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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.
This doesn't seem true, but I would expand the category of "teacher" to include writers and people who make instructional videos.
To take a very simple example, the other day we had to change a flat tire. We went onto Youtube, and several people had uploaded videos about the basic process, and various ways to get stuck tires off when changing them. This was much better than just trying to guess, based on physical reality and the tools found in the back of the car. The video makers were teaching.
Children who grow up with books around, but never have phonics explained to them generally do not learn to read English very well. Most children need someone to teach them how phonics work, even if it's just the person reading a script to the kid about how it works (and then it's a collaboration between person reading and curriculum writer).
Nobody taught me algebra in high school, because I was homeschooled and my parents just gave me a textbook, but not really one that was meant to teach an average teen all by itself. It kind of just said "here's how you manipulate these symbols correctly, here are some examples, here are some practice problems where you can manipulate the symbols yourself," without much hand holding about why anyone would want to manipulate the symbols correctly, or what they meant. I did not learn much algebra. Later, I listened to a teacher lecture, watched Khan Academy videos, and did practice problems with instant feedback. All these things were teaching (but the textbook alone didn't have enough communication channels or interactivity for me to succeed at learning from it). If someone who actually was good at explaining math had tutored me, it would probably have gone even better.
I agree that the idea of a brilliant Teacher who guides and shapes young minds, and also teaches them way more than they would learn from the standard model of lecture+demonstrations+practice+feedback is mostly a myth. I've known people I would consider elders -- very wise and I learned a lot from them in their area of interest, but it probably didn't and couldn't make a big difference in standardized tests or my ability to find and perform work.
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