Education’s biggest idea

Want to understand the big picture of how people learn? Want to understand why schools promise so much, but so often deliver so little?

Want to understand how we can change this?

Five workshops
one–two hours each

Welcome to our workshop series on Kieran Egan! Science is WEIRD is built on Egan’s system… but up ’til now, we’ve only talked about his surface-level ideas.

There’s a reason for that.

Egan’s system is based on one idea that’s complex and counterintuitive and weird. But it is, in our judgement, the single most powerful idea in education.

In these five workshops, we unpack it, and show how it can help us remake how we educate.

You’ll hear the 100,000-year history of education. We’ll zoom out to see the three greatest educational ideas anyone has ever had… and understand why they’re not enough. (This will help us see the simple logic behind most educational fights.)

By the end, you’ll have…

• a map to see the strengths and weaknesses of every philosophy of schooling & homeschooling

• a checklist for how to help your kid cultivate genius in elementary, middle, and high school

• a profound new answer to the question: how can we help our kids really understand the world?

  These hour-long workshops are funny and fast-paced and interactive. Like our science classes, each workshop is a riddle; Brandon will dangle metaphors, images, and stories as hints. And by the end, you’ll solve it.

The riddles themselves

Workshop 1

Why is good education so hard?

Workshop 2:

How can we help kids in preschool and elementary school paint a profound picture of the world in their heads?

Workshop 3:

How can we help middle schoolers fall in love with the shiniest bits of reality?

Workshop 4:

How can we help high schoolers see the world as clearly as a scholar?

Workshop 5:

How can we help our kids really understand the world?

Who is this for?

Are you a parent who’d like to help your kid fall in love with learning? Are you a teacher of students from preschool through college? Are you a professional who needs to explain complex things to other adults? Are you anyone who works with 2e, gifted/talented, ADHD, or ASD kids?

This is for you.

And this is most specifically geared toward homeschoolers of every stripe, especially those looking for a new direction to explore. Classical, Montessori, Waldorf, Charlotte Mason, and unschooling will all be referenced and explained— but you don’t need to know anything about them beforehand.

Update!

Brandon created these to prepare for writing an entry for the 2023 Astral Codex Ten book review contest… and won it! You might enjoy reading (or listening to) that book review even more than watching these workshops. Check out our page on Egan for all the links.