Schools must harness the same sense of wonder that led early humans to seek unifying stories to explain their place in the world, and teachers must do more to incorporate myths, jokes, and riddles into curriculum and teaching practices, from the first grades to the youngest. until high school.
That's the argument of Kieran Egan, a Canadian philosopher and Simon Fraser University professor who died in 2022. The academic's ideas are suddenly having a moment in technology and innovation circles, thanks to a blog post on a website popular with Silicon Valley insiders.
The blog, Astral Codex Tenhas been technology/slate-star-codex-rationalists.html” target=”_blank” rel=”noopener nofollow”>described by The New York Times as “a window into the psyche of many technology leaders building our collective future.” Every year, ACX, as the blog is often called, runs a book review contest, with the latest winner summarizing Egan's 1997 book: “The Educated Mind: How Cognitive Tools Shape Our Understanding.”
The argument of Egan's book is difficult to summarize, but the central idea is that the way schools teach has become too disconnected from the way young people are programmed to learn.
And that attracted Brandon Hendrickson, who came across Egan's work while pursuing a master's degree program in education at the University of Washington. Since then he has been researching the scholar's work and now writes a substack newsletter called The lost tools of learning embracing the philosopher's teachings. And he spent months writing his review of Egan's book: a sizable summary that runs to more than 23,000 words.
“Over the last few decades, education reform has been based on these outdated ideas about human nature, human psychology, and human society,” Hendrickson says. “You cannot have a culture without metaphors. You cannot have a culture without songs, dances and rituals. And to come together as a group of people, you need to have these things…they are the great gears that turn the wheels of the human mind.”
Hendrickson argues, citing Egan's theory, that teachers should do more to shape the material they teach in the same way that bards once spread Homeric myths (and the way Hollywood screenwriters keep the stories alive). . The idea is that the material holds up better when students can see it as part of larger narratives, such as those of humans trying to overcome obstacles to survive.
“What it suggests… is that we look at how myths operate as narratives, so that we can design an intellectually vivid history curriculum,” Hendrickson writes on his blog. “And myths are really special: each one is based on at least one binary (like weak vs. strong, or lies vs. truth, etc.), and uses it to tell the story of the big picture of the world. They are so powerful that people can understand it, remember it and love it, even if that never happened.”
To some, this may seem like a call to edutainment, or more style than substance in education.
For Hendrickson, however, the theory addresses a key flaw in current education: that surveys show Students do not feel that what they learn in school is important.
“It's like there's a button in our head that's the 'button that matters,'” he says. “If we think the lesson is important, then the lesson itself doesn't have to be so good: we will work to understand it. Much of education reform, especially the cognitive science and education movement that I really love, ignores the primacy of mattering. In the end, the student has to find something meaningful to them.”
Some commenters on Hendrickson's book review noted that many teachers already work to playfully connect with their students and get them to focus on lessons.
But Hendrickson maintains that the reason his blog post is getting so much attention is that “there is a desire, especially among people in Silicon Valley who have children, a desperate need to help our children experience the joy of “struggling with ideas and finding The experience of the world is terribly interesting.” And he and others worry that doesn't happen enough in today's schools.
EdSurge connected with Hendrickon to hear more about what he learned from Egan's ideas and how one school in Oregon tried to put them into practice.
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