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Notes -
Today's AXC book review (https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-the-educated-mind) is about "The Educated Mind" by Kieran Egan. This is my second time reading half of it, skipping to the bottom, and feeling frustrated about it.
The reviewer is clearly invested, excited, and has put a lot of effort into their review. At the same time, I can't think of how the ideas, as presented, could possibly useful as a teacher, parent, or even if I were trying to design a new charter school or something.
A while ago, I went to a two hour lecture (with no breaks! In tight stadium seating, so it was impossible to even go use the restroom!) with someone going on and on about neural imaging and The Science of Reading (tm) and Background Knowledge and whatnot, with five minutes towards the end suggesting that perhaps it would be worthwhile to look into actual books or something sometime, as part of Professional Learning Communities (tm). These are, in general, things I'm interested in, but it was all about the five strands of something, which each split into three strands, which each have seven flavors, or something like that. There was no clever resolution as in the rhyme about the man going to St Ives.
This review felt kind of like that. It either is kind of the same as one would intuitively expect, and so doesn't need explaining (yes, of course we should tell stories. Clearly. Does anyone except Eustace Scrubb's parents disagree?), or it's something very complex that teacher's will struggle to follow and probably fail at (nobody is going to succeed at teaching "ambiguity, meta-skepticism, balance, lightness" in school, to ~30 assorted youth at a time).
A bit ago I was listening to Jordan Peterson interview a man who had opened up a private school in Wichita, Kansas (Zach Lahn, Wonder). The school sounded nice. I would plausibly send my children there, were I in a position to do so. They have a system with older students mentoring younger ones, a binary choice to discuss each morning, and one time they had a disrespectful student, but then they expelled him. It isn't just rich kids, he argued: he has a nurse working two jobs to pay the tuition! I stopped listening at that point, and felt a bit spiteful about it.
Maybe I should stop following this stuff, and just keep my head down. It's not like I'm planning to open up a new Eganian charter school in my city anyway. But educational discussions follow me around, haunting my steps, ever since growing on in a very countercultural, education aware household, reading John Taylor Gatto as a teen. I tried to go to in-person events, and it followed me. The ladies tea was talking about it, with a homeschooling mom of four, a mom with her kid in private school for culture war reasons, and someone getting people to sign a culture war adjacent education petition. I tried going to church, and the pastor's wife was talking in the nursery about Sunday School curriculum, with some sort of Montessori adjacent Catholic derived philosophy or something. I tried going to a friend's house, and they were also talking about Education. All of it sounds kind of exhausted and on edge.
The most intractable problem, with the fucky-est answers of all.
My own deeply unhelpful yet deeply held belief is that nobody can teach anybody anything; you simply place people in various combinations of prison/laborcamp/cult/skinnerbox and alternately whip them/ give them treats until their brain falls into the correctly shaped hole and they learn something almost by accident.
's why I find the various flavors of Xavier's school for the gifted deeply unconvincing also. You mean to say your product works when every rule is followed by committed users who were probably going to succeed regardless? You don't say.
I’m coming around to this one too. In schools it’s pretty clear that you either remember the information or you don’t, and that depends on you. Maybe the teacher tells you some mnemonic, but that’s about it. For most subjects there aren’t even multiple ways of explaining a concept. I’ve taught music, and families are just paying for a threat they can use to make the kid practice. Even teaching my kid to ride a bike involved (for Baby Genius) telling her that we weren’t going home until she figured it out, and I’ll be on that bench over there. For Baby Average, it involves making her practice every day. Extra help in something like math usually involves a face-to-face explanation that can’t be tuned out. In each of these cases learning is either automatic or self-directed. In the gym at 6am I can’t think of a counter-example. Somebody dogpile me!
Maybe the place for teacher influence is in the selection of the tasks to be practiced or the info to be learned, which is where Egan seems to offer hope; he has a specific plan, just not a fully developed one. He has decided what kids should learn- schools have decided how LONG kids will learn and then filled that time with busywork.
I will say that there is such a thing as a 'good teacher', it's just that it is determined per student and not per teacher.
For me, an autistic type 1 nerd that hates sitting still for more than 15 min, I need a teacher that goes lighting fast and makes as many jokes per minute as possible, then spends the back 3/4's of the class doing examples and taking questions so the loose information settles into the correct pattern. I actually REALLY benefited from zoom classes when I did my emergency covid degree; cause if the lecture was too slow I could play video games and keep my brain in the peak power zone RPMs wise, instead of falling asleep/into a fugue.
Someone else who takes careful notes and thinks things through might want very slow, thorough lecture to construct the pattern in their brain and then just moves to the next one.
A third person might not benefit from lecture at all; they need to read and reread the text until their brain synthesizes a world model out of it.
It's the full flower of human individuality, what a fucking pain!
I don't think that's autism.
Playing video games is not keeping your brain up, it's relying on ingrained muscle memory and habit. I see too many streamers of games who are just grinding with a maxed build and they are steamrolling their way through maps, while playing music, chatting online, and responding to questions. That's not concentrating on the game, the game itself occupies as much intellectual endeavour as scrubbing the bathroom would.
That is what I jus said.
Just distracting enough to keep me focused.
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You can teach people arithmetic and you can teach them to read. We even know working ways of doing both.
I’m not sure you do either of those things in the way that Big Teacher wants to be true.
To teach a kid to read you just go over the sounds again and again, then go over words (which is the same thing). Eventually they get good at it. Big Teacher wants it to be the case that if that doesn’t work, then you move to some plan B that depends on esoteric that only Trained Professionals know about, but there is no plan B that works, which is why you have legions of functionally illiterate people. Plan A (“I make you practice and you will thereby learn automatically”) is not the type of thing they make movies out of.
Arithmetic is almost the same. At some point you see 1 and 1 making 2, and it just sticks. Same for subtraction. Smart kids grasp it after few examples, less smart kids grasp it after more examples. For something more complicated, like long division, the kid is still either remembering the steps or he isn’t (virtually no 9-year old actually understands what the steps are doing). There is no stronger tool or one weird trick- all you have are more examples. This is why patience is so often lauded in teachers. The good ones just grind out more and more examples without getting exasperated.
So kids learn to read and do arithmetic, but is that because adults do something to put the knowledge in the kid’s head (which is what most people mean by “to teach”) or just because the adults make the kid learn it himself?
This is called phonics and it works for nearly all children that aren’t actually literally retarded. It takes some skills to do, but a 110 IQ woman can follow detailed directions without much specialized training. The problem is that ‘big teacher’(which is probably more education bureaucrats that have never actually set foot in a classroom since they day they graduated than it is actual teachers) refuses to do it, instead insisting on things that do not work, which they insist will be overcome by the power of progressive wishful thinking. Functional parents are able to route around this, of course, either because their kids are smart enough to learn anyways, or because they teach the basics themselves, or because they can pay for private tutors that use phonics, or whatever the case may be. But of course large percentages of the nation’s children do not have functional parents. It would, indeed, be much better if public schools could just do phonics, but they don’t.
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Or, unfortunately, another plan A.
But I do think that that example illustrates that how you teach matters—phonics works better than other modes of instruction. Likewise, being able to hold students' attention helps with their learning.
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Setting aside whether that's how to do it --- if it is, that's teaching.
Big Teacher is even worse; they want to use things which don't work INSTEAD of doing things which work for most people. But that doesn't mean that things can't be taught; that means that Big Teacher sucks.
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