Brandon Hendrickson on Making Education Engaging

Swami (00:01.486)

Hi, Brandon, lovely talking to you today and thanks for accepting my invite. It’s fascinating to talk to you. I have heard your book review on the Educating Mind October 2023 in the podcast and it was one of the best ones that I’ve ever heard and it’s a long one, but a fantastic review of the book. So thanks a lot for accepting my invite.

Brandon Hendrickson (00:26.474)

Thank you so much for inviting me onto this.

Q1 Brandon on Kieran Egan

Swami (00:29.966)

So Brandon, I wanted to kick off this conversation with the hero that you look up to…the book that you figured out in the library that you start with, right?

So talk to me about your hero first and tell me what are the things that you found amazing that that allowed you to kind of look at and say hey I need to look at schooling in a new way and I need to transform the way I think I need to teach to kids. So talk to me about your hero Tell me a little bit about it because people in this part of the world may not know about him, so I don’t want to name him, but I want you to start off with a tribute to him.

Brandon Hendrickson (01:24.138)

I think the way to talk about that is to say a little bit about where I was when I discovered the work of Kieran Egan. I was the sort of student who never was told that I was actually supposed to care about the grades that I got in my classes. Whatever I studied, I just studied it because I fell in love with it…I’m now diagnosed with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, ADHD.

And looking back, I see that I had an ADHD-fueled childhood where I would just get really interested in some new topic and go to the library and read a dozen or three dozen books about that topic. And I was able to connect because I sort of developed this well-rounded understanding of the world, I was able to find what was exciting about any of the topics that I was learning in school with almost no exceptions. The exceptions were the interesting things, the hard things. But then I got really good grades when I was in high school and I got a free ride to an undergraduate education, a really great honors college where I was trained in the great books tradition and was never, probably somebody told me at some point that I was supposed to care about grades, but I never was able to make myself. And so I just took whatever classes. I think probably somebody else told me that I should care about what my major was in college, but I never cared about it. I had no plans for what I was going to do after I graduated. I just saw college as an opportunity to take whatever the shiniest classes were at any given beginning of term.

And so three years into college the university sent me a letter and said you really are obligated right now to declare what the topic is that you are studying. And so I picked world religions. And then after two years of that I realized when I was about to graduate I realized wait a second. I can’t get a

job with a degree in world religions. What am I going to do? I need to do something practical. And so I decided to stay on a fifth and very expensive not covered for by my scholarship year and got a very practical degree in history, which is obviously not actually a practical degree either. I thought I could maybe become a history teacher. And this just shows, I was the first person in my extended family to go to university and just shows like the absolute naivete that I was approaching the world with.

But then I graduated in those things and loved virtually every class that I took. And I learned so much and learned to fall in love with so much of the world.

And then my final year of college, I happened to read a book by someone that you and members of your audience may know, a man named John Taylor Gatto, sort of the enfant terrible of American education, a man who had gotten the New York City Teacher of the Year Award, sometime in the 1990s, and then the next year quit teaching in a huff with an essay called, like, Why I’m Quitting Teaching or Why Schools Suck, or something like that. And he became the face of this sort of intellectually quas -respectable camp that said, okay, schooling doesn’t actually work, it’s actually bad for students. And I found his ideas tremendously exciting, and I still wanted to be a teacher. But I didn’t have an education degree. And so, you know, what does one do in that sort of situation? One becomes a tutor. And so I became a test prep tutor.

And I opened a couple of businesses with some people with test prep and ended up specializing in very high-end test prep for people who have ADHD.

But then along the side, I realized that I couldn’t…keep scratching my intellectual itch just by doing this, even though it was an opportunity to get into Cognitive Science and get into, well, honestly, mostly cognitive science, Performance Science, and the Psychology of Memory and the Psychology of Working Memory and the Psychology of how People Learn Educational Psychology. And so I started teaching on the side just a whole mess of different classes. Again, whatever sounded the most interesting with our local homeschooling community in Seattle, where I was living at the time. And so I teach classes in history, because I actually had a degree in that European history, world history, American history. But I hated teaching the same thing twice. And so I would go out of my way to find opportunities to teach classes in, oh, you know, big history, you know, history from the Big Bang to the present and looking into the future, future studies, courses in world religions, courses in philosophy, courses in world views – from theism to naturalism to nihilism to existentialism to pantheistic monism to postmodernism, classes in the philosophy of evil, courses in happiness, right? All these intellectually very rigorous courses that I would teach with very brilliant, thoughtful, such cool kids, high schoolers mostly, but also preschoolers, also elementary schoolers, also college students, some middle schoolers even sometimes.

And…I would teach all these things and teach all these subjects, science, reading, literature, and I would fall in love with again and again this or that approach to education. And what always happened was that I would learn about classical schooling, or I’d learn about Montessori Schooling or Waldorf [Schooling] or...Unschooling or whatever, and I would read a book or two on it and I’ll get so excited and I would so naturally see what was beautiful about it. And I would then finally get around to meeting some people who did it and found out that the thing that they understood, the piece of education that they understood that really was beautiful was just that one thing.

And it was never any of the other insights that anybody else had had. It would be very disorienting and confusing for me. And so I figured that, okay, what I need to do to actually understand education is I need to go back to school. I need to get a degree in this. So I enrolled in a, on paper, very good Master’s Program in the Social and Cultural Foundations of Education. Sort of aiming for a philosophy of education, sort of element, but also integrated with how education actually works through history and through sociology and through economics and all of those things. And I found it to be an intellectual wasteland, with some important exceptions, but most of my classmates were not thoughtful about education. They were doing it because it was a professional degree. Most of my professors were not intellectually interesting people. Some of them were just there to, you know, get a job, to do a job.

Here’s what the book teaches. Let me push this into you. Others were ideologues of one sort or another who were very close -minded about… who came into the class with, you know, there is one exact answer to the questions that we will ask in this.

And my job is to give you the illusion that we are having an exciting, open conversation while bringing you to this answer, and if you do not get to this answer, bad things will happen. They wouldn’t have put it that way, but that

was very much my experience of that. With, to be clear, a handful, a small handful of very excellent exceptions. But the overall story was that. So I was in this funk, I was in this dark…period of how do I make sense of education? When I was in an academic library and I was looking for one book and I happened to run across this book by this thinker who I’d never heard about before named Kieran Egan called Getting It Wrong From the Beginning. Is it okay actually if I share my screen with this and show it? Thank you very much. Let me just pull this up right now “Getting it Wrong from the Beginning – Our Progressivist Inheritance from Herbert Spencer, John Dewey and Jean Piaget” by Kieran Egan. And I read it and it asked the questions that nobody else was asking. And it put the big picture of not how like just this or that or whatever philosophy kind of worked together, but these meta philosophies of education and showing how the last hundred years, had been this fruitless

war, this pointless battle of arguing over the things that were not the most important things. Between the educational traditionalists and the educational progressivists, we can and probably need to talk about what at least I am talking about when I say those things, because people use different phrases. This was like the hidden war in education. And he identified the problem of school…more better, at least that I had experienced, more clearly than anything that I had ever read, including the enfant terrible, which is that everything in the world is interesting, but we portray the world in schools to students as mostly, as dull, but we are surrounded by mystery and what we know is fascinating. And I was hooked and then, I found after having read this that he did not just raise the questions, he did not just identify the problem, but he had his own unique, very unique way of trying to answer this and set up a new foundation for education. And that he chronicles in a number of books, most sort of officially the book, The Educated Mind – How Cognitive Tools Shape Our Understanding. I suppose I’m obligated, having shown one, to show that other one. Where are you? That’s funny. Oh, here it is, okay. Yeah, and this is the book then that I ended up doing my book review for the Astral Codex Ten Book Review Contest.

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