Loving your child's mind: Francisco and I discuss Alana on summer/winter

Hey Francisco, how are you doing?

Hello Michael, I'm well, how are you?

I'm well, I'm well. So the call with Alana today was, you know, I was trying to see what she could reason through. You know, on an earlier video we reasoned through how an airplane might fly and I think that was really interesting. Sometimes we reason through mathematics problems together. Today I thought I'd see if we could reason through something pertaining to do with summer and winter. And she didn't really have enough of a knowledge base to go very far. So that's why I got into other things and checked to see what she does know about science and history and so forth. And so in some ways, I would say today was a discovery process of the limits to her knowledge in terms of what we can reason about. We'll pause and see if you saw what, or what else you saw in that process.

That sounds right. I think you could tell in the set of answers that she gave about the initial questions about the seasons that her answers are a mixture between what she thinks makes sense in how— in what she has observed in everyday life, and then explanations that she has heard and then pieces together. And in that, I was thinking about how often in Socratic conversations Thinking about answers in terms of them being correct or incorrect is often not very helpful. For example, Alana gave the tilting of the Earth and stuff like that, answers that are supposedly correct, but in wanting to know what she knows, thinking about correct and incorrect answers is often not very helpful. What you want is for her to walk through it, right, to explain or Does that sound right?

Absolutely. And what's interesting is, you know, I know her father well, and her father is very committed to thinking for oneself and self-education and autodidacticism and all of that. He was reluctant to let her go to school because he wanted to help her think for himself, but because for social reasons, she really wanted to go to school. So they let her go to school, and it's a good charter school and everything. Founded by Danielle Strackman, who co-founded the Thiel Fellowships and the 1517 Fund. But given that, I was struck, and this is a leap, but it connects back to the themes you just brought up, by at the end when I asked what was valuable about learning, it all came down to basically school. You can show you can pass tests and you can do well in contests. That is, there was not any sense of learning. She did say one might, one might want to learn, but there's not a sense that it is useful and valuable to understand how the world works, which is kind of what I was hoping to go for.

Yeah, and it makes sense if, if the way you approach, uh, having someone learn is by gauging whether they give correct or incorrect answers. The moment I can say 'Oh, well, the seasons change because it's due to the Earth's tilt,' and it doesn't mean anything to me, then the knowledge that I supposedly acquired doesn't mean anything to me either, and I can't use it in any other context than being prompted to that correct locution.

Well, exactly. And so I would say one of the battles I often have with students, you know, when I have them at school schools is shifting from learning— so-called learning consists of producing the right answer— to learning as a process that's valuable, increasing one's understanding of the world. So for me, I want to— I do want to understand why the seasons happen and so forth. And, you know, I would say the best educators want their students to understand that as well, but it's an extreme rarity. And so one of the things You know, this gets into the issue of retention, which may sound far away, but I know a lot of people who have forgotten everything they learned in school are struck by how much I remember. It's not that I remember everything, but if I am trying to understand the world and incorporating these things into my understanding of the world kind of as part of my— this is who I am and how I see things— that's very different than again, memorize and forget tests. And so this is why for me, even if it's slower, to get people to look at learning as understanding the world is really fundamental to the learning process as I see it. I assume that you're pretty much in the same place, or would you differ?

Yeah, I would even want to dwell a little on that point of retention and memory because I remember in my own educational As I was starting to teach and as I finished high school, I was very conflicted with having learned a lot of things, being continued to read a lot, and forgetting a lot of what I read. I felt like there was something missing in the way I was approaching it because I remembered a set of facts or a set of things for a limited period of time and the What I retain from that is very little, and I think that is common in many people's educational experience. And what's necessary is a sort of paradigm shift between focusing on retention and memory and shifting to something else, which you were calling understanding, right?

And would you say that as you moved more towards understanding and really creating your own intellectual framework for the world, that you found that you began to remember? More of what you wanted to remember?

I think so, and I think two things happened then. The first thing is that I realized that the value I get from learning new things is not my capacity to remember everything I learn right now, but just to add in, to add and modify the set of principles with which I see the world. It's almost a very axiomatic way of thinking about things. And yes, important things I remember, but I also learned to let go of, or not to be too worried about retaining everything that I hear, and be more focused on having this new information modify and change my principles, my axioms.

Absolutely. And, you know, sometimes I want to avoid going abstract, but I think it's inevitable. So when you talk about axiomatic, for For one, understanding Euclidean geometry as an axiomatic system has been a paradigm for me all over the place. To leap a little bit, sometimes in the world of tech entrepreneurs, we'll talk about, they'll talk about understanding from first principles. Certainly Elon Musk talks about understanding from first principles. And I would say that that's very much how I understand things. And I want to refine and clarify my first principles. And see how those first principles then expand in all sorts of directions to enhance understanding. And then finally, to comment on that memory thing, I would say that while I remember a lot because it's all integrated into my understanding, there are also definite limits to the details I remember, and I shamelessly rely on Google for that. But because I have this framework for understanding, I find that I'm much more efficient using Google as a tool to identify facts than are most people. Because, you know, I have this sense of, oh, you know, science and astronomy and, you know, the way in which the Earth works and so forth is, you know, I'm being sloppy, but basically one is better at searching for facts on Google the more one can kind of, you know, clarify the nature of the question one's asking. And so by having this sort of first principles understanding of things, that I have these pathways into all sorts of information, so that even if I don't incorporate the information, I have a definite pathway to almost any bit of information. Does that whole scheme of understanding resonate for you?

Sure. And I wonder what you would respond to the following idea, which I think is related. I think there's a common trope in thinking about learning in that there is the idea that because there is this great accumulation of knowledge and there's a lot of things to retain and remember in any one field, that it is not worthwhile. And it is, it is not worthwhile to think about many different fields. And there is a focus on specialization that this is how the way things should be. People should only know about the field they choose. To know about and are incurious about everything else. And I think a good counter to that that exists is exactly what you were talking about. Certain people, especially in the tech world, are good examples of how someone without knowing every minute detail of different knowledge fields can still have an integrated understanding that allows them to understand anything they want, given enough time and given enough information.

No, absolutely. And I very much see the kind of autodidactic tradition that we come from out of St. John's is very aligned. And not everybody gets this connection, but I would say the autodidactic tradition that many entrepreneurs come from. So for me, that's a huge connection. And to go to a different place, the narrower the domain of knowledge, the more likely AI is going to master and exceed human performance. Whereas the more unstructured and diverse one's knowledge base, the less likely it is. And I actually, I had a friend with a PhD in math, actually Johnny, with a PhD in math, who was involved at very high-level investing on Wall Street. And he acknowledged that there are places where, you know, there were mathematical models and he was in that world of very technical models for investing, but where human understanding, kind of human big picture understanding, was often a necessary complement to highly technical mathematical models because in the world of investing, you know, there are so many factors changing all the time that sometimes a human big picture pattern recognition could grasp things that a more narrowly designed model would miss. And so I found that an interesting case of sort of at the frontiers of human and very sophisticated mathematics mathematical models still were useful as complements for one another.

Yeah, I think so too. And I think to bring it back to the more concrete, to the more educational, that this is a case in which maybe one could say that it's becoming more and more the case that you don't need to have the relevant information at hand, you need to know where to look. And knowing where to look is a case of making these connections that are in many cases intuitive but can be developed in a kind of Socratic way. I always think back at the kind of connections that are made in the seminar table at St. John's and in Socratic discussions where seemingly unrelated things that a student intuits are connected and they just play with that idea. It's like, oh, we're talking about mechanics right now, but there's a similar idea in this novel that I'm reading at this moment. I wonder if there's a connection there. So it is that skill of knowing where to look, not what information is relevant.

No, absolutely. And I want to dig into something that's tangential but a bit different, which is I find that all of the things, many of the things we're talking about are ubiquitous in the literature on learning and 21st century skills and yada yada yada. But what I find is that many educators and many parents and policymakers and so forth who hear about these things, then they're still in that model of this is what the fact is, now let's implement the fact. And I would say a different approach that I have, and I suspect you have, is for me it's very much about my experiential understanding. So when I hear about making connections or being able to look for the fact, all of these things which are kind of clichés in that world out there, for me, I spend hours and hours— tempted to say every day, maybe it's hours and hours every week, but you know, I would say in a way I've got this kind of constant metacognitive process going and have for decades now, where I'm constantly sort of evaluating the connections between ideas in my head, the strengths of various intellectual propositions I hold, the evidence on behalf of various propositions, how I understand certain things. That is, all of these terms, you know, making connections, you know, not having to know the facts, all of that is true and yet it's become banal. In some ways, I see what I've done and I suspect what you've done and what we want to do in our students is instead of having them be, you know, like Alana's answer about must have to do with tilt, to have them be kind of internalized as ongoing internal processes, rather than kind of snapshot facts that are loaded and meaningless and therefore inert. Does that mapping resonate for you?

The mapping does resonate, and I think often the challenge once such a mapping resonates with an individual who's wanting to educate their child or who wants to set up a sort of learning environment is knowing how exactly to nurture those, those meta— or to create a structure where those metacognitive skills are fostered. And I come back to the principle of a certain bounded freedom, right, that is lacking in many institutions of— maybe you could say that making sort of these these connections, these metacognitive skills are things that in the correct environment happen naturally, that that is the way we are supposed to think, and hence that's the way we do think when we're allowed to. So it's finding that balance between freedom and structure that is often the concrete challenge.

And I'm not disagreeing with you, I'm still trying to figure out Why that piece? When you're talking about the challenge in getting people to understand or to implement, why are you focusing on the bounded freedom piece? I guess I'm not quite seeing what's motivating that particular focus.

I'm just thinking of common reactions to people once they have this awareness that what they want is the tropes that we've already said, the connections, the synthetic thinking, whatever, that their first response is a highly structured program with very little bounded choice. That, that it's almost as if someone thinks about how they've made connections and they want to reverse engineer and have someone follow sequentially that. But the problem is that the way to get to these skills that you want is going to be very unique, as unique as an individual is unique. So instead of reverse engineering that sequence, you allow for a sort of bounded freedom so people can create their own sequence.

No, that totally helps. Thank you. So what comes up for me is, I think there was actually a wonderful TV series on the history of science called Making Connections by James Burke. I may have mangled it somewhat, but— and he is showing how, you know, science is about making connections, and it is wonderful. At the same time, You know, I don't know that I would use it, or I would not— I would have low expectations were I to use it in a school setting. Because while he's talking about connections that were made by certain people in a certain context, and it is a legitimate model, he's not allowing the students themselves to make the connections that are meaningful to them. And so very often, the way I think of it is You know, things have to be emotionally live. Where we— so nothing sticks if there's no kind of emotional energy around it. And so a challenge in importing external curriculum is there's no reason to believe, and often there's reason not to believe, that the externally imported curriculum coming into a student's head is going to have any emotional resonance at all. Whereas in the Socratic process, I may be discussing, you know, Plato and Nietzsche or Toni Morrison or whatever, But I don't expect or anticipate that the students will feel any emotional resonance for the author of the text. Instead, my goal is to ask open-ended questions about truth or justice or love or betrayal that will trigger emotional, you know, energy on their part. And then once I've discovered the emotional, you know, energy over there, then my job is to create connections with, say, the text or the ideas that I want them to think about. But I very much start with where the emotional energy is on their side. I assume that resonates for you as well.

Yeah, and it's even worthwhile to note how much more fun as an educator it is to do that, because it's that you don't, you don't know where, where and how things are going to emotionally I mean, resonate emotionally for the student. So it's even like a gateway to making connections you didn't even know were there instead of having students recreate their own connections. I wonder if one way to talk to, to have a funny metaphor for this is as the forcing curriculum and having students trace the connections, it's as if you were throwing apples at students' heads hoping they become mutant. Things have to be individual. Emotional resonance has to be very individual from your own lived experience.

Absolutely, absolutely. You know, I kind of want to wind down time-wise, and this is a theme I want to go into more depth later, but does this issue of kind of meaningless versus emotionally laden have anything to do with your own trajectory as an educator? Gradually becoming more interested in the Socratic education?

I think so, and that has shown itself in a change of emphasis I've had as an educator. That the moment I started becoming aware of the importance of having things be emotionally laden and then work from that is that I've become less, less and less focused on subjects. And in fact, increasingly subjects become less relevant for me as an educator. And obviously I don't want to throw away subjects. I think it's useful to categorize knowledge in this way sometimes, but as an educator, I think it's becoming that concept is becoming more and more obsolete.

Well, of course, I agree. And to keep these reasonable time, we'll wind up for now. But we'll definitely explore that more in the future. Right. Have a great week, Francisco. Thank you.

Thank you. Bye-bye.