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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.
My impression is that your friend, while plausibly smarter than the teachers in question, is actually a net negative for the system.
Given the facts on the ground (teachers as a class are intellectually average), one would most want to leverage that averageness by having them learn to teach one thing, and then they keep teaching that one thing over and over again, and don't change it without a really good reason.
This is actually pretty satisfying for average intelligence people when it works. For a while, I worked at Starbucks. There are a lot of really short, satisfying interactions. A person wants a desert latte. The barista makes the desert latte exactly as instructed. The person gets exactly what they expect. Everyone is happy (most of the time), or perhaps eventually realizes that the drinks are silly, but doesn't blame the barista, they probably made it in keeping with the recipe. There were also some other positions that were scripted, but basically fine. Things got bad when we had a lot of down time, everyone was bored and someone would suggest deep cleaning something without proper training. This is a reasonable job for average and slightly below average intelligence people.
It would be very reasonable to teach a slightly below average intelligence person who's generally responsible and decent with kids how to, for instance, teach 7 year olds phonics. There are several curricula, they mostly seem just fine, she could become an expert in teaching 7 year olds phonics according to some specific just fine curriculum curriculum. It's satisfying seeing a kid go from not connecting letters to sounds, to connecting letters to sounds. The kids feels good about it, the teacher feels good about it, they get a good performance review, perhaps they get a pay raise.
I have a degree in teaching in my specific subject area. They taught us the subject area. They taught us... who to write essays about John Dewy, and some formats one could use to write lesson plans, if anyone ever asks, which they don't... Well, they taught us our subject matter, anyway. But they did not actually teach us very much about teaching our subject matter to kids, and the standards change every couple of years anyway, so I just kind of make stuff up that seems kind of like a watered down version of what I learned about the subject, and keep tinkering with it when it doesn't work.
This is absurd.
Personally, I kind of like designing curriculum, so I don't mind that I'm just making everything up myself. But also, that's absurd. Maybe I'm making up complete nonsense -- someone who doesn't know my content area comes in to check once a year, to see if it looks like I'm teaching something that seems kind of reasonable (actually, to make sure there isn't too much chaos). Why is each teacher making their own Philosophy of Education? I like philosophy, and it was still a waste of my time, because the constraints are pretty tight, so we're really going for optimization more than creativity.
If the problem is that teachers aren't that bright, then they should learn A Curriculum, for something pretty constrained, and learn to teach it well. It will be fine if all seven year olds just learn to behave appropriately, and to connect sounds to letters really strongly, and then the rest of the time is enrichment or something. All the smart sneering people tinkering with the curriculum every year, so that all the average intelligence teachers are trying to learn it as they teach every year is a significant part of the problem.
This is, ultimately, my problem with the review as well. Two hour essays on shiny new conceptualizations instead of "here are ten great stories to read to an eight year old, including the best adaptation." Everyone already wants to tell the kids stories. That is not where the weakness lies at all, even a little bit.
Quite right, it is absurd. I'm not going to defend the curriculum-writers as intellectual giants either. A lot of it is bad from the input end I understand, my friend was brought in to make sure the curriculum they were proposing was correct and a lot of it wasn't. Some of it was just nonsense, platitudes without meaning. Constantly changing curriculums is bad as well, I agree that there ought to be stability.
But the issue I'm talking about is to do with the very structure of the system. You weren't told what you need to know to do your job, so you ad-hoc it and it sort of works out. Nobody can even come in to make sure you're doing it right, nobody seems to know what doing it right looks like! This is a bad way to run an institution. There isn't a proper centralized control, so people just do what they were taught the first time...
We all know phonics is the way to go, so why haven't we been doing that primarily for the last 30 years, why are we rediscovering it? I suspect it's the very issues you note: everything is so decentralized teachers do whatever they feel like, whatever they were taught back when they were taught, nobody is checking to see that they're teaching the right things. If they do check, then it's not effective. Feedback checks like exams are gamed and measurable outcomes manipulated. All this public money goes into education and the payoff is pretty meagre. I'm not American but the standard of American education is pretty low, even on that simplest level of connecting sounds to letters (never mind strongly). We can pick and choose whatever stunning illiteracy statistics we like, it's not working.
Just imagine if this was any other profession:
The whole thing is systemically broken.
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