(2024-01-14) Hendrickson An Egan Pattern Language

An Egan Pattern Language. As you might have already gleaned, this substack explores the vast possibilities that Kieran Egan’s approach to education opens up. Alas, he never laid out a specific curriculum.

If we really want Egan-fueled schools, we need to come up with some boots-ready stuff, even if they’re rough.

Behold — an Egan pattern language! Hendrickson Egan Pattern Language

the inspiration for it comes from a 1977 book about (of all things) architecture

When Christopher Alexander began, architecture was in a bad place.

It wasn’t enough, he found, to describe mere buildings

Alexander & company knew, of course, that 253 patterns would be a bit much for most folks — a problem, as they were radicals of the charming 1970s sort.

So they devised a standardized template for their patterns: the problem it solves, a description, diagrams, and links to other patterns that support it.

Why call it a “language”?

By giving specific names to the patterns they found, they hoped to make it easy for people to communicate with each other

Christopher Alexander and Kieran Egan both grew up in the postwar British Isles. They both saw their professions to be chasing misguided goals. They both thought the mainstream intellectual world had lost track of the basics of human nature

I’ve prepared a bunch of patterns, around 200 in all.

Who are you thinking this’ll be useful for?

if you work with human beings — well then, probably, you.

There are two special sets of folk that I’m hoping this will be extra useful for: homeschoolers and potential school founders. These are the people who have the biggest blank canvases, who can reimagine education from the ground up.

As a homeschool parent who literally wrote “homeschooling” into his vows, I can say that there’s a hunger out there for something that brings together the intellectual richness of classical education (without the rigidity), the emotional joy of unschooling (without the niggling fear that your child will grow up to be a mooch), and the glory of outdoor education (without, y’know, mud everywhere and all the time

Are there oh-so-many “potential school founders” out there?

*Yes, there are. And some of them even know it.

Even before the pandemic, the microschool movement in the United States was picking up steam; in the last couple years, it seems to be going gangbusters. There are entire organizations (Prenda and Acton Academy come to mind) to guide ordinary folk through the boring nuts and bolts*

Some educational philosophies don’t play well with others, but one of the glories of Egan is that he helps make clear sense of what works across educational traditions. He throws open the doors so we can look into very different practices, and borrow elements that work. That means we can look into Montessori, Waldorf, and Reggio Emilia. It means we can consider classical Catholic schools, vocational apprenticeships, and Ayn Rand academies. It means we can take inspiration from Jewish Talmudic study, the Mandan Sioux training of young men, Siberian shamanic tutelage, Plato’s Academy, Aboriginal storytelling, Confucian exam schools, and Mesopotamian math riddling.

I keep seeing these weird emoji — 🤸‍♀️, 🧙‍♂️, 🦹‍♂️, 👩‍🔬, and 😏 ? — on your patterns pages.

But at the chewy core of Egan’s understanding of education is the notion that, for humans, certain practices and formats of information are special. Egan called them “tools”

He grouped those tools into five “toolkits” — SOMATIC (🤸‍♀️), MYTHIC (🧙‍♂️), ROMANTIC (🦹‍♂️), PHILOSOPHIC (👩‍🔬), and IRONIC (😏). Each opens up a different way of understanding the world. For Egan, “becoming educated” meant cultivating all five of these understandings.

On this substack, whenever I make reference to one of Egan’s tools, I’ve taken to making note of which toolkit it comes from. As it would be really irritating to keep reading “Somatic” and “Mythic” and “Romantic” and so on, I’ve just used those emoji.

What about the little degree symbol (°) I keep seeing?

Those are my way to note you’re seeing a pattern in our Egan pattern language. In the glorious future, all of those will be linked to their page, so you can jump around