Mentions personal use of Beeminder.

Transcript context

…I'm actually surprised to hear you say that because one way in which I read some of your stuff is that this is actually a way of endorsing the traditional way of thinking about education, but using new tools to get the traditional ones. To give you an example of what I'm talking about, you go back to a headmaster from the 1900s, and you say, is it important to have the taxonomy of a subject memorized? You say, of course it is, that's why you’re going to spend a year memorizing the taxonomy. And then you would say memorizing is actually important so that you have a dictionary by which to proceed on the subject. So in those ways you have new systems for doing that same kind of thing. And the reason in this particular case, I was expecting you to say, No, you have to be disciplined if you decided to learn something. I expected that in the case of the three hours of intense learning followed by an intense piano session, you were just really tired at the end and you're like, “But no, this is something I have to do this evening.” So yes, I'm actually surprised to hear you say that. Yeah, no, I really enjoy this tension. I'm probably reacting to the Goggins reference with a bit of an over extreme overcorrection or something but this really is how I feel. And I feel this tension all the time. The histories in educational psychology that I'm most aligned with are the most robotic, authoritarian kind of histories, and also the ones that are most kind of unschooling and Montessoriesque. I really have a ton of sympathy for elements of both of these directions and there's kind of a weird synthesis of this in my head that I can't fully externalize. I guess part of what I'm saying is aspirational. It certainly is the case that I do in practice use willpower to make things happen. Just as an example of something totally contrary to everything I was saying, I use a tool called Beeminder, which charges me if I don't do certain things. This sounds kind of military, but it's certainly more authoritarian than this kind of freewheeling butterflies kind of gesture I was making a moment ago. And I use it to make sure that I do my memory practice. Shouldn't my memory practice be so joyful? It's at the center of my research, right? It should be the most interesting, exciting part of my day, but often it's not. And so I use this to do it anyway. So there's some tension here. I think I do want to say the reason why I'm willing to endorse this headmaster's view about the taxonomy has to do with the price. I did a bunch of memorization in high school, and it was very inefficient, and it was very uncertain. It was emotionally difficult because I wouldn't even feel confident that I'd learned the stuff. I didn't know what it was to learn something reliably, to be confident that I'd be able to recall it. And it was hugely time consuming because I didn't have techniques or tools. And now, part of why I respond so favorably to just learning the taxonomy is that, for me, it's just trivial. Like, yeah, sure, whatever, throw it into the deck. It'll consume a total of 15 minutes over the next few weeks and then I'll know it. It just doesn't cost anything. Other things in learning do still have real costs and those are maybe more difficult to negotiate. Actually, this is maybe a good place to ask you about unschooling and your attitude towards it. Somebody on Twitter had this question, how are you structuring the education of your kids as they're growing up?…

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