Astral Codex Ten

Aristotle

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Aristotle

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Aristotle is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 10 times across 10 issues between April 09, 2021 and February 21, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “He attacks Plato and Aristotle first”; “he’s mentioning Aristotle in the very same breath”; “the guy no one read but everyone pretended to was Aristotle”. It most often appears alongside Scott, Christianity, Plato.

Metadata

  • Category: People
  • Mention count: 10
  • Issue count: 10
  • First seen: April 09, 2021
  • Last seen: February 21, 2025

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Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Your Book Review: On The Natural Faculties
April 09, 2021 · Original source
As early as 1605, in The Advancement of Learning, Francis Bacon is taking aim at Galen for the “specious causes” that keep us from further advancement in science. He attacks Plato and Aristotle first, of course, but it’s pretty interesting to see that Galen is the #3 man on his list after these two heavy-hitters.
Inline links: taking aim at Galen
It’s hard not to notice just how famous Galen was in his own time. Marcus Aurelius described him as “primum sane medicorum esse, philosophorum autem solum” — first among doctors and unique among philosophers (one wonders if Galen might have influenced the Emperor’s own philosophy). Forgeries and unscrupulous editions of his work were such a problem during his lifetime, he had to write a book called On My Own Books to try to sort it all out. Among other things, he complains that his servants were stealing private letters he had written to friends and circulating bootleg copies of them as medical advice. Galen was an incredibly prolific writer. Wikipedia claims that he produced more works than any other author in antiquity, maybe up to 600 treatises, and possibly employed 20 scribes at one point. While these particular claims are hard to substantiate, he did leave behind a whole lot of books. Fires and the various other mishaps that are guaranteed to happen to classical texts destroyed many of his works. Some of this even happened during his own lifetime, and in On My Own Books he seems surprisingly relaxed about so many of his works being lost: The books of many others perished at that time, as did all those of mine which were located in that storehouse; and none of my friends in Rome admitted to having copies of the first two books. Since, then, my followers prevailed upon me to write the same treatise again, I thought that I should give this explanation regarding the previously distributed books, in case anyone in the future finds them and wonders why I should have written a treatise twice on the same subject. Even with these losses, huge amounts of his work has survived. It’s hard to get an exact count, but Claudii Galeni Opera Omnia by Karl Gottlob Kühn, compiled around 1833 and for a long time the definitive edition, contains 122 different works in 22 volumes. That’s a lot. Despite this, I was surprised how hard it was to get my hands on primary source copies of his works (in English). Because of our own plague, I was limited to finding sources online — but for most classical works, this is pretty easy. Marcus Aurelius was a contemporary of Galen, and it’s not too hard to find multiple different translations of Meditations (though admittedly Marcus may have a slightly wider appeal). Part of this might be that Galen’s works are very badly organized. Every secondary source I read on the Galenic corpus is full of griping about how confusing the whole thing is. Galen wrote in Greek, but many of the original versions of his books are lost, leaving us only with Arabic or Latin translations, or Latin translations of earlier Arabic translations. Some of the books appear under different titles in different places, and sometimes the works are only indexed under abbreviations of those titles. Some of them probably were never intended for publication (those bootleg letters I mentioned above), and so may not have official titles or versions at all. Forgeries of his works in various languages continued well on into the Renaissance. Galen himself was very unclear on how to think about the documents he produced. At one point in On My Own Books, he starts off by talking about a piece of writing he did “as an exercise for myself”, and then immediately turns around and mentions that he gave it to friends, who in turn gave it to their friends. Needless to say, the whole thing is a mess, the scholars seem very agitated. I chose to review the longest piece I could find, which is On the Natural Faculties, specifically the translation by Arthur John Brock, which was the only translation I was able to track down. This also seemed like a good choice because, instead of being a treatise on a more limited topic like diet, the pulse, or bones, this book serves as more of an introductory textbook to what today we would call biology. III. On the Natural Faculties is divided into three books, though if the three books have any structure to them, I wasn’t able to figure it out. Galen is pretty straightforward in naming his pieces, and this book is about him trying to describe all of the “natural faculties”. This doesn’t really correspond to any modern concept, but essentially he means the fundamental or basic biological functions common to all living things. He begins by contrasting the functions of the soul, like feeling and voluntary motion (we might say “mental functions”), which occur only in animals, with the natural functions common to both animals and plants. You could maybe translate “natural faculties” as something like “basic biological functions”. I had always heard that Galen was a Hippocrates stan, but right from the get-go he’s mentioning Aristotle in the very same breath (though he reminds us that Hippocrates “lived much earlier than Aristotle”). When describing the natural faculties, he seems to base them off of Aristotle’s physics more than Hippocrates’ humors. Aristotle’s physics is a system I mostly know secondhand from the descriptions offered by Thomas Kuhn (for an example, take a look at this piece). Kuhn stresses that this system is hard for a modern mind to understand and even harder to explain, so I was surprised at how intelligible Galen’s account is. Maybe reading Kuhn’s description prepared me to understand what Galen has to say, but either way, it’s great. I think Galen does a better job than Kuhn. Basically he says, look, there are different kinds of motion: If that which is white becomes black, or what is black becomes white, it undergoes motion in respect to colour; or if what was previously sweet now becomes bitter, or, conversely, from being bitter now becomes sweet, it will be said to undergo motion in respect to flavour … when a warm thing becomes cold, and a cold warm, here too we speak of motion; similarly also when anything moist becomes dry, or dry moist. He goes on to suggest that the natural faculties are more advanced forms of motion, possibly built up out of the combination of simpler forms of motion. (Kuhn treats the Aristotelian perspective as if it was the common sense of the ancient world, but the fact that Galen has to describe it in such detail makes me wonder if that was really the case.) That’s the framework. What the exact set of natural faculties are, however, is less clear. In book one he focuses on three faculties in particular — genesis, growth, and nutrition — and provides lots of arguments that (for example) the body’s ability to grow is different from its ability to sustain itself. In book three he gives a different list of four — the attractive, retentive, expulsive, and alterative faculties — but he also suggests that these are “handmaids of Nutrition”. Elsewhere he says that genesis is not “a simple activity of Nature” but instead is “compounded of alteration and of shaping.” He also mentions faculties like “adhesion” and “presentation”. The particulars are pretty confusing, but the general gist is clear. Galen wants to lay out all the different faculties and their sub-faculties (and sub-sub-faculties?) so that the reader can understand the workings of the body. Galen makes it pretty plain that he thinks that diseases are caused by failures or overactivity of the different principles. For example, he says that in leprosy “there is adhesion of the nutriment but no real assimilation”. One faculty is working but the other is disordered. If you want to be a good physician, he says, you need to understand all these faculties so you can identify diseases (tell what faculties are misfunctioning) and treat them — “how are you going to be successful in treatment, if you do not understand the real essence of each disease?” he says. The four humors do make their way into this mix eventually, especially in the second and third books. (Though the translator often insists on translating “humor” as “juice”, which makes me very uncomfortable.) The relationship seems to be that the humors are the building material of the body, but that all the activity is carried out through the natural faculties. The student needs to know the humors to understand what is being moved around, but the humors are primitive. To Galen, biology is all about these faculties shuffling, transforming, and combining different humors. VI. Anyways, that’s what Galen wants to be talking about. But about halfway through book one, he goes entirely off the rails and never really gets back on track. The thing that sets him off is other schools of medicine. It’s clear that Galen cannot stop thinking about them. They invade his every thought; he is beleaguered by them. I would seriously believe that he loses sleep over them. Some of the commentators I’ve read suggested that Galen was an arrogant man — one said he saw in Galen “the blind assumption that he alone was graced with the ability to bring Hippocrates’ work to completion”. My sense of Galen was that he is a man who is constantly exasperated. He is just trying to write basic pieces about how to be a good physician and philosopher, and people keep descending on him with the most unbelievably pedantic arguments. Book One of On the Natural Faculties is divided into 17 sections, and he spends half of the first section hedging around ways people could potentially take his words in the wrong ways. These sound more than a little like intrusive thoughts, and it’s tempting to think that he’s blowing this all out of proportion. But from what I know about Galen’s life, it seems likely that he really was getting into disagreements all the time, and probably really did need to worry about people quoting his work out of context. One article in The Lancet describes him as “a public figure, known and recognised by many, accosted in the streets, challenged to debate.” It’s easy to imagine how being accosted in the streets might work its way into your head. Either way, these concerns absolutely consume him. He keeps getting drawn off on different tangents, before trying to return to the main thread with statements like: I said, however, that I was not going to enter into an argument with these people, and it was only because the example was drawn from the subject-matter of medicine, and because I need it for the present treatise, that I have mentioned it. Let us pass on, then, again to another piece of nonsense; for the sophists do not allow one to engage in enquiries that are of any worth, albeit there are many such; they compel one to spend one’s time in dissipating the fallacious arguments which they bring forward. What, then, is this piece of nonsense? Now, we usually refrain from arguing with people whose principles are wrong from the outset. Still, having been compelled by the natural course of events to enter into some kind of a discussion with them, we must add this further to what was said… Since, then, we have talked sufficient nonsense — not willingly, but because we were forced, as the proverb says, “to behave madly among madmen” — let us return again to the subject of urinary secretion. But, as I have said, one is driven to talk nonsense whenever one gets into discussion with such men. Having, therefore, given a concise and summary statement of the matter, I wish to be done with it. Of course, in the very next paragraph, he is immediately drawn back into a discussion of their shortcomings! In some ways, On the Natural Faculties is less of a medical treatise and more of a fascinating snapshot of the state of the academic medical world in the latter half of the second century CE. The tone sounds really contemporary in a lot of ways, and has a quality of acrimonious quibbling that is more than a little familiar, though I don’t think modern physicians are likely to be poisoned by their colleagues (but what do I know). V. We’ve established that Galen has a problem with other experts and schools of medical thought. That leaves us wondering how justified he is. Is he criticizing them for real problems in their work, or is this just partisan squabbling? What are the things that he takes such issue with from these other schools? I think there are two things he’s mostly complaining about. The first thing that really sets Galen off is sectarian dogmatism. “Everyone becomes like the first teacher that he comes across,” he says, “without waiting to learn anything from anybody else.” He bemoans sectarian partisanship and, in classic doctor fashion, uses a weird hygiene metaphor, calling it “excessively resistant to all cleansing process”. It is “harder to heal than any itch”. The fact is that those who are enslaved to their sects are not merely devoid of all sound knowledge, but they will not even stop to learn! This is kind of tragicomic, because two of the main things Galen is accused of are 1) blindly following whatever Hippocrates said about medicine and 2) leading centuries of physicians to blindly follow whatever he wrote! It’s hard to know how blindly Galen is following the teachings of Hippocrates. On the one hand, he does refer to him as “most divine Hippocrates” at least once. On the other hand, he is open to pointing out the (rare) cases where he thinks Hippocrates has overlooked something, and even talks about how he wishes his opponents would criticize Hippocrates more directly! When someone disagrees with a whole suite of his intellectual heroes, he says, “now, one cannot be blamed for not agreeing with all these great men, nor for imagining that one knows more than they; but not to consider such distinguished teaching worthy either of contradiction or even mention shows an extraordinary arrogance.” Maybe other physicians really did follow Galen’s writing blindly in the centuries following his death. I’m not sure anymore. But Galen certainly can’t be blamed for it. He could not be clearer in stating that this is exactly what the student of medicine should avoid doing. It would be tempting to pass this all off as one-sided; “stop listening blindly to your teachers and listen blindly to me!” I don’t get that sense. First, we know that Galen studied all over the ancient world, so he was exposed to all sorts of ways of doing medicine. He practiced what he preached. It’s hard to know how fair a representation he’s giving of the other schools of thought, but he writes as though he has them all memorized, and he certainly was in a position to frequently get into debates with them. When he tells us that they’re uncritical, I’m tempted to believe him. Second, Galen makes a serious point to try to convince the reader of his positions. He’s not just stating “facts” and expecting you to bow down at his feet. He’s engaging with opposing points of view and trying to make compelling arguments that he thinks will convince his readers. VI. Finally, I don’t buy this because nowhere is Galen asking people to listen blindly to anyone, least of all himself. Because the second thing that REALLY sets Galen off is when people aren’t empirical enough! He constantly ridicules, in pretty harsh language, those who remain unconvinced by observation and experiment. Asclepiades, one particularly hated adversary, is charged with “bidding us distrust our senses where obvious facts plainly overturn his hypotheses.” Asclepiades has rather unusual opinions about the urinary system, and in one particularly strong example, Galen asks rhetorically (and sarcastically!), I do not suppose that Asclepiades ever saw a stone which had been passed by one of these sufferers, or observed that this was preceded by a sharp pain in the region between the kidneys and the bladder as the stone traversed the ureter, or that, when the stone was passed, both the pain and the retention at once ceased. It is worth while, then, learning how his theory account for the presence of urine in the bladder, and one is forced to marvel at the ingenuity of a man who puts aside these broad, clearly visible routes, and postulates others which are narrow, invisible—indeed, entirely imperceptible. Other schools are also attacked for denying “observed facts” or even “obvious facts”. Meanwhile, people who draw incorrect conclusions but respect the facts are praised. Galen cares a lot about physicians basing decisions on empirical observation. We know that he’s serious about this because of the many disturbing vivisection experiments he describes in great detail. In discussing digestion, he says, “I have personally, on countless occasions, divided the peritoneum of a still living animal and have always found all the intestines contracting peristaltically upon their contents.” He describes an experiment where you vivisect an animal, cutting away different coats of the esophagus, “then give the animal food and you will see that it still swallows although the peristaltic function has been abolished”. When describing the action of the stomach, he suggests that you can fill an animal with liquid food — “an experiment I have often carried out in pigs” — and cut them open “after three or four hours.” He really seems to want his readers to try these macabre exercises at home. “You may observe this yourself,” he says, “if you will try to hit upon the time at which the descent of food from the stomach takes place.” Fellow physicians are criticized for their lack of anatomical experience in the same way. “If he had ever practised anatomy, he might have known that the outer coat of the bladder springs from the peritoneum and is essentially the same as it.” The most extreme example comes from a debate with the disciples of Asclepiades about the function of the ureters, trying to convince this rival school that urine flows from the kidneys to the bladder through these channels. After exhausting his rhetorical options, Galen turns to empirical anatomy. First he shows them, in a dead animal, that the ureters connect the two structures. This isn’t enough. Next he shows them “in a still living animal, the urine plainly running out through the ureters into the bladder.” This doesn’t change their minds either. Next he takes a live animal, ligates the ureters, bandages the animal up, and lets it go. When he opens it up again later, he finds the ureters “quite full and distended”, and when he removes the ligature, everyone can see the urine flow into the bladder. You’d think the story would end there, but not so. Instead, says Galen, “tie a ligature round [the animal’s] penis and then … squeeze the bladder all over.” He points out that nothing goes back through the ureters to the kidneys, demonstrating that the conveyance is a special, one-way action. He goes on like this for a while. Let the animal urinate and tie a ligature around one ureter but not the other. Cut open both the ureters and see the urine “spurt out of it”. Bandage the animal up and open him up later to discover his insides full of urine and the bladder empty. “Now, if anyone will but test this for himself on an animal,” Galen concludes, “I think he will strongly condemn the rashness of Asclepiades.” Today we know that Galen was wrong, and that humorism isn’t a great way to think about medicine. But whatever Galen might have been lacking, it certainly was not the empirical bent. He was no armchair philosopher, and was more than happy to cut up lots of animals to make a point about the function of the ureters. This is funny because, again, this is the opposite of the story we’re told about Galen. He’s described as a pre-scientific or even unscientific thinker, believing that experimentation and investigation are a waste of time. Clearly this isn’t the case, and he made full use of all the resources available to him. We know that human dissection was prohibited in the empire, but Galen worked with gladiators, so we know that he had firsthand experience with human anatomy. He certainly was unafraid, even eager, to practice animal dissection and vivisection. Other doctors of the time didn’t seem to do either of these things, or at least didn’t do nearly as much, and so Galen starts looking more and more like a lone light of empiricism in the wilderness. (However extreme and disturbing his methods may be.) VII. In view of this, it’s extremely depressing to see Tetlock write, “yet Galen never conducted anything resembling a modern experiment.” Galen isn’t here to respond, but if he were, I imagine he would say: and yet Tetlock never conducted anything resembling a basic literature review! Galen definitely isn’t as charitable as we might want him to be. He calls some of the ideas he disagrees with “impossible, nay, perfectly nonsensical”, or “stupid—I might say insane”. His intellectual rivals “are like slaves” he says, “caught in the act of stealing … quite bewildered, and while the one says nothing, the other indulges in shameless lying.” But I’m pretty sympathetic to Galen’s position, because his contemporaries really do sound like idiots. Of course, all this is being filtered through Galen’s own account, but if he’s describing them with any accuracy, he is totally fair in saying that they have no idea what they are talking about. Some of the positions he argues against include: Urine passes into the bladder in the form of vapors, rather than being secreted by the kidneys and passed through the ureters to the bladder. Galen argues against this first by pointing out that the kidneys and bladder are connected by the ureters (which must have some purpose), and second by the extensive evidence from vivisection that I mentioned above.
Inline links: this piece, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!6Gdb!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fbb854d87-de36-4173-ab8a-2728bd8605b5_1024x635.jpeg
As with many other things, it’s ironic that people haven’t actually read Galen, because this is yet another thing that Galen complains about in this book. Back in his day, the guy no one read but everyone pretended to was Aristotle. “The fact is, these people seem to me to have read none of Aristotle’s writings, but to have heard from others how great an authority he was on ‘Nature’…” I guess little has changed in the past 1,800 years.
Your Book Review: Humankind
May 28, 2021 · Original source
Don't trust any study which hasn't been replicated Why you shouldn't stand by the bystander effect In 1964 at 3:19am Catherine Genovese was attacked in front of 38 witnesses in a nice neighbourhood in New York. For half an hour none of them did anything to help, allowing her attacker to strike again. Finally at 3:50am one calls it in. The police arrive two minutes later, but it's too late for Kitty. This phenomenon is called the bystander effect. In an experiment where subjects hear someone in trouble they rush to help, but if they know 5 other subjects are also listening in only 62% of them do - it's someone else's problem. If Kitty had awakened only one person she might still be alive. Except that once again I've told you how Kitty Genovse's murder was reported, not what actually happened. Let's try again. At 3:19am Kitty's scream rings out. There aren't 38 people who hear it - it's cold, they have their windows shut, and they're asleep. 38 is the number of people the police interviewed afterwards, most of whom did not witness anything. Of those who do wake up and look out they see a woman lurching down the street, apparently drunk. Nonetheless two of them immediately call the police, who have other drunk people to deal with, and decide this isn't very important. Two people witnessed the actual attack. One did indeed do nothing. The other was scared of being picked up by the police for being drunk and homosexual in a built-up area (this was 1964), so he told a neighbour, who immediately rushed down to Kitty, heedless of the danger. Five days later Kitty's murderer was caught after a bystander noticed a man carrying a TV set out of a neighbour's house. He and a friend called the police, and disabled the man's car. And the bystander effect itself? It's real, and it replicates, for the sort of low jeopardy situations you can get an ethics committee to sign off on, but what about violent situations like Kitty's? They were unstudiable until Marie Lindegaard had the bright idea of using CCTV footage of real incidents to evaluate bystander behaviour in violent situations. In these high stakes situations bystanders intervene 9 times out of 10, with the rate of intervention rising if there are more bystanders. In the studies bystanders were prevented from interacting, but in real life where they can communicate bystanders exhibit spontaneous team work. I guess I need to add 'don't trust the New York Times' to my list of lessons learned (apparently they sometimes threaten to do other bad stuff as well). Part 3: Against Empathy, God and Civilisation Empathy is too narrow The German infantry of WWII was perhaps the most impressive in history. Martin Van Creveld has calculated that the average German solider inflicted 50% more causalities than his allied counterpart. The Italians in Africa hated them, yet admitted they would have been crushed by the British if not for them. When the Soviets were rolling up their eastern frontier, and allied armies had successfully landed across France it was pretty clear that Germany was toast, but they fought on with astonishing tenacity, and a shockingly low desertion rate. Trying to figure out how to break the German morale, allied psychologists interviewed German POWs. Were they motivated by patriotism? A belief in Nazism? A mistaken belief that this war could still be won? An indoctrinated hatred of Jews? No, the secret was friendship. The Germans had a tremendous 'marital ethos', placing a high value on loyalty, camaraderie and self-sacrifice. Ideology was present, but entirely secondary. Bregman speculates that the German army was better because the friendships of its soldiers were stronger, but admits this is only speculation: interviews of British and American soldiers produced the same results. His key point is that empathy - such as feeling for your fellow soldier - can be a force for evil rather than good, because we can't be empathetic for all humans, only for ones we 'see'. He quotes Professor Paul Bloom who has written a book. "It's about empathy," he says. "I'm against it." (The book is subtly titled Against Empathy). Experiments on babies and toddlers show that they are generally eager to help, but easily manipulated. There's an experiment that shows babies two puppets, one being helpful and the other being mean. After the show all the babies want the helpful one, but show the mean puppet sharing their preference between crackers and green beans, and suddenly they'll take that one over one that was helpful but different from them. Adults are not beyond a bit of empathy manipulation either. People were told the sad story of Sheri Summers, a 10 year in need of a transplant. Would they bump her up the list, ahead of other people whom they knew nothing about, but the doctors who ordered the list believed were better candidates? No, on the whole they wouldn't. Then they took another group given the same scenario, but with the additional instruction to imagine how she felt. Suddenly the majority were up for throwing justice and rationality to the wind (it'd be nice to check whether the effect moved from just below half to just above, but the paper is behind a paywall). Power kills empathy 500 years ago Machiavelli literally wrote the book on how to use immoral means to maintain power. Today this approach is called 'realism', reflecting the confusion between real and cynical with which Humankind began. The Prince has maintained its fame ever since, but being old and famous are no guarantees of being correct, see for example Aristotle on physics, race or women (but don't fall into the trap of thinking Aristotle was wrong about everything - that man was prolific). When Professor Dacher Kelter started working on the psychology of power in the 90s he noticed two things: Everyone assumed Machiavelli was right
Inline links: 9 times out of 10, other bad stuff, paper
Biography of Jason Shea, 44th US President
April 13, 2022 · Original source
What would it look like to try an even less literal translation than that? One possibility - don’t laugh - would be “Aristotle”.
If you’re totally unfamiliar with Chinese history and culture, translating the characters as “Kong Fuzi” or “Confucius” doesn’t help. It just sounds like a meaningless name. The speaker could be naming their friend, and saying that she’s worried being unvirtuous will disappoint them. Or it could be the dictator, and recommending virtue because the secret police will arrest unvirtuous people. Translating it “Aristotle” succinctly conveys that you should be virtuous because a widely-respected ancient philosopher said so.
Highlights From The Comments On "Sadly, Porn"
April 20, 2022 · Original source
Around Seminar XI / 1964, Lacan got booted from the Freudian institute, for being too heterodox. So he pivoted and gave a lecture for more general-purpose French intellectuals at the time, which is why Seminar XI is mysterious and obscure: he's talking to guys like Merleau-Ponty, top brass of the French intellectuals, and invoking Aristotle and Hegel and Heidegger, not doing close readings with a gaggle of analysts. But the results of his earlier close readings form the groundwork for his later work. He gets increasingly esoteric from that point on, IMO culminating in Seminar XX, which is kind of where the groundwork for modern notions of gender comes from (Butler was a Lacanian, although she may not admit it).
Universe-Hopping Through Substack
September 29, 2022 · Original source
It seems like an unfair battle. How can music ever be more powerful than logic? But Plato—and the other leading ancients who laid the groundwork for our rational and algorithmic society—feared music for a good reason. They saw the hypnotic effect of the epic and lyric singers on the masses. For centuries, people learned life skills from songs. They preserved history, culture, and the entire mythos with songs. They tapped into their own deepest emotions with songs. They celebrated every life milestone and ritual with songs. They reached out to the gods themselves with songs. Above all, they used this music to secure personal autonomy and what today we would call human rights. So we should not be surprised that Plato, Aristotle and the other originators of Western rationalism had to displace this dominant worldview of their ancestors—mythic, magical, musical—in order for them to create a more rigorous, disciplined, and analytical society. They won that battle, and we live with the consequences today in our algorithm-driven culture.
Your Book Review: The Educated Mind
July 14, 2023 · Original source
Kieran Egan laughs at your educational reforms Okay, of those three jobs, which should we give to schools? You probably have your favorite — I certainly did! But Egan wants you to know they’re all crap. None of them, by themselves, can give us the kinds of schools we want. Q: I kind of like Rousseau! What’s the problem with pure development? Like I said before, my bookshelves overflow with authors who want to knock down Rousseau (and the people who followed in his wake — John Dewey in particular). Egan will have none of it: before the developmental approach, many schools were terrible places where children were beaten for getting math problems wrong. “Rousseau and Dewey,” he writes, “have enriched our conception of education in important ways. We will not make educational progress by trying to cut away their contribution”. But, he continues, there’s no way a purely developmental approach could possibly work! Rousseau imagined human nature to be selfless and kind; this ideal state could only survive if it was kept away from the evils of society — the titular child in his book Emile was kept away from human society, unable even to read, until age twelve. Of course, schools don’t go this far — they can’t — but I can attest from personal experience that even fairly serious attempts to raise children in an accepting community of peers often crash and burn when faced with actual human nature. Kids reared in the most developmentally appropriate schools can be nasty, bored, and lazy at about the same rate as their mainstream peers. Q: In my heart, I’m an academicist. What’s the problem with it? I think Egan was an academicist in his heart, too. His book drips with classical references — so much so that it can make some sections difficult to read. But, he points out, those purely-academic schools really were hellscapes. And their brutality wasn’t something that was just tacked on, it flowed from their understanding of knowledge: enlightenment will come when the right information enters a child’s head, regardless of how it gets in there (or whether the child wants it in there). And again, Egan feels obliged to point out that we’ve tried this approach for thousands of years, and it hasn’t worked. In fact, Plato’s original vision so obviously doesn’t work that people hawking academic schools have modified their pitch: no longer is the goal for students to understand the Truth, but to cultivate inquiring, skeptical minds who are perpetually dissatisfied with old answers. Can we imagine taxpayers paying for this? Q: Fine, fine. I’m not a fan of socialization, but I’ll ask the question — what’s wrong with it? The funny thing is that of the three, this is the only one that has shown its ability to work for a long stretch of time! (As John Calvin pointed out, as animals, we’re pretty pathetic. Socialization allowed our ancestors to become something more than individuals so that they could survive; we owe this job our gratitude. That said, it would be impossible for schooling today to seek only to socialize. That would require that members of a society share values, and fundamentally agree that their society is good. It also requires that a society not be changing, so the values and skills that are taught to children today will be the ones that will be useful to them in thirty years. Obviously, modern Western society is none of those things. Pure socialization might work for the Amish, or for Catholic trad communities, but not for us. And, frankly, we should feel okay about this. (Do you know where you could get a pure socialization education in the 20th century West, Egan asks? The Hitler Youth!) There really are good reasons to be wary of any education that decrees that its society is uniformly good. Which combination is best? Okay, you say, it’s clear that none of these jobs is good on its own — the solution (obviously!) is to smoosh them together. If we do that wisely, the good parts of each will make up for the deficiencies of the others. This sounds eminently reasonable — but Egan would like to have a word with you. Q: What’s the problem in combining socialization with academics? Wouldn’t this be a beautiful combination? Socialization would cohere the school together, and then they could leverage those good feelings to, say, read Aristotle. I’ve seen this work in schools (like conservative Christian academies) founded on a set of specific beliefs. But when intellectual diversity enters in, it becomes harder. You, perhaps, say that socialization could unite people around their differences — schools could support a society made up entirely of critics! Yes, a society of critics would be interesting, and so would a herd of cats: neither works in practice. Imagine students reading their Ibram X. Kendi books in the morning, then pledging allegiance to the American flag after lunch. Q: What’s the problem in combining academics with development? Again, this seems like a beautiful vision: we can invite children into discovering the big ideas. Alas, it crashes into the reef of reality quite quickly: what do we do when kids don’t want to learn about the big ideas? This combination works wonderfully for kids who naturally want to be academics, but — and this is a crucial point that geeky education types too often sweep under the rug — lots of kids don’t naturally want to be academics. Okay, you say, ignore the “liberatory” element of the developmentalist program, and focus on the “uncovering the nature of the individual child” part: academics can tell us what the students should be learning, and development can tell us how they should learn it. Egan has a thought experiment for you. Imagine that you get the funding to fully pursue this combined goal — you set up a hundred different types of schools in the nearest big city. There’s a specific school for every possible permutation of learner — a school for big-picture kinesthetic learners who score as INFJ on the Myers–Briggs, a school for detail-oriented auditory learners who score ENFP, a school for marine-biology-loving hyperactive learners who lost their personality test results… you get the idea. You build the schools, you work out the bus schedule, and then, on the first day, all the students learn exactly the same content. Because that’s what it means for a school to be an academy — it teaches “the best that’s been thought or said”. Q: What’s the problem in combining development with socialization? What’s wrong with telling kids to become their authentic selves, even as you squeeze them into the roles most beneficial to society? Imagine two rural schools merging together, due to declining local population. Now imagine that one of them is a hippie free school, and the other is a military academy. (That’s a reality TV show I’d watch.) It’s possible, I suppose, to imagine this working for kids who naturally want to be, say, plumbers, or paleontologists, or presidents — and who happen to go to a school that prepares its students to fill that one role. But the odds of matching students to schools just perfectly seems small. But enough thought experiments — we can state this in a visual form: behold, the SAD triangle. It’s bright around the edges, but muddled where they mix: One of the things I love about Egan is that he looks at educational ideas historically. (Most histories of education start around the turn of the 20th century; I remember being excited when I found one that began in the 1600s. Egan begins in prehistory.) And what we’re reminded of, when we see these historically, is that these jobs were meant to supplant each other. Put together, they sabotage each other. What are we asking of schools? Of the three possible jobs, which are we asking mainstream schools to perform? Egan answers: all three. To confirm this, stretch your memory back to your student days, and see if you can put some of the most basic elements in any of these three categories. We’re so immersed in these that they seem obvious, “natural” aspects of schooling, but of course they’re nothing of the sort. Did you spend your time with other children of the same age? Was your work graded according to a standard? Were you forced to play team sports, or to pledge your allegiance to your nation-state? All of these, Egan says, bear the fingerprints of the goal of socialization. Progressive reformers in in the 1960s saw these as the markings of a dark conspiracy, but socialization has more warm-feely aspects: counselors to help students cope with the strains of modern society, field trips to the local fire station and historical monuments, and everything “practical” — life skills, sex ed, emotional regulation, and so on. Did you learn anything that wasn’t obviously useful? Did you read Hamlet, say, or master the Pythagorean theorem, or learn that the planets orbit the Sun (and not the other way around)? That’s the fingerprints of the academic goal. Finally, did you hear teachers show concern about “age-appropriate” content, or see signs that your school valued individualized learning? Does it seem right to you that learning should be “active” rather than “passive”, or that it’s better for someone to discover something than to be told it? Did your kindergarten have tiny, child-sized chairs? All these, Egan says, are the fruit of developmentalism. The first time I read the book, I wondered at all this. What Egan was saying was indeed lining up with my memories. But perhaps, I thought, he was playing loose with the categories; I was still skeptical that schools really were trying to balance all three goals. So I decided to check his idea from a different perspective and look up the mission statements of school districts I was familiar with. Here’s the one from the town I currently live in: “Skills” and “become involved members of a global community” seem to connote socialization, “challenge” and “knowledge” seem to connote academics, and “empower” and “reach their full potential” seem to connote development. But I wasn’t sure if I was just seeing faces in clouds, so I looked up the mission statement for my hometown: “Succeeding” seems like socialization, “learning” seems like a nod to academics, and “growing” seems like code for development. But again, I was worried that I engaging in motivated reasoning, so I looked up the largest district I’ve lived in, a city of about a million people: Wow. That seems pretty clear. So, to sum up: Egan says that there are three potential jobs we can give to schools. Alone, each of these jobs is terrible; together, they’re worse. And what we’ve done is given schools all three jobs. A sad triangle, indeed. What about alternative schools? I was curious to see whether this “sad triangle” could help us understand other philosophies of education, and why they work (or don’t). Where would, say, unschooling, and classical education, and vocational ed, and Montessori go? The first three seem obvious. Radical unschooling is in the upper-right, classical schools (with its focus on feeding kids “the best that’s been thought or said”) is in the upper-left, and vocational ed is in the bottom corner. What can that tell us? Intriguingly, each of those approaches can claim to have done some impressive stuff. I’ve worked with radical unschoolers, and while their skills have often been lopsided (not learning math is an acknowledged issue in the community), they’ve all at least exhibited a zeal for learning the topics they’ve been interested in. (Video games, frequently.) And I remember a massive study in the early 2000s that asked which kinds of schools actually improved student test scores controlling for the effects of socioeconomics. What it found was that only two types of schools stood out: Catholic schools that were operated by a religious order (e.g. the Jesuits — not local parish schools), and vocational schools. Q: Oh, that’s terrible evidence. One of those was just personal anecdotes! And what about selection effects? And what about…? I wouldn’t disagree — and, as Freddie deBoer points out, most educational research is bunk. I’ll take this to be only weak confirmation of Egan’s theory that combining jobs undercuts education. Are we hosed? If Egan’s critique is correct, we’re in a bad situation. Educational radicals yell from their dark corners to abandon the middle and come join them; a century of educational reforms have amounted to little more than wobbling around, first in one direction, then another. At the moment, the conversation about schools in the United States, at least, seems to have hit an all-time pessimistic blech. Freddie deBoer speaks for a lot of people when he says “Even the most optimistic reading of the research literature suggests that almost nothing moves the needle in academic outcomes. Almost nothing we try works.” I’m not quite that pessimistic — the word “almost” is doing some work, there. There are some reforms that seem to work at the margin: raising teacher pay, making it easier to become a teacher, reducing air pollution, free school lunches, and more. Actually applying what the science of reading has been telling us for a few decades seems a big one. And perhaps you have your own pet reform proposal. Sure — add it to the heap! What Egan suggests, though, is that so long as we’re bopping around this triangle of jobs, we won’t be able to get the schools that we want. The dream There’s a moment at the end of my favorite Bollywood movie that’s become stuck in my head. The protagonists have made the arduous journey to a beachside rural school. In the sun outside, flocks of children are experimenting with art and playing with inventions; inside, the walls are covered with books and the tables are covered with models. The kids are learning joyously and deeply. In the real world, such places do exist — they’re just exclusive, pulling their students from among the families who are already the most gifted and curious. They don’t make kids this way; they scoop up the kids who are already this way. But in the movie, we’re supposed to believe these are normal children — normal, except they’ve been transformed by a school. Egan’s wild idea is that it’s possible to make schools like this. He thought that we didn’t have to wait for the communists to make people equal or for the transhumanists to make people smarter. All he thought it required was giving schools a different job — not socialization or academics or development, but something that brings pieces of them together in a new way. But in order to understand that job, we have to come to a cleaner, bigger, and truer understanding of what “education” is. The road ahead: a special Q-and-A Q: This is the proverbial thousand-dollar-bill-lying-on-the-sidewalk: if this is possible, someone should have done it now. Is Egan going to give sufficient evidence for me to believe this? Maybe! I’ll address this in a special section at the end, after sketching out what his theory looks like. Q: If his theory is even plausibly true, then why haven’t I heard of Egan before? His books can be hard to read — he was an intellectual’s intellectual; he had difficulty writing a page without a reference to William Wordsworth, Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Claude Levi-Strauss, Richard Rorty, Noam Chomsky, or Steven Pinker. And his paradigm is wonky and multidimensional; he rejiggers common categories, and tells you everything all at once. But worst of all, when his paradigm is stated plainly, it sounds stupid. Q: Oh! What… is his paradigm? I’m going to jigsaw his book, and hold back his big idea for its own section. First, I’m going to list out some simple observations of students at different ages, and imagine what schooling could look like, if it were built on these principles. (First I’ll do this for elementary school, then middle school, then high school.) Then I’ll explain how his theory ties all of this together… by clarifying our definition of what education actually is. Q: I’m not from America; could you be clear on what you mean by those divisions of schooling? Egan’s framework has three main stages, but they don’t divide neatly into “elementary, middle, and high school”. (The precise age ranges he talks about, if you’re interested, are 2–8, 8–15, and 15 and older.) Regardless, I’m going to use those terms — he sometimes did — because it gives me something specific to imagine. Don’t sweat ‘em. Part 2: A new kind of elementary school What’s the matter with elementary schools? Egan suggests that Plato and Rousseau, for all their differences, might have the same reaction if they visited a modern elementary school: they’d call it “trivial”. I’ll admit, here, that I have tremendously fond memories of my elementary school years — committed teachers, good friends, and interesting activities. But I suspect my memory has edited out the most typical work I did. Either that, or elementary schools have taken a drastic plunge in quality from the 1980s. My wife and I homeschool now, but before the pandemic, we sent our kids to our local public school, and whenever we volunteered in the classroom, we were horrified. They spent their days practicing reading on shallow texts, or half-mindlessly practicing basic arithmetic. Occasionally they’d bring us home a sign of learning about something from the real world — usually something as intellectually and emotionally compelling as the importance of tooth brushing. And at parent–teacher conferences every year, we’d be sat down on tiny chairs and informed that, while our children were quite bright, they were struggling to pay attention in class. No sh**, I wanted to reply. The school seemed hermetically sealed; almost nothing that felt meaningful from the outside world could get in. Though they might agree about little else, Egan thinks that Plato and Rousseau would look at the dull worksheets and insipid “hands-on activities” and call modern elementary schools trivial. He agrees, and thinks that fixing this is the first step to building a new kind of school. Why so trivial? Ironically, Egan thinks it's all the fault of Plato and Rousseau. Hidden in the ways that both the academicists and developmentalist think about education is an assumption: that children’s reasoning is basically the same as adult reasoning, but lesser. Q: This isn’t some romantic, children-are-the-real geniuses theory, is it? Egan actually does think that there’s an intensity to how children perceive the world that we lose — but no, it’s not. He’s building on mainstream cognitive science — just aspects of it that are currently more-or-less ignored in school. The upshot, though, is that he thinks that educational researchers (be they of academic or developmentalist persuasions) see kids as smaller, stupider versions of adults. Q: But that’s the opposite of what my local developmentalist school says! It was the opposite of what the developmentalist school that I worked at said, too. But at teacher meetings, I’d frequently hear people ask what was “developmentally appropriate” for a child. I’ll grant that there are perfectly reasonable times to ask this: “Honey, is it developmentally appropriate for our 10-year-old to watch ‘Cocaine Bear’?” is just one of many examples. But “is it developmentally appropriate for our class to learn about world religions?” or “is it developmentally appropriate for our school library to have a book mentioning homosexuality?” probably aren’t some of them. (The latter example was not one that I heard at my progressivist school, but Egan points out that this sort of language is often used by conservative activists.) This notion of “developmentally appropriate” took on a scientific sheen with the work of Jean Piaget, the famous Swiss psychologist. Before age 12, he “proved”, children aren’t able to form hypotheses, draw conclusions, or think abstractly. This, his followers thought, should transform schools — and so they did! To math, they added in “manipulatives” — physical cubes and rods and such — to help students see math. To the history curriculum, they — well, they ended it. Why waste time, they asked, lecturing students about history that they couldn’t possibly understand? In its place they put the “expanding horizons” model of social studies. One version goes as follows: In kindergarten, students learn about themselves In first grade, they learn about their families In second grade, they learn about their neighborhood In third grade, they learn about their city In fourth grade, they learn about their state In fifth grade, they learn about their nation In sixth grade they learn about the world We can admit that there’s an elegance to this model. (I can picture how clever the theorist who first came up with it must have felt!) The downstream effects of it, however, seem horrible. Doesn’t keeping kids ignorant of the rest of the world seem provincial? Doesn’t reinforcing their self-centeredness seem infantilizing? Perhaps we could stomach it if it was founded on some unshakable findings of child psychology — but does it really strike you as likely that kids are incapable of understanding anything that happened long ago or far away? How, Egan asks, can we explain the $50 billion success of a movie franchise aimed at children that literally begins “A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away?” Q: Because… Jedis aren’t history? The point is, kids obviously have the mental abilities to understand — and in fact care a lot about — things far outside their own experience, and we’ve built elementary schools on a long-dominant model of educational psychology that swears they can’t. This is actually a great example of a general principle. Let’s call it “the Star Wars test”: can our model make sense of the most obvious facts of students? When we find that the answer is “no”, we should at least consider radically revising what we’re doing in school. What are elementary schoolers good at? (or: kids are smarter than students) Someone — I can’t now find who — once observed that children seem to lose IQ points the moment they step into a classroom. Egan agrees, and suggests that we think of ourselves as primatologists to kids, Jane Goodalls who investigate children “out in the wild” to see the sorts of things they gravitate to, and do fairly well at. If we do this, what do we see? Kids tell jokes, for one. They get mental images stuck in their heads, for another. They engage in role-playing, get lost in reverie, and beat out rhythms when they’re bored. They make ample use of metaphors, tell stories, and insist on seeing the world in terms of abstract binaries (e.g. stupid/smart, cowardice/courage, slavery/freedom, and so on). These, Egan holds, are the cognitive strengths that children use to understand the world. They’re the things that kids are often about as good at as adults — or much better than. They’re going to be the tools Egan wants us to use to rebuild the entire elementary curriculum, and in fact he spends most of his second chapter geeking out about how we might define these, how they operate in the mind, where they first pop up in history and anthropology, and even how they might have developed in our evolutionary past. I’m going to skip all of that, and get to the curriculum. From trivial to rich: the trick What could an intellectually rich elementary school curriculum look like, if we built it on kids’ cognitive strengths? He gives us one suggestion to help us do this: ask where each discipline came from in the first place. What was math before it was math, for example — or science before it was science? Q: How on Earth could that help? That’ll become clear later, when we finally uncover what Egan thinks “education” actually is, and see what job he wants us to give schools. For now, take it as a tantalizing hint… or, y’know, just ignore it. Elementary literature & language What was literature before it was literature? Before people invented writing, they had rich oral traditions: they told simple stories, recited poems, and shared proverbs. Egan suggests that these bits of oral tradition should form the backbone of the elementary literature curriculum. Q: What sorts of stories? As many as we can, and from as many diverse cultures as possible! Folktales are wonderful, as are myths. Think the Aboriginal story of “The Rainbow Serpent”, episodes from the Sumerian “Epic of Gilgamesh”, the Egyptian story of Osiris & Isis, the Greek story of Orpheus & Eurydice, the Chinese Legend of the White Snake, the Japanese Tale of Amaterasu and Susanoo, the Ashanti tales of Anansi, the Aztec myth of Quetzalcoatl, the English legend of King Arthur, the Maori myth of Maui and the Sun, the Roman story of Romulus and Remus, selections from the Indian Mahabharata, the Anglo-Saxon epic of Beowulf, the Inca legend of the Sun and Moon, the Iroquois Myth of the Flying Head (a real thing! look it up!), and the Ojibwe story of Turtle Island. Q: That was a lot of examples. Are you going to keep giving so many? I’ve got a [mumble mumble mumble] to get to. Sorry about that. Sometimes, though, I feel that a limitation of reading Educated Mind is that, in trying to keep his book to a manageable size, Egan skimped on examples in some places that it matters. It’s easy to read his occasional example and assume he intends that it hold some central place in the curriculum — when all he wants to do is display how rich and diverse the curriculum could be. (Also: good God, I didn’t even include an example from Norse mythology!) So from now on, just assume that every category could be filled with oodles of examples. Q: What sorts of poems? Lots of poems, first of all. We shouldn’t steer toward “fancy” poems — rather, we should find poems that appeal to kids immediately — think Shel Silverstein, Mother Goose, Dr. Seuss, Jack Prelutsky, Edward Lear, or Ogden Nash… that sort of thing. In a biting essay, Egan suggests these poets like these appeal to kids precisely because they leverage kids’ cognitive strengths: “we should find, and encourage saying and singing and shouting aloud verse with strong narrative forms, thumping rhymes and rhythms, the most vivid images, fun with metaphors, and a rollicking story.” Q: Why proverbs? Proverbs stick in your mind almost effortlessly. (“All’s fair in love and war!” “When in Rome, do as the Romans do!” “You can’t judge a book by its cover!”) They’re also useful; they capture general truths. Kids can apply them to all sorts of situations, but also discuss them — to what extent are they wise or foolish? (I remember my surprise when I realized that they couldn’t all be true — because you can’t follow “look before you leap” and “he who hesitates is lost” at the same time! I’m embarrassed to say that I think I only realized this when I was in college.) Elementary science What was science before it was science? Egan suggests: being immersed in the natural world. We might, he writes, encourage elementary students to “adopt” some feature of the natural world — a patch of grass, a cat, a branch, a stream — and simply observe it at length. To do this, we can use the cognitive strength of reverie. Q: Oh, do you mean like kids sometimes do in science class nowadays — describe a thing to a partner, make notes, draw it, and label its parts? No, the exact opposite! That’s all about squeezing the experience into words and forms that we understand. What we want “is less an attempt to know about nature as to know it in some participatory way, to know it as something we are an intimate part of, not set off from”. Q: That sounds a little… “woo” to me. It did to me, too… until I remembered my childhood climbing tree. I didn’t much like to go outside as a child, but I had this one tree that I’d climb up and read for hours and hours. If I close my eyes I can bring to mind the precise texture of its bark, the roughness of its broken-off branches, the coolness of its leaves, the always-surprising solidness of its trunk… I’m bigger now, but I think if I were back in my parent’s yard, I could still navigate its limbs with my eyes closed. I have, at this point in my life, read a fair number of books about trees, but I’d be surprised if all of them together more than equaled the amount I learned from that tree — my tree. Elementary math What was math before it was math? Egan suggests: counting and logic. We might, then, use rhythms, metaphors, stories, and jokes to help kids become fond of these. Q: Counting is pretty… basic. Could it really be improved? Beware of “the curse of knowledge”: Steven Pinker’s phrase for forgetting that something was once difficult! Egan suggests we should spend time helping kids count wonderfully. We can start early with counting rhymes. (“One, two, buckle my shoe! Three, four, out the door! Five, six…”) But we can also help kids use their fingers as metaphors. There are some pretty cool ways of using your hands as an abacus — and did you know that you can count up to 1,023 using just your fingers on both hands, and a knowledge of binary? Q: Logic — I’m intrigued! Aristotelian, or Boolean? Neither, for the time being — Piaget was presumably onto something when he found that young children couldn’t reason abstractly, but he was looking at logic in a vacuum. When we put logic into the context of stories, we find that kids can deal with logic just fine. There’s an entire worldwide network of educators, in fact, called Philosophy for Children, who have written whole books about how to do this, and Egan loves it all. Sometimes they read stories and ask simple questions: “What is friendship?” or “What does it mean to be brave?” They also pose ethical questions: “Is it ever right to spill a secret?” And they pose paradoxes: “Can you step in the same river twice?” Q: You mentioned “jokes” a moment ago. Care to elaborate? Egan thinks that, to help kids get good at math, you should tell kids jokes. Q: That’s… new. I think so, too — but he backs it up pretty well. To be funny, jokes (or at least most kid jokes) rely on a leap in logic: Why can’t you trust an atom? They make up everything. Knock-knock. Who’s there? Boo. Boo-hoo? Don’t cry, it’s just a joke! To understand the joke, kids have to follow the logic — spotting patterns, making connections, and tracking what their audience expects a word to mean. That’s a lot of cognitive lifting. And Egan goes further, suggesting that we grit our teeth and create methods to help kids invent their own jokes, no matter how horrible they’ll be at first. (The things we do for learning…) Q: Wait wait wait! What about addition facts, and multiplication tables, and fractions? Egan emphasizes that his methods are designed to be add-ons to the standard math curriculum. In general, he’s a don’t-blow-up-the-system sort of guy, and if something seems especially weird, you should probably assume it’s an add-on to the regular curriculum rather than a replacement, even if I forget to say so. Elementary arts What was art before it was art? Egan suggests we pop our heads into Paleolithic caves for our inspiration. Whatever the specific meaning of all those charcoal elk and aurochs and mammoths (communication with the spirit world? art for art’s sake? a way to impress babes?), Egan thinks it obvious that they were also an attempt to capture an intense experience that would be difficult to express in words alone. What did it feel like to be near an aurochs, or a saber-toothed tiger? “The arts help us,” Egan writes, “to hear and see afresh, to force our perceptions and sensations to experience again the immediacy and vividness of the world”. If we follow this, then, we don’t want to help kids build “art skills” so they can draw like an adult — rather, we want to help them amass a repository of diverse aesthetic feelings that they’ll want to express. We should provide them with a riot of experiences. Q: That couldn’t be more opaque. Examples, please! Egan writes that we should have children learn to whistle, sing, and click their tongue; we should help them emulate the ways a skunk or a hawk or a stick bug might move through a space. We should expose them to scores of different temperatures and materials. In music, we should help them love Beethoven, yes, but also the Beatles; Tchaikovsky, yes, but also Tuvan throat singers, and also John Cage, whale song, and bird song. Q: That’s a lot of experiences, but what would they be doing? An interesting aspect of Egan’s view of education is that he doesn’t seem to think we should push kids right to the “doing” phase. He wants to help kids cultivate an affective relationship with the world. In any case, he writes that as students get more experienced, we should prompt them to move from merely enjoying these experiences to trying to systematically shape similar experiences. And drawing, painting, and playing music could easily be folded into other parts of the curriculum. Elementary social studies What was social studies before it was social studies? Well. Remember how, just a moment ago, I wrote that you could assume that you should probably assume that Kieran isn’t in favor of junking the curriculum as it currently stands? He suggests we very carefully pick up the elementary social studies curriculum, place it into a trash can, and set the whole mess on fire. He isn’t worried about much of importance being lost. (Remember that the “expanding horizons” model is, to him, the original sin of 20th century educational reform, and he repeatedly quotes student surveys showing that “social studies” regularly wins the title of “most boring subject”.) In its place, he suggests we put history — which, he hints, we should think of as the centerpiece of the elementary curriculum. So the real question is what was history before it was history? His answer, surprisingly, is myth. Q: Egan wants us to teach myths as if they were history? Not at all. What he suggests, though, is that we look at how myths operate as narratives — so we can design an intellectually vivid history curriculum. And myths really are special: each is built on at least one binary (like weak vs. strong, or lies vs. truth, or so on), and uses that to tell the story of the big picture of the world. They’re so powerful that people can understand it, remember it, and love it — even if that thing never happened. We should take that power, Egan says, and apply it to things that really did happen. Q: So what history does he think kids should learn in elementary school? The great struggles of humanity from across the whole. Flippin’. World. We’re still talking about young children, so these should be done as simple stories. The goal isn’t to make them history PhD’s, so we needn’t even try to put them in any sort of order. Egan suggests that, in first grade, we pick a single binary like “freedom against oppression” and tell kids a welter of stories, again from as many cultures as possible, and as many times in history as possible. Q: Can you give examples? Oh, all right — in first grade we can tell kids the stories of the war of the Greek city-states against the Persian empire, and the slave uprising of Spartacus against the Romans. We can tell them about the plight of Jews in medieval Europe, and of the unsuccessful Sepoy Rebellion in India against the British. We can tell the stories of the American, French, and Haitian Revolutions, and about the Chinese Taiping Rebellion against the Qing Dynasty. We can tell them the story of the escaped slave Harriet Tubman returning to the South to rescue her kinsmen, the story of six-year-old Ruby Bridges facing threats to integrate her elementary school, and the story of how the Mau-Mau uprising led to modern-day Kenya. We can tell the stories of Mexican-American union organizer Cesar Chavez and of Malala Yousafzai surviving an assassination attempt to advocate for female literacy. The world does not lack for stories of oppression and liberation that can capture the attention of a six-year-old. Q: That’s… huh. What stories might they hear in second and third grade? Egan gives examples, but I won’t list them here. He suggests we use a similar approach for each, except that we swap out the binary each year. He thinks “the struggle for security against danger” would work well for year two, and “the struggle for knowledge against ignorance” would work well for year three. (That year could have a lot of overlap with the science curriculum.) Q: Anything else, for history? Yes — they should get a sense of Big History. They should get some simple stories about the ice age, the Cenozoic, the age of dinosaurs, the Paleozoic, the origins of our solar system, and the Big Bang. (Because if the ancient Norse can tell their story of the beginning of the universe, by gum, we can tell ours, too.) To sum up Egan argues that the problem of early schooling is that it’s trivial — and it’s trivial because the dominant theories of educational psychology see children as lesser versions of adults. What else would we teach them, except dumbed-down versions of what adults learn? But children have certain cognitive strengths that schools aren’t making systematic use of. If we rebuild elementary schools on those strengths, we could turn schooling upside down. We could stop seeing the curriculum as a bag of information to impart, and start seeing it as a set of great stories to tell — and invite kids into. Kids could experience (both intellectually and emotionally) the great struggles of humanity and see that they can join in them. Students could experience the story of education as the beginning of a very real adventure. Egan’s elementary school: some skeptical questions Q: I’m not sure I’m understanding what you mean by “mental images”. Care to explain? It’s an interesting fact of human cognition that just a few words can whip up a complex mental experience. Egan doesn’t just mean what we might call “visual imagery” — the ability to hold, say, the image of a bespectacled, spat-wearing duck in your mind without seeing a photograph. He’s also including what psychologists call auditory imagery, olfactory imagery, gustatory imagery, and tactile imagery. Q: How could all of that be helpful in schools? Humanity has a built-in VR system, and we’re not using it! Egan invites us to pretend we’re teaching a class about the humble earthworm. We might list off facts — “earthworms are so many centimeters long, move through soil by means of their something-or-other muscles…” but he suggests we can evoke images, say, “of what it would be like to slither and push through the soil, hesitantly exploring in one direction then another, looking for easier passages, contracting and expanding our sequence of muscles segment by segment, and sensing moisture, scents, grubs, or whatever”. Those facts are now felt by the student; the knowledge has become part of them. And just a few words can spark a complex mental experience, one going beyond literal images to include imagined sounds, smells, tastes, and more. These experiences can feel real and stick with us. (That these mental images are so easy to evoke, and so meaningfully felt, feels something like the proverbial hundred dollar bill on the ground.) Q: How could metaphors be helpful? It really is interesting that so much of the “constructivist” turn in psychology — that is, the notion that children don’t absorb knowledge, but construct it — has continued to focus on logics-mathematical reasoning, when there’s been mounting evidence for decades that metaphors are more central. It’s not just that we use metaphors to better understand things we already know, we also use them to grasp new knowledge. What’s more, psychologists have devised tests to measure the skill at metaphor-making, and have given them to people of different ages. What they found was that eleven-year-olds make more metaphors (and higher quality metaphors) than do undergraduates — and that four-year-olds have both groups beat. Again, hundred dollar bills on the sidewalk. Q: Your talk of “binaries” has me worried — binaries like good/evil and male/female are the source of so many of our most pernicious stereotypes! Isn’t the purpose of education to get us beyond stuff like this? Yes, it is! Education is supposed to complicate our understanding — but that means we’ve gotta start somewhere, and binaries provide us a natural starting place. As an uncontroversial example, think about temperature. We all begin as babies by perceiving two temperatures — hot and cold. Later, we add on intermediate categories — warm and cool. (Note that the human body is the assumed mid-point to temperature. Binaries often work like this; “big” and “small” mean “bigger or smaller than me”, “nasty” and “kind” mean “nastier or kinder than I am, except when my brother is really asking for it”, and so on.) A good story (and an Egan-inspired elementary curriculum is, in a sense, nothing but good stories) will go further, and transform the binary. Toy Story is grounded in the binary of abandonment/belonging: at the beginning, the toy cowboy Woody belongs to his owner, and has his affection. Then a rival comes who threatens his belonging. In trying to get back to belonging, Woody is entirely lost — and to save the day, he has to come to a deeper understanding of what belonging means. Now, all lessons can’t be Pixar movies. But the good stories (especially in literature and history) will challenge and subvert the binaries they begin with. Q: I see the pattern of Egan drawing from “as many cultures as possible”. Why so many? Is this a political correctness thing? If it helps to think of it as such, then, sure! I don’t think Egan would have had a problem with that. But his ultimate reason for including so much diversity goes deeper. For Egan, including such world-wide diversity isn’t optional, and the answer to why is bound up in his definition of education. (Keep reading.) His answer also insists that we, whenever possible, also include stories from the Bible and Homeric epics (the Iliad and Odyssey). Q: Mmm, stories from the Bible aren’t going to fly in my local school! So be it! Egan doesn’t spend much time obsessing over the practicalities of… His interest is in describing what an ideal education might look like, if it were possible. Every lesson, every classroom, and every school is necessarily a compromise. Q: You make a big deal of poems. But isn’t poetry dead? An interesting contrast can be made to classical education, which also has kids read a lot of poems — they see knowing great poems as one of the marks of an educated person; again, for an academicist, it’s the information that transforms. Egan begs to disagree. Poems are important because they’re a wonderful way to train their cognitive strengths, like rhythm (poems are language fueling by thumping). We want to help kids learn to use this tool better, and a great way to do that is to help them recite poems that they’ve learned by heart. Q: “Learn by heart” — is that code for “memorize”?! It is! Egan is actually quite big on memorization — he points out that all the knowledge in the world can do nothing for a person once they’ve forgotten it. He didn’t, however, appreciate the academicist focus on memorizing without understanding (or at least enjoyment). Q: I’m still worried about the science curriculum, as you’re describing it. Can you allay my fears? Honestly, while I feel there’s something profoundly right to how Egan is describing early experiences of nature, I feel the same way. Note that there’s more science coming in the social studies curriculum. But if that’s still not enough, one could bring down aspects of the middle school science stage. Q: Anything else that Egan suggests we do in elementary school literature and language? He suggests that we help kids learn a second language! This is so obviously true (why do American schools typically wait until kids lose the ability to naturally absorb languages to start teaching languages?) he doesn’t belabor it, though. Q: You had mentioned that Egan’s vision seems more internal-focused. Should we be worried about that? While I strongly suspect that his curriculum would make kids more creative in any way you’d like to measure it, Egan wasn’t particularly interested in “creativity” — he was more about helping kids find the world interesting. I get the sense that he thinks kids will do things with minimal prompting once they’re loaded up with complex internal experiences. Q: I think I’m beginning to understand Egan — is he basically saying “make learning fun”? “Fun”, applied to education, is a dangerous word. Egan worries about the dangers of an emotionally unserious curriculum producing emotionally stunted adults. That doesn’t mean we need to tell students only “serious” stories — only that we treat the world honestly. “Disney-esque sentimentality is the exact emotional equivalent to intellectual contempt”. Q: But aren't some of these stories too dark for children who have themselves experienced oppression and disaster? Egan argues that these stories may be especially helpful to them — they can help them understand their struggles better, and give voice to them. Q: At the very start of this, you promised us “rationality”… but I’m not seeing rationality here! All this talk of “adventure” almost seems to go the opposite direction. What gives? Wait for it. But for a hint right now — Egan is fond of citing his fellow educational theorist Jerome Bruner, who claimed “any subject can be taught effectively in some intellectually honest form to any child at any stage of development”. Bruner was criticized for that; his critics charged that he was ignoring learning differences and socio-economic realities. Egan thinks he was profoundly right. Part 3: A new kind of middle school What’s the matter with middle school? What was middle school like for you? In math, I recall a jumble of barely-related topics. In literature, I remember reading great literature — Frankenstein, Romeo and Juliet — only in their dumbed-down summary formats. In social studies, I remember teachers proclaiming on the first day of class that unlike all of our previous history classes, this class wouldn’t be about names and dates… and then going on to memorize names and dates. And in science, I remember being forced to dissect a frog only to discover that frogs are — you guessed it — made of slimy frog parts. Your mileage may vary, but for a lot of us, middle school feels like getting booted out of the (in retrospect) Eden of elementary school, and like marking time before the serious studying of high school. It feels meaningless. In my favorite of his books, Egan calls so much middle school curricula “human deserts”, noting “we have created a system in which the importance of human emotions for meaning seems barely noticed”. Why so meaningless? If our dominant approaches to educational psychology fundamentally misinterpret younger children, Egan suggests, they basically throw up their hands when faced with pre-teens and teenagers. Mainstream schools begin to introduce vocational training to help lighten the load, and Maria Montessori famously suggests that adolescents should be sent to go run a farm. Egan is sympathetic to those responses, but points out that they don’t do much to lighten the load that the academic curriculum often becomes at this age. This feeling of meaninglessness, he argues, is utterly tragic — it comes just when a hunger for meaning blossoms in adolescents! We can see that hunger for meaning in their lives outside the classroom, where their interests ramp up into veritable obsessions. What are adolescents obsessed with? What might we see, if we become Jane Goodalls of early adolescence? First, teens are obsessed with gossip. The motivations of others — why did he do that? and what was he THINKING? — are hypothesized and talked to death. Second, that they’re pulled toward idealism. Many feel a dissatisfaction with the world as it is, and feel a romantic urge to make it a better place. They’re often lured into simplistic beliefs that promise to help them do that. Third, they love extremes: they want to find limits, and test them. Obviously, this can show up as risky behavior, but we can also see it in their love for the bizarre — note adolescents’ fascination in things like aliens, cryptids, and ghosts. (Egan loves pointing out that The Guinness Book of World Records is a perennial bestseller among kids at this age. How else would they find out who had the world’s longest fingernails?) Fourth, they gravitate toward heroes — people who push the edges of those limits. By celebrating heroes, they can vicariously share in their transcendence. Look for the posts hanging up in a teenager’s bedroom to guess what boundaries they feel most hemmed in by: athletes push against physical limits; a death metal guitarist might push against authority and conventional morality. An activist or entrepreneur might push against our dulled morality or our sense of what’s possible. Finally, we might spot teens taking up hobbies and making collections. Hobbies can be a way to identify yourself as part of a group against the rest of the world (“I’m the sort of person who goes bird-watching!”), and collections can be a way to climb the status ladder inside the community. Egan points out that a collection can also be a way to feel like you have control over what you’re discovering is a very big and complex world of detailed information (“I’ve spotted every one of the fifty most common birds of Texas — even the black-capped vireo!”) Egan’s insight is that these obsessions give teenagers a sense of meaning, and that we can use them as tools to make middle schools that overflow with meaning. From meaningless to meaning-soaked Again, Egan sketches out a new kind of curriculum subject-by-subject. Before, his trick was to ask where the subject first evolved out of; now, it’s to ask who first discovered or created the specific content we’re teaching. “All knowledge”, he writes, “is human knowledge. Everything we know is knowable through the lives of its inventors, discoverers, or users, and we can have access to that knowledge through the hopes, fears, or intentions that drove them”. Middle school math Who first discovered the concepts students learn in math? The answer, of course, is a wide diversity of curious men and women living across the world over the last few thousand years. Egan says: bring those people into how we teach math. If we used gossip and heroes to help students find it meaningful, what kind of math would result? When we teach the Pythagorean theorem, we should give a sense of who Pythagoras was — a cult-founder who worshiped numbers to find God, whose followers (according to a piece of ancient gossip) murdered one of their members who discovered irrational numbers! Q: Well, sure, that works for Pythagoras, but he’s a known nut job; surely most math doesn’t come from such interesting roots? When we teach the Cartesian coordinate system, students should meet Rene Descartes, the Calvinist French polymath who saw the possibility that math could decipher the world, if only we could unite algebra and geometry… and invented the xy-plane to do exactly that. When we teach scientific notation, we should call our students’ attention to the importance of the number zero, and tell them the story of the Pope who tried to introduce Arabic numerals to Christian Europe and may have been assassinated because of it. When we teach algebra, we should ask students why “algebra” is Arabic for “the fixing of bones”, and tell the story of what Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi was up to. We could do this all day. Literally everything students learn in school was first invented or discovered by some interesting person who was struggling to accomplish something hard. To learn is to connect with those people, whether we know it or not. Egan says: help kids know it. Math has been dehumanized: re-humanize it. Q: So the math curriculum needs to become a history of math curriculum, and math teachers need to become history teachers? No, the content needn’t change. But with surprisingly little work, we can bring in the gossipy stories of heroes, and their obsessions can spread to students. Middle school science Who first discovered the things students learn about in science? If you’re thinking “scientists”, you’re only partially right. Most of the big-picture ideas that we now think of as “science” were discovered before the word “scientist” was invented, or the discipline was professionalized. Frequently, they were hatched by true amateurs, working in their free time, hungry to unlock the secrets of nature. We can use gossip and heroes to spread their obsessions to students just as we taught math, but Egan points out two twists. The first is that the content itself can take on heroic qualities: everything is impressive, when you look at it in a certain light. In an interview, Egan once said: “My book is an attempt to show that, indeed, everything in the world is wonderful, but that schools are designed almost to disguise this slightly shameful fact. We represent the world to children as mostly known and rather dull. The opposite is the case: we are surrounded by mystery, and what we know is fascinating”. What would even the most boring subjects look like, if we emphasized their heroic qualities? Well: What’s a tooth? Bone, wrapped in rock, surrounding tiny cells that your body feeds with blood. What’s a bar of chocolate? A crystal of jellyfish-shaped fat molecules stacked together; when you put it in your mouth you shake them apart into a writhing confusion. What’s the air around you? The bottom of a 10-mile-deep ocean; when you put your tongue over a soda straw and your Pepsi stops leaking out, it’s not because a “vacuum” is “sucking” it up, but because that ocean is squeezing it into your face. Again, we could do this all day! And in middle school science, we can. Everything in the world is wonderful; we can help students see this again and again. The second twist is that science is a subject rich in extremes. Here Egan introduces a concept that we’ll see crop up again: “15-minute segments”. To help us fit as much wonder as possible into a school day, he suggests we supplement the usual school subjects with a few quick lessons. To infuse science with extremes, he suggests we add on three: “human & natural records”, “extremes of animals & plants”, and “cosmology”. Middle school history Who first made the things students learn about in history? Why, the historical characters themselves! Since we’ve given kids a grounding in history in elementary school, now we can build on that, going through many of the same events as before, but in more depth, and more vividly. We’ll leverage the interest with other people’s inner lives to tell stories focusing on the perspectives of the people who made history — zooming in, when possible, on scandalous details. We’ll leverage the tool of idealism to choose historical characters who chafed against their surroundings, and understand what they were trying to accomplish. What was their vision of the world? What did they hope for, and what did they fear? Q: Isn’t the “great man” approach to history out of fashion? Egan’s approach doesn’t say that “great men” made history — it’s just leveraging gossip to help kids see history as something meaningful that can expand their own possibilities. “Early adolescence is commonly a time of intense and vivid emotional life, and also a time of deepest boredom and depression… [We] can give shape to the intermediate curriculum and offer the students a world that is rich, complex, varied, and as intense and vivid as their own emotional lives”. We also should add on another “15-minute segment” just to pump in as many biographies as possible, and from people who don’t always fit into the normal history curriculum. Call it “Brief Lives”, and throw in anyone who’s struggled to push some limit — Mary Wollstonecraft, Jesse Owen, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, one of the students’ great-aunts, whoever. As students get older, this can transition to “People and Their Ideas”. Here, we’d focus less on the details of the person’s life, and use it as a backdrop to showing how meaningful some of history’s most important ideas could be. Think Aristotle and syllogisms, Edward Said and orientalism, Confucius and propriety, Cornel West and race, Buddha on the four noble truths, Muhammad and the five pillars, Karl Marx and communism, Adam Smith and the invisible hand, Thomas Hobbes and the state of nature, John Locke and natural rights, Jeremy Bentham and utilitarianism, Thomas Aquinas on the sacraments, Martin Luther on faith, Voltaire on the freedom of speech… you get the idea. Q: Can you really get a profound understanding of utilitarianism in 15 minutes? Yes! The point of this segment isn’t to develop a systematic understanding of any one idea, it’s to introduce students to the exciting possibilities of human thought. (As a bonus, this might make them less likely to fall for the first ideology that they encounter later in life.) Diversity is important for this — as it is with culture. Throughout this, we should also be trying to expose students to as much cultural diversity as possible, because in high school, we’ll be trying to make sense of our society, and it’s impossible to do that unless we have something to compare it against. Middle school literature & language You might think that this subject would be easy — that middle school literature is already filled with “strong and clear narratives”, that it deals with “transcendent human qualities such as courage, love, and persistence”, that it focuses on “extremes of human experience”, that it examines “something strange and exotic”. You’d be right! Egan’s pretty happy with a bog-standard middle school literature curriculum, done well. In this part of the book, his spends most of his limited space suggesting three rather odd activities which could also be useful — especially for increasing students’ awareness of language, so they can use it better. The first is etymology — not, however, memorizing lists of roots, but in being told the entertaining backstories of specific words. Take the word “berserk”, for example — we now use it to mean something relatively mild (“if my mom catches me coming home late, she’ll go berserk”), but it comes from an old Norse word meaning “a raging warrior of superhuman strength”. And that’s because ber meant “bear” and serk meant “shirt”: soldiers of the bear cult would don the skin of a bear to, in their minds, transform into one — howling, foaming at the mouth, and gnawing the rims of their shields. (Most adults walk through life with little understanding that the words falling out of their mouths are entities, with their own back-stories. Communication is, at the very least, more interesting when we become aware of this.) The second is to add on another language to learn — not, this time, to become fluent in it, but just to become aware of how very different human languages can be. (For native English speakers, Sanskrit might work well, or Cantonese, or perhaps even ancient Egyptian. Again, the point isn’t for this language to be useful — it’s to explore diversity.) The final one is to study humor — not just jokes anymore, but comedy at its finest. Egan cites (at length!) Monty Python as a group of people who were particularly brilliant in their use of the English language. Examining their skits can lead us into not just an appreciation of semantics (the study of how meaning is made from smaller pieces, like etymology) but also pragmatics (the study of how meaning is made in social situations). Pretty heady stuff, for a conversation about a dead parrot. Part 4: A new kind of high school I’ll confess — I loved parts of high school… and among nerdy folks, I suspect I’m not alone. For some of us, this was a golden time. Even at my local public high school, I had access to academically thrilling classes — especially, in my last two years, advanced literature and history. I felt like I was finally understanding the ideas that mattered. In any case, Egan is quick to acknowledge that, at this level, the sort of education he advocates really is being practiced in some places. What he can add is an understanding of what makes it wonderful, how to make it even more wonderful, and how to make it wonderful for many, many more people. What’s the matter with high school? Far too often, even when high school classes are intellectual, they’re dry. For the majority of students, all this academic stuff is experienced as utterly lifeless, a mass of dead information to be squeezed inside one’s head for a test and then left to evaporate. Egan mocks the curriculum wars that seem to be a permanent feature of the teaching life; quoting the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, he says “while the academic left and right bicker over whether the curriculum is too traditional or too radical, they fail to recognize that most students absorb so little of academic culture that the bickering is largely irrelevant”. Why so dry? Egan suggests three reasons to explain this. First, because high school academic classes are too often masses of small details with no sign of the big picture. Second, because they’re typically slavishly disciplinary, and aren’t able to address the questions that span the disciplines. Third, because they’re often designed to bring students through what everyone is sure of, and hide away any controversies. In all of these, Egan suggests that what’s called “academics” in high school is too often a dim imitation of what real academics are actually practicing. There’s a fourth reason, though, and it’s probably the biggest of all — by the time they get to high school, most students haven’t actually learned that much! An academic approach is designed to connect small details into the big picture; for people who arrive in high school (and college) classes without having already collected much in their heads, academics are going to taste dry. (An implication of this for anyone trying to improve schools is that we might not want to start with high schools. If your goal is to create a new kind of academic learning, first start at elementary school — or barring that, middle school.) What motivates mad scientists? When we wanted to re-conceive the elementary and middle school curriculums, we looked at what students were already good at — kids’ cognitive strengths and adolescents’ obsessions. For this level it might be easier to look — for reasons that will become clear when we finally unveil Egan’s crazy-sounding definition of education — at the sorts of things that bring intellectuals joy. Q: Which intellectuals? Take your pick. Galileo, Einstein, Smith, Marx, Goodall, Chomsky, Curie… all the people who took to the life of the mind like fish to water. But that’s a lot to hold in my mind at once, so I’m just going to think about Doc Brown from Back to the Future: He was high on intellectualism I’ve never been there, but the brochure looks nice Let’s call these people “mad scientists”. And let’s pretend we once again took up our job of being primatologists, and snooped on these folks “in the wild” (“in the lab”? this is beginning to get recursive…)… what would we find motivating them? Asking simple questions, for one. (What is space? What is society? What is a human? What is language?) Building general schemes (big theories) that hold lots of evidence together. Finding their place in the cosmos. And (perhaps above all) seeking certainty. Once again, Egan suggests we use these as tools to remake the curriculum. From dry to daring What could a high school curriculum look like, if it were rebuilt on these tools? Once again, Egan has a trick. This time, it’s to ask what fights have driven the development of each of these fields forward — and how we can help students enter them. First, a mini-segment! Intellectuals invented the academic disciplines to better pursue the life of the mind, but the disciplines can get in the way. Some of the most important intellectual discoveries that could help students are too big to fit into any of the disciplines. We need a place to introduce them plainly. Egan proposes another mini-segment — again, just 15 minutes a day, a few times a week — called “Metaknowledge”. Q: Isn’t that already in the International Baccalaureate program? Yes, he acknowledges that he’s borrowing from that! This segment would introduce ideas that would enrich student thinking across the disciplines: game theory, cognitive biases, systems thinking, Bayesian reasoning, epistemology, ethics, logic, cultural evolution, and so on. High school literature How can we help students enter the big fights of literature? Intellectuals of a literary bent — professors, critics, poets, novelists — delight in arguing over literature like rabbis arguing over the Talmud. Take, just for one example, the debates over Shakespeare’s character of Ophelia. Does she love Hamlet, or is she a victim of his emotional abuse? Is she truly insane, or is she acting? Is she passive, or is she pulling the strings? Oceans of ink have been spilled arguing over questions like these; our students can, perhaps, spill a few ounces more. The usefulness of arguing literature, for Egan, isn’t that it’s oh-so important for educated adults to know a lot about Ophelia. (This, again, was where the academicists went wrong — in thinking that being educated was about getting the best knowledge in your head.) Rather, arguing over literature is a training arena for the all-important intellectual move of this kind of understanding: building general schemes out of evidence, and struggling with anomalies. One person, for example, might hold that Ophelia is insane, and cite all sorts of obvious evidence — her father just was murdered by her lover, she rants nonsense while (bizarrely) handing out flowers to friends… But then he’s challenged when he reads a scholar pointing out that, to people in Elizabethan England, types of flowers have symbolic meanings. How does he deal with that? He could ignore it, claiming it an over-reading of Shakespeare. (Sometimes a flower is just a flower!) Or he could address it, complicating his own scheme. This intellectual work is best done with other people, who are incentivized to challenge your understanding of something, and go back and forth, building competing models and calling attention to anomalies. This process — the “dialectic” — pops up again and again in the academic disciplines. It’s the center of how understanding works, at this stage. And the nice thing about practicing it on literature is that, more so than in history or science, the evidence is shared knowledge — it’s right in front of everyone, written out. But there are other ways literature class can be helpful to the general life of the mind. Egan also suggests that we’ll want to specially include literature that helps students understand complex ideas. Camus, Orwell, Borges, Calvino might be particularly helpful here… and I imagine that genres like science fiction and magical realism might be particularly useful, too. (Note, though, that once again none of this requires a radical remaking of the curriculum, or of the canon of texts that we traditionally assign to high schoolers.) Q: Oh yes, the canon — what does Egan have to say about the canon wars? When he wrote Educated Mind in the nineties, the long-brewing canon war was approaching its inevitable apocalyptic climax. On one side of this Plain of Megiddo were the pro-canon traditionalists, arguing that we should keep assigning the texts that had been argued over for centuries. Facing them were the anti-canon reformers, arguing the standard texts over-represented the perspective of dead white men. Onto the middle of the plain rides Egan on a white horse, who bellows above the din: “I’VE GOT A BUSLOAD OF HIGH SCHOOLERS WHO WANTS TO JOIN IN, EVERYONE OKAY WITH THAT?” To do so, he says, we need to give students the arguments from both sides. So, for example, bell hooks, Edward Said, and China Achebe should be on the syllabus, as should Allan Bloom, Mortimer Adler, and Diane Ravitch. And of course they should actually read the texts cherished by both sides, too, so they can argue better. High school history How could entering the big fights help us reinvent high school history? First, we might look for dueling histories. It’s time for students to get into historiography and understand that history isn’t just what happened, it’s something we make. We might help kids read chapters from Howard Zinn’s socialist history of America alongside the corresponding chapters from Paul Johnson’s conservative history of America. How could big questions help? We want to help students see how various people have disagreed over some of the big questions of what human history is, at its most basic. We can have them compare Steven Pinker’s theory of civilization’s progress (Better Angels of our Nature) with Yuvah Noah Harari’s theory of civilization’s woes (Sapiens). We could have them compare so-and-so’s account of human history as an ever-expanding unlatching of energy sources with Robert Wright’s account of human history as unlatching more and more positive-sum games (Nonzero). What role could the lure of certainty play? To help them grow their skills at finding anomalies, we might help them work through pseudo-histories and conspiracy theories. Q: Conspiracy theories! Oh, come now, you’re playing with fire. Well, the world is on fire. Our students will spend the rest of their lives encountering terrible-but-beguiling arguments about how the world works; if we don’t prepare them for those, what have we been doing? So we should introduce arguments that the Moon landing was a hoax, that the Illuminati founded America, that aliens built the pyramids, and so on. At no point can we demean students for falling for any of these theories — the job of a teacher at this stage, Egan writes, is to support students in their reasoning even when their beliefs are offensive and stupid, gradually offering anomalies. There’s no way out of bad theories except through them. By the time students graduate, we want them to have wrestled with terrible ideas and — for a while — lost. They need to experience what it’s like to change their minds about something they felt strongly about. They need to viscerally realize, in Feynman’s famous phrase, “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.” High school natural science How could entering the big fights reinvent high school science? At present, so much of the high school science curriculum — especially “honors” classes — is oriented toward helping amass details. (The same is true of 100-level university classes, which famously “survey” the field to prepare for more advanced studies. I always thought this was stupid — of the huge lecture hall of students in my Geology 100 class, how many went on to take even a second course?) The meaty debates that propel science forward are held back. Egan complains: “The more general and speculative theories in any discipline are treated like an unconventional and disreputable relation who, even though the children find her exciting and entertaining, must be kept hidden from view, her very existence denied as long as possible”. This is a stupid approach — students with an adventurous bent are convinced that science isn’t for them. Egan proposes, simply, that we flip this, and organize high school science classes around the big debates. We shouldn’t be ashamed at how, well, adolescent this might look: “the dramatic, speculative, and contentious theories will be up-front in the early years of the [high school] curriculum”. What might those be? Egan doesn’t give a list, but we can spitball some: instead of explaining what “matter” is from the top down, a physics class could problematize “matter” by following the debates over the nature of dark matter and dark energy, and by becoming familiarized with the various interpretations of quantum mechanics
Inline links: pretty pathetic, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!pui0!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fd4a43f11-1843-4b8f-83a2-2b787e78465e_1600x639.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!4ZLy!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F3c5eed59-0e97-4371-9883-fa365d82dbac_1600x508.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!MG6O!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F877a1fd2-be15-4a59-b683-380916a07e3e_1600x639.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!cC4-!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F051a12b7-2f60-43fd-8d77-a0040ba524a5_1600x639.png, when he says, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!YXMl!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F862809c5-6478-438e-95d8-4dcb4c3a52af_1600x574.png, In a biting essay, In my favorite of his books, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!ywm7!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ff9c9b1ed-a260-4117-8679-0b5a32339748_1600x574.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!WPeH!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F62ea55f8-0458-484f-be45-7a011d050756_1600x625.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!FPXt!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fb017fc37-3151-4556-87f1-31a097cf7594_1600x574.png
Egan’s insight is that these obsessions give teenagers a sense of meaning, and that we can use them as tools to make middle schools that overflow with meaning. From meaningless to meaning-soaked Again, Egan sketches out a new kind of curriculum subject-by-subject. Before, his trick was to ask where the subject first evolved out of; now, it’s to ask who first discovered or created the specific content we’re teaching. “All knowledge”, he writes, “is human knowledge. Everything we know is knowable through the lives of its inventors, discoverers, or users, and we can have access to that knowledge through the hopes, fears, or intentions that drove them”. Middle school math Who first discovered the concepts students learn in math? The answer, of course, is a wide diversity of curious men and women living across the world over the last few thousand years. Egan says: bring those people into how we teach math. If we used gossip and heroes to help students find it meaningful, what kind of math would result? When we teach the Pythagorean theorem, we should give a sense of who Pythagoras was — a cult-founder who worshiped numbers to find God, whose followers (according to a piece of ancient gossip) murdered one of their members who discovered irrational numbers! Q: Well, sure, that works for Pythagoras, but he’s a known nut job; surely most math doesn’t come from such interesting roots? When we teach the Cartesian coordinate system, students should meet Rene Descartes, the Calvinist French polymath who saw the possibility that math could decipher the world, if only we could unite algebra and geometry… and invented the xy-plane to do exactly that. When we teach scientific notation, we should call our students’ attention to the importance of the number zero, and tell them the story of the Pope who tried to introduce Arabic numerals to Christian Europe and may have been assassinated because of it. When we teach algebra, we should ask students why “algebra” is Arabic for “the fixing of bones”, and tell the story of what Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi was up to. We could do this all day. Literally everything students learn in school was first invented or discovered by some interesting person who was struggling to accomplish something hard. To learn is to connect with those people, whether we know it or not. Egan says: help kids know it. Math has been dehumanized: re-humanize it. Q: So the math curriculum needs to become a history of math curriculum, and math teachers need to become history teachers? No, the content needn’t change. But with surprisingly little work, we can bring in the gossipy stories of heroes, and their obsessions can spread to students. Middle school science Who first discovered the things students learn about in science? If you’re thinking “scientists”, you’re only partially right. Most of the big-picture ideas that we now think of as “science” were discovered before the word “scientist” was invented, or the discipline was professionalized. Frequently, they were hatched by true amateurs, working in their free time, hungry to unlock the secrets of nature. We can use gossip and heroes to spread their obsessions to students just as we taught math, but Egan points out two twists. The first is that the content itself can take on heroic qualities: everything is impressive, when you look at it in a certain light. In an interview, Egan once said: “My book is an attempt to show that, indeed, everything in the world is wonderful, but that schools are designed almost to disguise this slightly shameful fact. We represent the world to children as mostly known and rather dull. The opposite is the case: we are surrounded by mystery, and what we know is fascinating”. What would even the most boring subjects look like, if we emphasized their heroic qualities? Well: What’s a tooth? Bone, wrapped in rock, surrounding tiny cells that your body feeds with blood. What’s a bar of chocolate? A crystal of jellyfish-shaped fat molecules stacked together; when you put it in your mouth you shake them apart into a writhing confusion. What’s the air around you? The bottom of a 10-mile-deep ocean; when you put your tongue over a soda straw and your Pepsi stops leaking out, it’s not because a “vacuum” is “sucking” it up, but because that ocean is squeezing it into your face. Again, we could do this all day! And in middle school science, we can. Everything in the world is wonderful; we can help students see this again and again. The second twist is that science is a subject rich in extremes. Here Egan introduces a concept that we’ll see crop up again: “15-minute segments”. To help us fit as much wonder as possible into a school day, he suggests we supplement the usual school subjects with a few quick lessons. To infuse science with extremes, he suggests we add on three: “human & natural records”, “extremes of animals & plants”, and “cosmology”. Middle school history Who first made the things students learn about in history? Why, the historical characters themselves! Since we’ve given kids a grounding in history in elementary school, now we can build on that, going through many of the same events as before, but in more depth, and more vividly. We’ll leverage the interest with other people’s inner lives to tell stories focusing on the perspectives of the people who made history — zooming in, when possible, on scandalous details. We’ll leverage the tool of idealism to choose historical characters who chafed against their surroundings, and understand what they were trying to accomplish. What was their vision of the world? What did they hope for, and what did they fear? Q: Isn’t the “great man” approach to history out of fashion? Egan’s approach doesn’t say that “great men” made history — it’s just leveraging gossip to help kids see history as something meaningful that can expand their own possibilities. “Early adolescence is commonly a time of intense and vivid emotional life, and also a time of deepest boredom and depression… [We] can give shape to the intermediate curriculum and offer the students a world that is rich, complex, varied, and as intense and vivid as their own emotional lives”. We also should add on another “15-minute segment” just to pump in as many biographies as possible, and from people who don’t always fit into the normal history curriculum. Call it “Brief Lives”, and throw in anyone who’s struggled to push some limit — Mary Wollstonecraft, Jesse Owen, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, one of the students’ great-aunts, whoever. As students get older, this can transition to “People and Their Ideas”. Here, we’d focus less on the details of the person’s life, and use it as a backdrop to showing how meaningful some of history’s most important ideas could be. Think Aristotle and syllogisms, Edward Said and orientalism, Confucius and propriety, Cornel West and race, Buddha on the four noble truths, Muhammad and the five pillars, Karl Marx and communism, Adam Smith and the invisible hand, Thomas Hobbes and the state of nature, John Locke and natural rights, Jeremy Bentham and utilitarianism, Thomas Aquinas on the sacraments, Martin Luther on faith, Voltaire on the freedom of speech… you get the idea. Q: Can you really get a profound understanding of utilitarianism in 15 minutes? Yes! The point of this segment isn’t to develop a systematic understanding of any one idea, it’s to introduce students to the exciting possibilities of human thought. (As a bonus, this might make them less likely to fall for the first ideology that they encounter later in life.) Diversity is important for this — as it is with culture. Throughout this, we should also be trying to expose students to as much cultural diversity as possible, because in high school, we’ll be trying to make sense of our society, and it’s impossible to do that unless we have something to compare it against. Middle school literature & language You might think that this subject would be easy — that middle school literature is already filled with “strong and clear narratives”, that it deals with “transcendent human qualities such as courage, love, and persistence”, that it focuses on “extremes of human experience”, that it examines “something strange and exotic”. You’d be right! Egan’s pretty happy with a bog-standard middle school literature curriculum, done well. In this part of the book, his spends most of his limited space suggesting three rather odd activities which could also be useful — especially for increasing students’ awareness of language, so they can use it better. The first is etymology — not, however, memorizing lists of roots, but in being told the entertaining backstories of specific words. Take the word “berserk”, for example — we now use it to mean something relatively mild (“if my mom catches me coming home late, she’ll go berserk”), but it comes from an old Norse word meaning “a raging warrior of superhuman strength”. And that’s because ber meant “bear” and serk meant “shirt”: soldiers of the bear cult would don the skin of a bear to, in their minds, transform into one — howling, foaming at the mouth, and gnawing the rims of their shields. (Most adults walk through life with little understanding that the words falling out of their mouths are entities, with their own back-stories. Communication is, at the very least, more interesting when we become aware of this.) The second is to add on another language to learn — not, this time, to become fluent in it, but just to become aware of how very different human languages can be. (For native English speakers, Sanskrit might work well, or Cantonese, or perhaps even ancient Egyptian. Again, the point isn’t for this language to be useful — it’s to explore diversity.) The final one is to study humor — not just jokes anymore, but comedy at its finest. Egan cites (at length!) Monty Python as a group of people who were particularly brilliant in their use of the English language. Examining their skits can lead us into not just an appreciation of semantics (the study of how meaning is made from smaller pieces, like etymology) but also pragmatics (the study of how meaning is made in social situations). Pretty heady stuff, for a conversation about a dead parrot. Part 4: A new kind of high school I’ll confess — I loved parts of high school… and among nerdy folks, I suspect I’m not alone. For some of us, this was a golden time. Even at my local public high school, I had access to academically thrilling classes — especially, in my last two years, advanced literature and history. I felt like I was finally understanding the ideas that mattered. In any case, Egan is quick to acknowledge that, at this level, the sort of education he advocates really is being practiced in some places. What he can add is an understanding of what makes it wonderful, how to make it even more wonderful, and how to make it wonderful for many, many more people. What’s the matter with high school? Far too often, even when high school classes are intellectual, they’re dry. For the majority of students, all this academic stuff is experienced as utterly lifeless, a mass of dead information to be squeezed inside one’s head for a test and then left to evaporate. Egan mocks the curriculum wars that seem to be a permanent feature of the teaching life; quoting the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, he says “while the academic left and right bicker over whether the curriculum is too traditional or too radical, they fail to recognize that most students absorb so little of academic culture that the bickering is largely irrelevant”. Why so dry? Egan suggests three reasons to explain this. First, because high school academic classes are too often masses of small details with no sign of the big picture. Second, because they’re typically slavishly disciplinary, and aren’t able to address the questions that span the disciplines. Third, because they’re often designed to bring students through what everyone is sure of, and hide away any controversies. In all of these, Egan suggests that what’s called “academics” in high school is too often a dim imitation of what real academics are actually practicing. There’s a fourth reason, though, and it’s probably the biggest of all — by the time they get to high school, most students haven’t actually learned that much! An academic approach is designed to connect small details into the big picture; for people who arrive in high school (and college) classes without having already collected much in their heads, academics are going to taste dry. (An implication of this for anyone trying to improve schools is that we might not want to start with high schools. If your goal is to create a new kind of academic learning, first start at elementary school — or barring that, middle school.) What motivates mad scientists? When we wanted to re-conceive the elementary and middle school curriculums, we looked at what students were already good at — kids’ cognitive strengths and adolescents’ obsessions. For this level it might be easier to look — for reasons that will become clear when we finally unveil Egan’s crazy-sounding definition of education — at the sorts of things that bring intellectuals joy. Q: Which intellectuals? Take your pick. Galileo, Einstein, Smith, Marx, Goodall, Chomsky, Curie… all the people who took to the life of the mind like fish to water. But that’s a lot to hold in my mind at once, so I’m just going to think about Doc Brown from Back to the Future: He was high on intellectualism I’ve never been there, but the brochure looks nice Let’s call these people “mad scientists”. And let’s pretend we once again took up our job of being primatologists, and snooped on these folks “in the wild” (“in the lab”? this is beginning to get recursive…)… what would we find motivating them? Asking simple questions, for one. (What is space? What is society? What is a human? What is language?) Building general schemes (big theories) that hold lots of evidence together. Finding their place in the cosmos. And (perhaps above all) seeking certainty. Once again, Egan suggests we use these as tools to remake the curriculum. From dry to daring What could a high school curriculum look like, if it were rebuilt on these tools? Once again, Egan has a trick. This time, it’s to ask what fights have driven the development of each of these fields forward — and how we can help students enter them. First, a mini-segment! Intellectuals invented the academic disciplines to better pursue the life of the mind, but the disciplines can get in the way. Some of the most important intellectual discoveries that could help students are too big to fit into any of the disciplines. We need a place to introduce them plainly. Egan proposes another mini-segment — again, just 15 minutes a day, a few times a week — called “Metaknowledge”. Q: Isn’t that already in the International Baccalaureate program? Yes, he acknowledges that he’s borrowing from that! This segment would introduce ideas that would enrich student thinking across the disciplines: game theory, cognitive biases, systems thinking, Bayesian reasoning, epistemology, ethics, logic, cultural evolution, and so on. High school literature How can we help students enter the big fights of literature? Intellectuals of a literary bent — professors, critics, poets, novelists — delight in arguing over literature like rabbis arguing over the Talmud. Take, just for one example, the debates over Shakespeare’s character of Ophelia. Does she love Hamlet, or is she a victim of his emotional abuse? Is she truly insane, or is she acting? Is she passive, or is she pulling the strings? Oceans of ink have been spilled arguing over questions like these; our students can, perhaps, spill a few ounces more. The usefulness of arguing literature, for Egan, isn’t that it’s oh-so important for educated adults to know a lot about Ophelia. (This, again, was where the academicists went wrong — in thinking that being educated was about getting the best knowledge in your head.) Rather, arguing over literature is a training arena for the all-important intellectual move of this kind of understanding: building general schemes out of evidence, and struggling with anomalies. One person, for example, might hold that Ophelia is insane, and cite all sorts of obvious evidence — her father just was murdered by her lover, she rants nonsense while (bizarrely) handing out flowers to friends… But then he’s challenged when he reads a scholar pointing out that, to people in Elizabethan England, types of flowers have symbolic meanings. How does he deal with that? He could ignore it, claiming it an over-reading of Shakespeare. (Sometimes a flower is just a flower!) Or he could address it, complicating his own scheme. This intellectual work is best done with other people, who are incentivized to challenge your understanding of something, and go back and forth, building competing models and calling attention to anomalies. This process — the “dialectic” — pops up again and again in the academic disciplines. It’s the center of how understanding works, at this stage. And the nice thing about practicing it on literature is that, more so than in history or science, the evidence is shared knowledge — it’s right in front of everyone, written out. But there are other ways literature class can be helpful to the general life of the mind. Egan also suggests that we’ll want to specially include literature that helps students understand complex ideas. Camus, Orwell, Borges, Calvino might be particularly helpful here… and I imagine that genres like science fiction and magical realism might be particularly useful, too. (Note, though, that once again none of this requires a radical remaking of the curriculum, or of the canon of texts that we traditionally assign to high schoolers.) Q: Oh yes, the canon — what does Egan have to say about the canon wars? When he wrote Educated Mind in the nineties, the long-brewing canon war was approaching its inevitable apocalyptic climax. On one side of this Plain of Megiddo were the pro-canon traditionalists, arguing that we should keep assigning the texts that had been argued over for centuries. Facing them were the anti-canon reformers, arguing the standard texts over-represented the perspective of dead white men. Onto the middle of the plain rides Egan on a white horse, who bellows above the din: “I’VE GOT A BUSLOAD OF HIGH SCHOOLERS WHO WANTS TO JOIN IN, EVERYONE OKAY WITH THAT?” To do so, he says, we need to give students the arguments from both sides. So, for example, bell hooks, Edward Said, and China Achebe should be on the syllabus, as should Allan Bloom, Mortimer Adler, and Diane Ravitch. And of course they should actually read the texts cherished by both sides, too, so they can argue better. High school history How could entering the big fights help us reinvent high school history? First, we might look for dueling histories. It’s time for students to get into historiography and understand that history isn’t just what happened, it’s something we make. We might help kids read chapters from Howard Zinn’s socialist history of America alongside the corresponding chapters from Paul Johnson’s conservative history of America. How could big questions help? We want to help students see how various people have disagreed over some of the big questions of what human history is, at its most basic. We can have them compare Steven Pinker’s theory of civilization’s progress (Better Angels of our Nature) with Yuvah Noah Harari’s theory of civilization’s woes (Sapiens). We could have them compare so-and-so’s account of human history as an ever-expanding unlatching of energy sources with Robert Wright’s account of human history as unlatching more and more positive-sum games (Nonzero). What role could the lure of certainty play? To help them grow their skills at finding anomalies, we might help them work through pseudo-histories and conspiracy theories. Q: Conspiracy theories! Oh, come now, you’re playing with fire. Well, the world is on fire. Our students will spend the rest of their lives encountering terrible-but-beguiling arguments about how the world works; if we don’t prepare them for those, what have we been doing? So we should introduce arguments that the Moon landing was a hoax, that the Illuminati founded America, that aliens built the pyramids, and so on. At no point can we demean students for falling for any of these theories — the job of a teacher at this stage, Egan writes, is to support students in their reasoning even when their beliefs are offensive and stupid, gradually offering anomalies. There’s no way out of bad theories except through them. By the time students graduate, we want them to have wrestled with terrible ideas and — for a while — lost. They need to experience what it’s like to change their minds about something they felt strongly about. They need to viscerally realize, in Feynman’s famous phrase, “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.” High school natural science How could entering the big fights reinvent high school science? At present, so much of the high school science curriculum — especially “honors” classes — is oriented toward helping amass details. (The same is true of 100-level university classes, which famously “survey” the field to prepare for more advanced studies. I always thought this was stupid — of the huge lecture hall of students in my Geology 100 class, how many went on to take even a second course?) The meaty debates that propel science forward are held back. Egan complains: “The more general and speculative theories in any discipline are treated like an unconventional and disreputable relation who, even though the children find her exciting and entertaining, must be kept hidden from view, her very existence denied as long as possible”. This is a stupid approach — students with an adventurous bent are convinced that science isn’t for them. Egan proposes, simply, that we flip this, and organize high school science classes around the big debates. We shouldn’t be ashamed at how, well, adolescent this might look: “the dramatic, speculative, and contentious theories will be up-front in the early years of the [high school] curriculum”. What might those be? Egan doesn’t give a list, but we can spitball some: instead of explaining what “matter” is from the top down, a physics class could problematize “matter” by following the debates over the nature of dark matter and dark energy, and by becoming familiarized with the various interpretations of quantum mechanics
Inline links: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!WPeH!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F62ea55f8-0458-484f-be45-7a011d050756_1600x625.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!FPXt!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fb017fc37-3151-4556-87f1-31a097cf7594_1600x574.png
The kind of understanding we laid out for high school was first hammered out by Plato and Aristotle, went dormant in Europe, and was further developed by Arab & Jewish scholars before blossoming again in the Renaissance and Enlightenment. Nowadays it’s carried on by scholars in more-or-less every university department. Egan needed a name that would encompass all of that, and he picked “Philosophic”.
Links For April 2024
April 04, 2024 · Original source
26: Good New Yorker article on the “classical education” trend [may be paywalled for some people], historically-inspired charter schools that teach classics, poetry, Latin, etc. “One New York City public-high-school reading list includes graphic novels, Michelle Obama’s memoir, and a coming-of-age book about identity . . . in classical schools, high-school students read Aristotle and Dante.” My guess is that learning Aristotle and Dante doesn’t necessarily directly make you a better person - but that interacting with the sort of teachers/kids/parents who would go to these schools, and being exposed to the sorts of rules/norms/teaching methods these schools would enforce, does make you a better person, and there’s no way to make all of this happen without the Aristotle and Dante as rallying flags.
Inline links: Good New Yorker article on the “classical education” trend
29: Did you know: “Herodotus, Aristotle and other authors named Arabia as the source of cinnamon; they recounted that giant cinnamon birds collected the cinnamon sticks from an unknown land where the cinnamon trees grew and used them to construct their nests. Pliny the Elder wrote that . . . the tales of cinnamon being collected from the nests of cinnamon birds was a traders' fiction made up to charge more. However, the story remained current in Byzantium as late as 1310.”
Inline links: cinnamon birds
Highlights From The Comments On Nietzsche
August 08, 2024 · Original source
I've come to think that The Fountainhead is the key to Rand's view of Nietzsche. Not just because she originally planned to use a quotation from him as its epigraph, but because of its major conflict between Howard Roark and Gail Wynand. Wynand really is something of a Nietzschean overman: born in the slums, he educated himself, became a successful newspaper publisher, is hugely rich, and besides that, is a lethally skilled fighter and superb in bed. And he's driven to seek power. But Roark is not a Nietzschean overman, though he's mocked as one a couple of times: He cares about his work, not about power. I see this as the debate between the Nietzschean Rand and the Aristotelian Rand who wrote Atlas Shrugged. (If you read Aristotle's account of the megalopsychos or "great-souled man," it's almost a perfect fit to what Rand says about Roark.)
Links For December 2024
December 17, 2024 · Original source
35: Ozy on the psychology of long-firm fraudsters. “Just like altruistic jobs usually have lower salaries, jobs that pay in Getting To Hurt People pay less in money . . . Aristotle was right: being bad is bad for you.”
Inline links: the psychology of long-firm fraudsters
Highlights From The Comments On Tegmark's Mathematical Universe
February 21, 2025 · Original source
If anything to do with the Ideal reminds you of Plato, and anything to do with the Real reminds you of Aristotle, then you can dismiss any idea as either “just reinventing Plato” or “just reinventing Aristotle”. This is the intellectual equivalent of those journalists who would write articles on Uber saying “These Silicon Valley geniuses don’t realize that they’ve just reinvented the taxi!”
Whatever, I give this one a pass, at least he picked someone other than Plato and Aristotle.