Kieran Egan's educational theory (which I limned out analytically in a review of his book The Educated Mind, which won the 2023 ACX contest) might be the biggest hope for impressively improving education in the developed world — but no one's written a practical guide for it.

I'd like to.

The book’ll be geared towards homeschoolers, but it’ll also invite non-homeschooling parents to pick and choose practices that appeal to them. It’ll start with a quick chapter that explains the current stalemate in education between the two warring armies of Traditionalism and Progressivism. Then it’ll move to a chapter that lays out what both sides are missing: the emerging understanding of what a human mind really IS (from disciplines like evolutionary psychology and anthropology and cognitive science). It’ll have a chapter that BRIEFLY encapsulates Egan’s notion, which’ll draw from what I wrote in the “Educated Mind” review.

The bulk of the book, though, will be practical. The remaining chapters will cover subjects like history, philosophy, science, art, reading, & math. Each will lay out easy-to-implement ways to use Egan’s cognitive tools (e.g. stories, metaphors, riddles, jokes, images, songs, heroes…) to help make these subjects MATTER to kids, grabbing their emotions and imagination to cultivate, well, rationality!

In short: a playbook for parents who want to raise intellectually vibrant adults that see that the world is meaningful and that education is an adventure… without, themselves, going stark raving mad.

With the money I’ll take a month off from teaching in the summer to do nothing but write write write. (And float draft chapters to readers. And work with my illustrator and graphic designer. And pick the brains of people who have been doing Egan education longer than I have about their ideas.)

Describe why you think you're qualified to work on this

I’ve been brow-deep in Egan education for fifteen years, and’ve worked in the homeschool community for slightly longer. I’ve taught all these subjects at different age levels.

And I have some skin in the game: a new daughter (now 11 months old, and shrieking happily upstairs). My wife and I have found that, once the initial bout of exhaustion is passed through (it gets better! even my friends with twins tell me this!), there’s a period of lucid optimism about what this new human might become; I want to take full advantage of it.

Other ways I can learn about you

I won the recent book review contest! Since then I’ve been doing a Christopher-Alexander-esque pattern language for Egan education at losttools.substack.com; I continue to build out an epic, Egan-fueled science curriculum at scienceisWEIRD.com.

How much money do you need?

I’ll ask for a total of $11,000. $6k is to feed my family, pay the rent, etc. for the whole month of June. $2k is to pay my part-time illustrator to pepper the pages with funny, appealing art. $2k is to hire a graphic designer to do a fully professional cover. $1k is to pay for a professional to do the book formatting. The goal in all this isn’t to make much money, but to position Egan’s approach as a “third way” in the homeschooling community. (This, of course, as a beachhead for invading the rest of education. The practices here will be easy to adapt to classrooms.)

I'll set the bottom at $2,000, which will be spent taking an extra week off to write furiously. (If I have to teach this summer, I'll try to finance the rest of the book myself, or raise money elsewhere.)