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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.
One of my friends was asked to help develop parts of a national curriculum and tells me that teachers are pretty stupid, allergic to nuance and don't even follow the curriculum that much. Not all teachers and so on... But it was like there was some vast Power that was inserting errors of fact, errors of punctuation, errors of logic into the curriculum, that my friend was swimming against the tide. Endless anecdotes of frustration at incompetence.
I get the sense that mainstream education in the West is systemically broken, not something that can be fixed by tweaks around the edges. Sometimes you have to disassemble the whole thing and try again from another angle. It's like an auto-catalytic process: there's a force that makes certain dysfunctional teaching doctrines prestigious, so education professors teach bad dogma, smart people are filtered away by various incentives, bureaucracy proliferates out of control, behaviour and culture of school declines and everyone just asks for more money even as standards fall.
What can you do other than set up charter schools or similar outflanking? How do you change incentives if the institution is already rotten? If you reward schools with high graduation rates, they simply raise the graduation rate and everyone is worse off with grade inflation.
If the problem is that teachers are stupid and allergic to nuance, then structural changes are not going to have much effect. We're going to have to attract smarter, less nuance-resistant people to the teaching profession. And that is going to mean raising pay substantially. Because when I was teaching, we had plenty of smart, nuance-friendly Teach for America teachers, but the vast majority of them left to go to law/medical/business school.
Nah, just abolish teachers certificates -- anyone with a bachelor's in whatever can teach that subject. It's quite a comfy job for smart slackers, just that the pipeline tends to push those people on to something else -- which by the time they are done, another two years to get suitable indoctrinated is a bridge too far to consider.
There are alternative certification programs that allow people who already hold a random bachelor's degree to to become teachers without going back to school for two years. I myself did the online, self-paced American Board for Certification of Teacher Excellence (ABCTE) program and found a position that way.
Alternatively, I could have gone to a local community college and completed their one-year, two-semester Educator Preparation Institute (EPI) program, but that would have been more expensive (I got the ABCTE program on sale for $1550, while 21 credits for seven courses would have come out to about $2500) and involved more work (ABCTE only required two high-stakes tests, one for the subject area and the other for pedagogy). Admittedly, the EPI programs include student teaching, while ABCTE does not. I was worried that the lack of field experience would hurt me, but I got an offer anyway.
I am aware -- two years seems like way to much of a barrier for somebody considering teaching as a fallback career. (I think there used to be a similar one year option in my jurisdiction, but it was eliminated by 'big teacher' or something. Ironically due to covid they were prepared to waive any of these requirements due to extreme shortages -- but you were capped at the bottom of the salary scale (like ~40k) and would be fired once the crisis resolved. So they definitely weren't attracting 'smart' people of any kind there.)
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