Loving your child's mind: Francisco and I discuss Ethan and Alana on reading

Hello, Francisco. Are you there?

Yes, hello Michael. There was a background.

Got it, got it. So yeah, today was pretty simple because last week with Lana we talked about Island of Blue Dolphins. Her father had told me that she was going to start Robinson Crusoe. Turns out she got excited about Percy Jackson, so I wanted to kind of check in on her own reading experience. And because where possible I like to, you know, have similar topics for both children, thought it'd be interesting to check in with Ethan on where he was with respect to reading. So, I'd say in a certain sense not deep philosophy this week, but more trying to get to know them as readers a little bit. So, I'll pause and see if you have any reflections on either or both conversations.

Yeah, I think it's good for them each to get an awareness. I think Ethan started doing that of what reading is and then incorporating that into like a personal practice, which it seems like Alana already has very much, and she sees it as just part of her everyday life. It's funny when she said that she just reads throughout the day. It's not— it's become part of her activities.

Exactly. And I realize, especially when I do these kinds of conversations, that at this point it's very different from sort of a St. John's style Socratic experience where we're doing deep textual analysis. And so, and I'm not attached as to whether or not it's a cousin, but I do find that I've become habitually reflective on everything. And so part of what I want to do with children is to have them become habitually reflective on everything. Again, there's this fancy word metacognition, and often schooly exercises include a reflection stage. But my sense is when it's done in school, I don't know, for me, I personally chafe against school assignments. So if an English assignment or history assignment says, "And now have a reflection." For some reason, it doesn't feel real to me. And part of this is interpersonal. If a textbook is telling us to reflect in a school context, you know, it just feels like another school assignment. Whereas if another human being is asking you, you know, what's the reading process like, then my sense is that they spontaneously and authentically, you know, reflect on it. And so, I like to make this sort of reflection a normalized I keep talking about a normalized part of human interaction. So pause, and do you see this as continuous with kind of the St. John's experience, or very different, or how does it, uh, how does it strike you?

Yeah, the way, um, you made the distinction, which I agree there's a very big distinction between reflection as mere assignment and reflection as activity, I would call it, and I think highlighting reflection as activity is the beginning of— I don't know if you'd agree, but the beginning of forming, instead of skills, habits. And a habit is a much more flexible, appropriate term for what we want to instill in other people, instead of just skills that you can just check off a list.

No, I would agree. And, you know, and then the question is, why these particular habits? And, you know, for me, it's, you know, because this is the way I am. But also, I guess I do believe that— I'm going to talk about things like mental sort of agility and fluency that sounds like a very different sort of thing, but You know, I'm involved in a lot of kind of entrepreneurial projects, and I find that other people who are involved in these projects, typically, you know, you can bounce ideas around and you can try this one on and that one on, and it seems very different from philosophy or reflection in a simple sense. On the other hand, one of my biggest complaints about conventional schooling is that it's often kind of algorithmic or procedural, that the experience that many children take away from schooling is that learning is procedural. This is, in algebra, this is what you do. In physics, this is what you do. In history, this is what you do. And that insofar as I think all of the good jobs in the 21st century are going to be, are going to go to people who one way or another can work with concepts and can think about their own concepts. Have this awareness of different ways to move things around in their mind. That's so very different from procedural learning that certainly dominates education up till 8th grade and generally 10th grade and mostly all the way through high school. Um, would you agree that what I'm doing is kind of working on this more conceptual fluency, uh, direction, the habit of conceptual fluency as opposed to sort of the procedural learning?

Um, yes, and I wonder if we could give a better view of what comes in, of what's the other option apart from procedural. I'm thinking of one aspect of education which does tend to just fall into the procedural category, which is curriculum, right? Like that the emphasis is always on curriculum, like it's always about the list of books and the kinds of activities. And Instinctually, I just find that a bit short-sighted, and that, that is a heavy emphasis on procedural, but it is hard to, to define what is the other option to that. Can you speak a little what you think the other option to just—

Yeah, no, I think that's a really great point, and just to go a little bit more on that, there's one kind of approach to schooling that focuses on clear learning objectives. So you know, at the end of this class period, you will know A, B, and C. And yeah, A, B, and C are— the whole idea is clearly, clearly defined. And you know, a lot of adult training is like that as well. So people have accepted that. On the other hand, so I agree, first of all, it's going to be challenging to have a concise, beautiful description of this other. But I think it's worth teasing out because I have a clear intuition about it. I'll give you a case study that interested me. One of the, um, one of the parents of, uh, the— or at the Academy of Thought and Industry was a woman who had been pretty much at ground zero in the world of UX/UI design. You know, back in the 1990s, websites were mostly made by male geeks and they were terrifically ugly and inefficient. And she was— she began to focus on how to make them much more user-friendly. And gradually, this attention to the user and the user experience developed into these whole fields of UX/UI design. And now she works at Facebook at a pretty high level because Facebook with billions, the UX/UI is critical. And when you think about, okay, how would somebody create a whole, and it's not like she single-handedly created a domain, How could somebody, you know, be at the frontier and help to create a domain like that, a new domain like that? Because there was not a— there didn't exist a procedural, um, you know, you look at something that sucks and you want to improve it, uh, there's not exactly a procedure at that point. And so, you know, I'm kind of struggling to figure out how I see that most important problems of the 21st century involve unstructured problems. And, you know, I was having a conversation with another Johnny about asking questions and how doing this trains us to ask good questions. But it's, again, it's not algorithmic. It's not like in sophomore year we are learning how to ask questions type, you know, 3.65. You know, I think one habitually, the way I look at it is I'm habitually trying to understand the world. And understanding the world is an endlessly vast, vast task. And so, if I'm understanding, you know, why— how can we believe in biological determinism and free will at the same time? That's one kind of understanding the world. If I'm trying to understand why all of these websites suck and are so ugly, and why does it have to be that way? That's a different kind of understanding the world. But strangely, for me, it seems similar. And so, to take a stretch, and I'll see what you think about this. When I get Ethan or Alana to think about what is reading and what's my relationship to reading and how do I read, these are kind of big open-ended questions. I have no particular agenda or right answer. I just want them to reflect on it. I see this kind of universal habitual task of understanding and then normalizing asking questions in order to extend understanding as really a foundational intellectual toolkit. So we'll pause there and see to what extent parts of that work for you.

Yeah, I think one thing that I got from that is that it is interesting how, how current needs and current trends can, can help us understand and highlight what we consider to be a good or effective education, in that perhaps it was the case that for a long time in most of the industries, you could get by with a kind of procedural computational type job. You could build a whole career on just following processes. But now there seems to be a need for a kind of synthesizing mind and a kind of less emphasis on computation and more emphasis on making connections that were not there before and how that just that speaks to the Socratic education, which is both very old in that conception of a classical conception of what a human being is and should be, but also adaptive to these, these trends that are going to be very necessary for the workplace of, of the present and the future.

Well, exactly. And, and for me, the, the key Socratic thing is, yeah, consistency and coherence. I feel like I should always unpack this, because for me, consistency and coherence plays a similar role to Euclidean axioms, where given those Euclidean axioms, you can unpack all of Euclidean geometry. For me, anytime we perceive an inconsistency, I want kind of an emotional— I'll call it an anxiety or something— that if A is not consistent with B, I'm bothered by that. You know, Einstein was bothered by quantum mechanics, and for a good reason. You know, I think that sort of desire to resolve consistencies is an important appetite. And it always has one if things don't quite make sense. One has in the habit of looking for them. But part of this is accepting that one's role as a learner and understanding is to create a viewpoint that makes sense. To some extent, I wonder if we're losing audiences by going so far from what seems to be the concrete experiences with the children. But I'll pause there and see, do you— is this language making sense for you? Is it mapping onto your experience?

It is making sense, and maybe as a way to somewhat return to the concrete experience, I think one key insight in the way I have seen you and people trained by you approach this type of education is that there is a sort of, not complete, but a sort of separation between having deep thoughtful Socratic conversations and following texts that should spark these conversations, that having deep thoughtful conversations extends your experience with texts, that it's something you can and ought to do with everything in your life, and that it doesn't necessarily map onto very specific texts and having read the right books and the right books in the right sequence, etc.

So, and because you recently graduated from St. John's, to some extent what I'm reminded of is that there is, there is a school, as it were, that's very focused on the text and the textual interpretation and and that it's all about the books. And what you're pointing out is, for me, it's all about, as it were, interrogating experience, that is, or understanding experience broadly construed. And books may inform our experiences, but experiences inform our experiences and thoughts. And so, yeah, I've definitely sort of— while reading is obviously important, that was our focus today, for me it's much, much more than any particular set of texts. Is that the kind of point you're getting at?

Yes, I think it really— and the progression you've had with Alana really speaks to that. Obviously, you can't follow a program of books in the way we've had with St. John's yet, just because of their age. And they're just— Alana is just starting to have her reading practice. So it's going to have to be other conversations. But I see that it is— that that reading in the way that discussing, discussing books in the way that we, uh, we were used to at St. John's is going to be just one component of Alana's continuing Socratic practice, for instance, that she has now the experience of having thoughtful, uh, investigating conversations about anything in her life, about everything.

No, that's very true. And actually, that said, I'm also looking forward to more text-based conversations as she She's obviously a reader. One of the challenges is I don't have the bandwidth to— I read one Harry Potter book, but I don't have time to read all the Harry Potter books to keep up with her. But as she reads things that I'm already familiar with, then I can begin to talk to her about various books that she, she has read. And so I also— there is a way in which reading text together tethers a conversation. And so while I will always have the big picture expansive philosophical understanding with her. I also look forward to doing a little bit more with texts. Again, right now she's still fairly concrete vis-à-vis the texts, but I think that, you know, it's interesting, you know, she's 8 now, or she turns 8 in August, you know, puberty is not that far along. Different children hit puberty at different ages, but then that's where things really intensify in terms of, as it were, intellectual kind of intensity and abstraction. And so I see all of this as sort of laying the groundwork for Alana, who clearly has a fabulous mind already, but moving out of this concrete phase into a much more, you know, both abstract but also internally reflective phase in say, you know, 2, 3, 4 years, something like that. Yes, Manu. Go ahead.

And about this experience of laying the groundwork, I've often heard you talk about this as preparing students for many things, but in part for a richer academic life, that a student that has this habit will encounter new information, new deep academic information and will react to it in a much different way than a student who hasn't had this practice. Maybe, do you have an account of why that might be?

So I'll try this on. So one, and this is from another teacher many years ago, I heard one teacher basically say education is all about throwing spaghetti at the wall and seeing what sticks. And you know, part of the interpretation is most of the time not very much spaghetti sticks. But to kind of go with the Socratic piece, if children are in the habit of wondering about the world and understanding the world and knowing that there's a lot more to understand and knowing that their minds are trying to make pieces fit, then I think a lot more will stick. And I think one of the reasons not much sticks is that, you know, very often the emotional life, the kind of vibrant emotional life of children may have to do with, say, relationships in their family, relationships with their friends, and maybe particular media they love. I think pop culture, I often say pop culture is the dominant force. And so in order to get kids excited, often one needs to connect, you know, often to pop culture or, you know, or things that are going on in their social media lives or in their gaming lives. And insofar as those are relatively narrow worlds for most children, It's very difficult to get mainstream academic content to stick if those are the kind of lively emotional pieces. So part of what I'm trying to do is to kind of early on extend what has some emotional resonance. And part of it is, you know, I think both with Ethan and Ilana, their parents are clearly talking about way more than kind of narrow things. And then with me, they have an experience of talking about way more. And they're reading— certainly Ilana is now reading books that give her a much broader set of experiences. So, one way to think about this is to have this emotional liveliness that is much broader in Alana's experience, and it includes science. So, we had a wonderful conversation on how do planes fly, and so she's kind of wondering about that. And so, as opposed to somebody whose only lively pieces are, you know, "I'm angry at my mother" and "I love anime," You know, how do you get to physics from that? You know, maybe eventually, but I'm always trying to connect the emotional lived reality of children to bigger topics. And part of this is expanding as early as possible, as much as possible, the emotional lived experience of children so that as they encounter more traditional and valuable academic topics, a lot more spaghetti sticks on the wall. So pause and see how well that analogy worked for you.

I think that, no, that was a great insight, almost like a breath of fresh air, because it's something you don't hear very often, that an intellectual practice does have a very strong emotional component, that issues of emotional resonance are present there, and vice versa. It just reminds me of the inherent playfulness that you experience when you talk to someone who is very interested in ideas, who is very confident, who just sees everything with an attitude of playfulness because they've had this habit of their intellectual life is their emotional life and the other way around.

Very, very much so. And I want to wrap it up, but just on that, of course, I think this is part of the experience you and I share, even though we attended St. John's decades apart, is that, you know, something as abstract as Plato or Pascal or whatever is emotionally vibrant for us. And I think for people who are not yet in this world, it seems weird. And instead of having it seem weird, you know, I want to create this very gentle path that brings people— so of course it's normal to care about the ideas, and I don't care about the names of the authors, but to care about understanding the world and to be emotionally passionate about understanding the world, um, in a way that is constructive, super valuable. So again, you and I could go much more deeply on this, but to keep it reasonably short, uh, let's have fun again next week. So have a great week. Let's go.