Rational schools

Can we make schools rational? Finished/skimmed. I slogged through the first and last bits interested in the subject. I think he’s trying to say leverage kids’ inherent traits (like rhythms, metaphors, gossip, uncertainty) to turn them into curious skeptics.

Egan argues that schools don’t work because they ignore the tools that have worked for hundreds (and thousands) of years — things like humor, emotion, stories, metaphors, extremes, gossip, idealism, general schemes, finding one’s place in the world, and the lure of certainty. If we rebuild the school curriculum on those things, organizing in something like the order they first arose historically, we can guide many more people into a rich, meaning-soaked, daring intellectual life, understanding that the complexity of the world will always strain the limits of what their minds can hold. (You might even call them “rational”.)

Now I’m not sure how tractable new education is, but some bits do read like they work. I like teaching through lens of mankind’s history. It’s just all too vague to implement (or maybe I haven’t read the content sections of the post deeply).

backpacks as a norm since pre-k gives bad posture? trains forward hunching. should be more norm to wear bag in front. also won’t slam ppl on accident.

honor code at rice is so nice (per dr. smith’s story) small percentage of cheaters at tj keeping us in inadequate equilibria. This is instantiation of Moloch?

Education in general is moloch? The proxy goal of creating value-providing ambitious people who do new things, with so much competition, has instead overfitted to the actual (college) selection process? It’s making sad zombie clones.

Is it useful to put ads on school sites? Maybe between clubs? What’re the considerations of an in-school currency? I vaguely remember reading alpha school might’ve implemented some version of it. Such an economy could teach 1. money management/decision making etc. skills people often diss schools for missing 2. provides incentives for good behavior

What makes a kid motivated to learn? Alpha school provides a good working thesis to test out It takes repetition (10k hours) of deliberate (hard) practice to become a master. That takes drive

• Parental and authority approval: Initially kids practice because they are given praise and attention from their parents when they do so, and are reprimanded when they don’t. He gives examples of mom saying “if you don’t practice an hour per day on piano I am going to stop paying for your music instructor”.
• Peer approval: At some point the young musicians begin to care less about what their parents think, and more about their relative status among their peers. Part of this is that they can perform music for their classmates, which is very impressive, but a bigger motivation is that their skills are recognized by other young musicians – their true peers.
• Self Actualization: Eventually the best musicians stop caring about their peers and start internalizing the desire to be great. They see themselves as musicians, and they do the hard, uncomfortable work of practicing because “that is what a great musician does”. Where Ericsson claims everyone starts on stage one, so incentives supercharges the process. It doesn’t detract.

In this way, extrinsic motivation is not all bad if it leads to internal eventually.