developmentally appropriate” took on a scientific sheen with the work of Jean Piaget, the famous Swiss psychologist.

does it really strike you as likely that kids are incapable of understanding anything that happened long ago or far away? How, Egan asks, can we explain the $50 billion success of a movie franchise aimed at children that literally begins “A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away?”

children seem to lose IQ points the moment they step into a classroom. Egan agrees, and suggests that we think of ourselves as primatologists to kids, Jane Goodalls who investigate children “out in the wild” to see the sorts of things they gravitate to, and do fairly well at.

Kids tell jokes, for one. They get mental images stuck in their heads, for another. They engage in role-playing, get lost in reverie, and beat out rhythms when they’re bored. They make ample use of metaphors, tell stories, and insist on seeing the world in terms of abstract binaries (e.g. stupid/smart,

What could an intellectually rich elementary school curriculum look like, if we built it on kids’ cognitive strengths?

rich oral traditions: they told simple stories, recited poems, and shared proverbs

being immersed in the natural world.

What we want “is less an attempt to know about nature as to know it in some participatory way, to know it as something we are an intimate part of, not set off from”.

Elementary math (Basic Arithmetic)
What was math before it was math? Egan suggests: counting and logic. We might, then, use rhythms, metaphors, stories, and jokes to help kids become fond of these.

Logic — I’m intrigued! Aristotelian, or Boolean? Neither, for the time being

There’s an entire worldwide network of educators, in fact, called Philosophy for Children, who have written whole books about how to do this, and Egan loves it all.

Elementary science

Elementary arts
What was art before it was art? Egan suggests we pop our heads into Paleolithic caves for our inspiration.

Egan thinks it obvious that they were also an attempt to capture an intense experience that would be difficult to express in words alone

we don’t want to help kids build “art skills” so they can draw like an adult — rather, we want to help them amass a repository of diverse aesthetic feelings that they’ll want to express. We should provide them with a riot of experiences.

An interesting aspect of Egan’s view of education is that he doesn’t seem to think we should push kids right to the “doing” phase. He wants to help kids cultivate an affective relationship with the world.

he writes that as students get more experienced, we should prompt them to move from merely enjoying these experiences to trying to systematically shape similar experiences. And drawing, painting, and playing music could easily be folded into other parts of the curriculum.

He suggests we very carefully pick up the elementary social studies curriculum, place it into a trash can, and set the whole mess on fire.

*In its place, he suggests we put history — which, he hints, we should think of as the centerpiece of the elementary curriculum.

So the real question is what was history before it was history? His answer, surprisingly, is myth.*

we look at how myths operate as narratives — so we can design an intellectually vivid history curriculum.

So what history does he think kids should learn in elementary school?
The great struggles of humanity from across the whole. Flippin’. World.

Egan suggests that, in first grade, we pick a single binary like “freedom against oppression” and tell kids a welter of stories, again from as many cultures as possible, and as many times in history as possible.

What stories might they hear in second and third grade?
Egan gives examples, but I won’t list them here. He suggests we use a similar approach for each, except that we swap out the binary each year. He thinks “the struggle for security against danger” would work well for year two, and “the struggle for knowledge against ignorance” would work well for year three.

they should get a sense of Big History. They should get some simple stories about the ice age, the Cenozoic, the age of dinosaurs, the Paleozoic, the origins of our solar system, and the Big Bang.

It really is interesting that so much of the “constructivist” turn in psychology — that is, the notion that children don’t absorb knowledge, but construct it — has continued to focus on logics-mathematical reasoning, when there’s been mounting evidence for decades that metaphors are more central.

Your talk of “binaries” has me worried — binaries like good/evil and male/female are the source of so many of our most pernicious stereotypes! Isn’t the purpose of education to get us beyond stuff like this?
Yes, it is! Education is supposed to complicate our understanding — but that means we’ve gotta start somewhere, and binaries provide us a natural starting place.

Egan is actually quite big on memorization — he points out that all the knowledge in the world can do nothing for a person once they’ve forgotten it. He didn’t, however, appreciate the academicist focus on memorizing without understanding (or at least enjoyment).

While I strongly suspect that his curriculum would make kids more creative in any way you’d like to measure it, Egan wasn’t particularly interested in “creativity” — he was more about helping kids find the world interesting. (interestingness)

Egan is fond of citing his fellow educational theorist Jerome Bruner, who claimed “any subject can be taught effectively in some intellectually honest form to any child at any stage of development”.

Part 3: A new kind of middle school

Your mileage may vary, but for a lot of us, middle school feels like getting booted out of the (in retrospect) Eden of elementary school, and like marking time before the serious studying of high school.

If our dominant approaches to educational psychology fundamentally misinterpret younger children, Egan suggests, they basically throw up their hands when faced with pre-teens and teenagers

This feeling of meaninglessness, he argues, is utterly tragic — it comes just when a hunger for meaning blossoms in adolescents!

What might we see, if we become Jane Goodalls of early adolescence?

First, teens are obsessed with gossip. The motivations of others

Second, that they’re pulled toward idealism. Many feel a dissatisfaction with the world as it is

Third, they love extremes: they want to find limits, and test them

Egan loves pointing out that The Guinness Book of World Records is a perennial bestseller among kids at this age

Fourth, they gravitate toward heroes — people who push the edges of those limits.

Finally, we might spot teens taking up hobbies and making collections.

Egan’s insight is that these obsessions give teenagers a sense of meaning, and that we can use them as tools to make middle schools that overflow with meaning.

Who first discovered the concepts students learn in math? The answer, of course, is a wide diversity of curious men and women living across the world over the last few thousand years. Egan says: bring those people into how we teach math.

When we teach the Cartesian coordinate system, students should meet Rene Descartes, the Calvinist French polymath who saw the possibility that math could decipher the world, if only we could unite algebra and geometry… and invented the xy-plane to do exactly that.

Literally everything students learn in school was first invented or discovered by some interesting person who was struggling to accomplish something hard. To learn is to connect with those people, whether we know it or not. Egan says: help kids know it. Math has been dehumanized: re-humanize it.

Middle school science

Most of the big-picture ideas that we now think of as “science” were discovered before the word “scientist” was invented

We can use gossip and heroes to spread their obsessions to students just as we taught math, but Egan points out two twists.

*Egan once said:

“My book is an attempt to show that, indeed, everything in the world is wonderful, but that schools are designed almost to disguise this slightly shameful fact*

The second twist is that science is a subject rich in extremes. Here Egan introduces a concept that we’ll see crop up again: “15-minute segments”. To help us fit as much wonder as possible into a school day, he suggests we supplement the usual school subjects with a few quick lessons.

Middle school history

going through many of the same events as before, but in more depth, and more vividly.

As students get older, this can transition to “People and Their Ideas”. Here, we’d focus less on the details of the person’s life, and use it as a backdrop to showing how meaningful some of history’s most important ideas could be. Think Aristotle and syllogisms, Edward Said and orientalism, Confucius and propriety, Cornel West and race, Buddha on the four noble truths, Muhammad and the five pillars, Karl Marx and communism, Adam Smith and the invisible hand, Thomas Hobbes and the state of nature, John Locke and natural rights, Jeremy Bentham and utilitarianism, Thomas Aquinas on the sacraments, Martin Luther on faith, Voltaire on the freedom of speech… you get the idea.

Diversity is important for this — as it is with culture. Throughout this, we should also be trying to expose students to as much cultural diversity as possible, because in high school, we’ll be trying to make sense of our society, and it’s impossible to do that unless we have something to compare it against.

Middle school literature & language

Egan’s pretty happy with a bog-standard middle school literature curriculum, done well.

The final one is to study humor — not just jokes anymore, but comedy at its finest. Egan cites (at length!) Monty Python as a group of people who were particularly brilliant in their use of the English language. Examining their skits can lead us into not just an appreciation of semantics (the study of how meaning is made from smaller pieces, like etymology) but also pragmatics (the study of how meaning is made in social situations).

Part 4: A new kind of high school

Egan is quick to acknowledge that, at this level, the sort of education he advocates really is being practiced in some places. What he can add is an understanding of what makes it wonderful, how to make it even more wonderful, and how to make it wonderful for many, many more people.

Far too often, even when high school classes are intellectual, they’re dry.

Egan suggests three reasons to explain this.

First, because high school academic classes are too often masses of small details with no sign of the big picture. Second, because they’re typically slavishly disciplinary, and aren’t able to address the questions that span the disciplines. Third, because they’re often designed to bring students through what everyone is sure of, and hide away any controversies

There’s a fourth reason, though, and it’s probably the biggest of all — by the time they get to high school, most students haven’t actually learned that much!

For this level it might be easier to look — for reasons that will become clear when we finally unveil Egan’s crazy-sounding definition of education — at the sorts of things that bring intellectuals joy.

what would we find motivating them?

Asking simple questions, for one. (What is space? What is society? What is a human? What is language?) Building general schemes (big theories) that hold lots of evidence together. Finding their place in the cosmos. And (perhaps above all) seeking certainty.

ask what fights have driven the development of each of these fields forward — and how we can help students enter them.

High school literature

*Egan proposes another mini-segment — again, just 15 minutes a day, a few times a week — called “Metaknowledge”.

Q: Isn’t that already in the International Baccalaureate program?
Yes, he acknowledges that he’s borrowing from that!*

How can we help students enter the big fights of literature?

arguing over literature is a training arena for the all-important intellectual move of this kind of understanding: building general schemes out of evidence, and struggling with anomalies.

This intellectual work is best done with other people, who are incentivized to challenge your understanding of something

And the nice thing about practicing it on literature is that, more so than in history or science, the evidence is shared knowledge — it’s right in front of everyone, written out.

High school history

*How could entering the big fights help us reinvent high school history?

First, we might look for dueling histories. It’s time for students to get into historiography and understand that history isn’t just what happened, it’s something we make*

To help them grow their skills at finding anomalies, we might help them work through pseudo-histories and conspiracy theories.

Our students will spend the rest of their lives encountering terrible-but-beguiling arguments about how the world works; if we don’t prepare them for those, what have we been doing?

By the time students graduate, we want them to have wrestled with terrible ideas and — for a while — lost. They need to experience what it’s like to change their minds about something they felt strongly about.

High school natural science

At present, so much of the high school science curriculum — especially “honors” classes — is oriented toward helping amass details.

The meaty debates that propel science forward are held back

Egan proposes, simply, that we flip this, and organize high school science classes around the big debates

High school social science

If, in elementary and middle school, history is the most important subject in Egan’s paradigm, then in high school, science takes that role. Science is so important that we should double it, and make social science (especially psychology and sociology) part of the core curriculum.

How should we teach it? He suggests that the tools of “simple questions” and “finding one’s place in the cosmos” can play a big role.

A high school social science course can lean into these disagreements by asking simple questions. For psychology, Egan suggests, one of these might be “what is the mind?” The course might begin by introducing a handful of scholarly perspectives — a cognitivist might respond “a computer”, a biopsychologist might say “a car engine”, a Freudian might say “an iceberg”, and a behaviorist might say “a team a trained seals”.

Can we really find teachers who can teach this? I suspect, actually, that we keep getting them — they come in with romantic notions of discussing ideas with interested students. The trouble is that they leave the profession when they discover how much teaching amounts to babysitting.

Part 5: What education is

Egan says that to educate is
to guide students
through humanity’s five great revolutions
as they learn to speak and write,
so they can imitate
each new kind of understanding
(while keeping alive the old ones)

The kind of understanding we laid out for high school was first hammered out by Plato and Aristotle

Nowadays it’s carried on by scholars in more-or-less every university department. Egan needed a name that would encompass all of that, and he picked “Philosophic”.

where did Philosophic come from in the first place?

The birth of an understanding

writing was introduced to Greece.

If the ability to write was all that it took, then we’d expect every literate person to be a near-genius

There’s something missing… and Egan thinks we find it in the emotion-laden, unsystematic, wonder-struck kind of writing that he says spread through Greece in the early years of the Greek Miracle. This looks for all the world like a mash-up of Mythic and Philosophic understanding.

It’s best exemplified, Egan writes, in The Histories, by Herodotus

People like Herodotus realize writing has the potential to immortalize the greatest, strangest things in the world

When children learn to understand spoken language (and speak themselves), they gain the ability to tell stories, use metaphors, understand jokes, and so on. Those types of speech can be used as tools for understanding the world; a society with those tools (and centuries to use them) will develop rich oral traditions.

When students learn to read (and write) simple prose, they can connect to a much greater quantity of information. Details can accumulate

And when students learn to read (and write) scholarly, systematic prose — think technical manuals, intricately-argued blog posts, encyclopedia entries — they gain the ability to see the world in abstractions

Egan isn’t positing that there’s any mysterious force directing children to progress in the pattern of their culture; he’s not even suggesting that this progression is “natural”. Our genes don’t make us develop Romantic understanding around age 8 — our culture does.

Egan suggests there’s a kind of understanding hiding inside all the others, and that acknowledging it can help us make education deep and personally meaningful.

He dispatches this kind of understanding frustratingly quickly — just nine pages — but he points to bodily senses, emotional attachment, humor, and one other one that drives everything.

Mimesis. We are the apes who imitate

Looking for a term to encompass this non-linguistic, body-oriented way of knowing, Egan settles on “Somatic”.

We were supposed to arrive at a place beyond shifting arguments and subjective perspectives. The twentieth century was not kind to this optimism. Many intellectuals have despaired that we’ll ever be able to find anything like Truth with a capital ‘T’.

You might assume that the Rationalist community is squarely in Philosophic understanding — and I think that’s mostly right.

But at our best moments, I think, we have one toe in the Ironic.

Philosophic understanding is obsessed with things making sense; Ironic understanding says, reality is always a few steps beyond you. “Chesterton’s Fence” is a Rationalist shorthand for the idea that we should expect the world to be more complex than our models

I think we see a sign that we’re stepping into Ironic, too, in our skepticism toward political ideologies.

*An Ironist, he writes, will mistrust all ideologies.

Q: And then collapse in indecision, unable to believe anything except their own skepticism?
Well, yes, that happens sometimes! This is a known fail state of Ironists — Egan refers to them as “alienated”, cut off from the world.* (alienation)

His ideal is something very different: someone who can be skeptical even of their skepticism, so they can see what’s good (or useful, or valid, or beautiful) in every perspective

has anyone really achieved this?
At least one person has: Socrates

And yet, Egan points out, Socrates was “buoyantly cheerful, even while facing death”. He’s jaunty — the original philosophical Tigger.

how can anyone hope to achieve it? Egan says: by using Irony to balance all the kinds of understanding. He writes that “irony without Philosophic capacities is impotent”; adding in Philosophic allows beliefs to have stability and strength.

All of this is fueled by the power of Mythic understanding. Philosophic understanding, traditionally, looks down its nose at Mythic, but Ironic can swoop in and remind Philosophic that its metanarratives are, in the end, more narratives — even while reminding Mythic that its simple stories shouldn’t be confused with the world as it is, but are accounts that we choose to tell.

Could you re-cap this recapitulation scheme?
Here’s what it amounts to: if the goal of a development economist is “getting to Denmark”, Egan’s goal is “getting to Socrates”. The aim of Egan’s entire educational theory is “to keep alive as much as possible of the earlier kinds of understanding in the development of irony”.

Q: I’ve gotten so tired of postmodernists sniping at science, saying that it’s “just another narrative”. Is Egan saying that? (Please don’t tell me he’s saying that.)
He’s not. He does want to admit the limits of science — objectivity isn’t the only game in town; our minds allow us other kinds of understanding. But he also acknowledges it as one of our best hopes for understanding the world

Q: Got any other evidence that the capital-R-Rationalist community should understand themselves as having — how did you say it? — “one toe in Ironic”?
I think the best indication comes from the twelfth (and, Eliezer writes, most fundamental) rationalist virtue — to keep in mind that what we call “rationality” may itself become a trap

Where do we see this? Only a few months ago, in his book review of What We Owe the Future

For someone who has only Philosophic understanding, logic isn’t something that can be easily disobeyed. But logic, for an Ironist, is a game that can be played — or not! Egan writes that, for the “sophisticated” (Socratic) Ironist, the point of logic and science and intelligence is to live well, and not cause others pain

Part 6: In conclusion, a conversation

“Alice” is a Rationalist-with-a-capital-R who’s interested in educational reform; she lives in a large metropolitan area with her son. She runs into “Reviewer” in the supermarket, who is wearing a mask.

Egan argues that schools don’t work because they ignore the tools that have worked for hundreds (and thousands) of years — things like humor, emotion, stories, metaphors, extremes, gossip, idealism, general schemes, finding one’s place in the world, and the lure of certainty.

When I toured an Eganian charter elementary program in Oregon — the only one of its kind, and now defunct for the usual awfulness of local politics — I could have missed the magic that was going on there, had I not talked to the kids.

what about IQ?

he acknowledges that differences in intelligence are real, and matter

but none of this implies dismissal of students who are at least able to develop Ironic understanding”. And many, many people currently locked out of the life of the mind are able to achieve Philosophic and Ironic understanding, if only they were guided to it in the right way.

You’ll have heard of the Flynn Effect — the observed fact that, over the last century or so, IQ scores have been going up, and fastest of all in the most abstract sections of the test.

The causes of this are debated — some suggest that it’s as simple as better nutrition. But the more intriguing hypothesis is that modern life is becoming more cognitively demanding; we practice abstract, decontextualized reasoning many more times a day than we did in the 1800s.

I think the intriguing hypothesis is the same thing as the spread of Philosophic understanding! Philosophic understanding is all about the abstract, the general, the decontextualized

*I’m thinking things like “motivation”, “long-term memory”, “metacognition”, “creativity”, or “long-term thinking skills”. Is Egan silent on those?

Reviewer: He thought they were too small, and stole our focus from the bigger reality of how they all worked together. If you wanted a curriculum that maximized students’ metacognition, for example, you shouldn’t spend an inordinate amount of time training “metacognition” — you should aim to help them develop the five different kinds of understanding. Get the big picture right, and the details will follow.*

If his big goal isn’t “rationality”, then what is it?

Reviewer: In this book, he mostly uses the word “educated”. But in the years after he wrote it, I think he realized that word wasn’t distinctive enough

“Imagination”.

because he switched to using another one-word summary of his whole “five kinds of understanding” model. But frankly I think it was a terrible choice,

I think most people hear it and make a bunch of wrong assumptions about his philosophy

Anyhow, that’s why, if you Google Egan, you’ll see the phrase “Imaginative Education” popping up.

If I had to choose, I might have gone with “human”.

I’ve been meaning to tell you that those pretty diagrams I showed you were profoundly wrong.

I’ve been drawing Egan’s “kinds of understanding” like they were “stages” — categories that you move between, one to the other. From that, you might imagine that an elementary school teacher will only be making Mythic lessons, and a teacher in middle school will only be making Romantic lessons, and so on. That’s not true

That means that, at the very least, a middle school teacher can (and should) be using Romantic and Mythic and Somatic tools.

everyone uses some of these kinds of understanding, to at least a little extent, all the time.

If you’re willing to make the boxes blurry, then what’s the use of saying they’re still different boxes?

Why can’t we just go straight to rationality? Why do we need to go through all the others? This really does seem terribly inefficient.

we’ve been trying clever shortcuts for a while. John Dewey’s shortcut was to put kids in small democratic communities; Rousseau’s was to let the individual student follow his interests; Plato’s was to cram minds full of truth. By and large, they’ve failed.

it took our species a long time to get to rationality. If we evolved speech fifty thousand years ago, and Egan is right that Socrates achieved something like “sophisticated Irony” around 400 BC, then it took us… well, about fifty thousand years!

why should we have confidence that this approach would work, when every single other exciting-sounding “this will change everything” educational reform has failed, failed, failed?

I think there are five possible ways we could try to suss out how likely Egan’s paradigm is to work.

First, if we want to persist in using the “stages” metaphor, note that, at the very least, these stages stack on top of each other

The first is through lots of formal, peer-reviewed studies

He was quite pessimistic on how much you could learn from this sort of study

Educated Mind came out in 1997, but he had built the fundamentals of his paradigm by the late Eighties. And since then, the cognitive sciences have swung toward embracing the power of the tools of what Egan’s dubbed “Somatic” and “Mythic” understanding — see Jonathan Gottschall for a popular account of the move toward narrative, Douglas Hofstadter for one on metaphor, Antonio Damasio for one on emotion, and Rebecca Schwarzlose for one on mental images.

*Have you read any Joseph Henrich?

Alice: The aerospace-engineer-turned-Harvard-professor-of-human-evolution who’s helping reinvent how we understand anthropology, psychology, and economics? The author or The Secret of Our Success and The WEIRDest People in the World? I’m familiar with his work, yes.

Reviewer: Well, I think Egan is Joseph Henrich for education.

They also both point to the importance of “cognitive tools” gained through culture, argue that we’re smart because we connect up with others, and think that mimesis is at the very base of our cognition.

Henrich makes a big point that the social sciences, thus far, have proceeded on the assumption that humans “are just a really smart, though somewhat less hairy, chimpanzee”. But cultural evolution has made us a fundamentally new kind of animal — and that the scholarly road ahead is wide open for exploring this. I sorta can’t imagine a more Egan-y thing to say.

as a kid, a lot of my learning was driven by jokes

I think I went further: I jumped into Philosophic understanding by becoming a young-earth creationist, when assigned to a middle-school science-class debate over the age of the Earth. Don’t judge! The web was young, and I was, too. But I recall the absolute thrill of realizing that I could find anomalies that could overturn other people’s entire schemas.

Alice: Did you stay a young-earth creationist?

Reviewer: No — and it wasn’t because I was mocked out of the belief. I kept pursuing the truth, trying to build a general scheme that could hold all the evidence, and after a year or two, gave it up.

Okay, so “personal experience” was number three.

Four?

Reviewer: If the “tools” that Egan describes are real, then they’re huge honking things. If we haven’t paid much attention to them up ’til now, it’s because they’re too big for us to notice. If Egan is right, then we should be able to point to people making billions of dollars off these tools

I’m worried that Egan-izing is eating the world. That as these tools are perfected, they begin to constitute a mass of super-stimuluses that it will be harder and harder to turn away from and live in the real world. Erik Hoel wrote about this problem well, and included tips on how to avoid it. Super-sensorium

from my vantage point, the gradual Eganization of everything means that it’s past time for us to apply these same tools to the real world, to re-enchant reality. And the ideal place to do that is school.

What’s your final one?

Reviewer: Well, someone could make a school of it, and see how it went.

The teachers already exist; the teacher-prep program that Egan started is still going. They just don’t have any place to tie their teaching together. As for the families, it wouldn’t even take so very many — small schools pop into existence all the time.