The Unexamined Education

Jon starts the episode by pointing out that Shaun keeps in touch with his former students but that he does not keep in touch with any. Shaun explains how social media works. Thanks Shaun. Jon confesses that he does not keep up with anybody really at all, and never has. Now, Jon has some regret because of this, so Shaun and Jon start a campaign to get Jon to gather up some friends from yesteryear....

Once again, our crew of two try their hands at a movie review. Sticking with the 80s, they watched Dead Poets Society . There's not much to say here except that Jon and Shaun miss the entire point of the movie! Clearly, the Dionysian influence brought into Welton disrupted the established and successful Apollonian regime. This is an ancient struggle - the Apollonian brings upon its own disruption...

Jon and Shaun tell us that they are going to reflect on the interview with Dev Ojha. Shaun, as always, starts things off by thinking more highly of himself than is warranted. Shaun places himself in the center of the conversation by issuing a public apology. Within his apology, he asks for forgiveness...centralizing himself as the sacrificial teacher necessary for all student successes. He apparen...

Well, these guys finally start to make sense. Clearly they recognize the problem with forcing a student through Shaun's English class, and they both seem to support this former student, Dev, who chose to pursue other studies rather than attend Shaun's class. The course of the discussion reveals that Shaun mainly put the effort of teaching on other students as he deferred answering direct questions...

Jon and Shaun tease the audience with their imminent disagreement about unschooling. Jon takes an unschooling posture. Shaun defends the schools...but only if a person have sufficient privilege. Jon then realizes that Shaun is only going to defend privileged access to schools, but he was hankering for an argument against a standard public school defender. Realizing that Shaun was not going to take...

Shaun makes it almost seven whole minutes without entirely dismissing the premise of the discussion. Jon forces him into another 50 minutes of conversation anyway. Jon gives an anecdote that he claims is not proof, but after delivering his anecdote, both Jon and Shaun treat the anecdote as universal truths. Shaun is suspiciously vague about whether or not he can count. Jon points out that the reas...

Wow! These guys are going after Jaime Escalante now…not the actual person, but the character portrayed by Edward James Olmos in the great movie, Stand and Deliver. Of course, both of them used to like the movie but now find themselves critical of their former judgments due to their tendency to overthink absolutely everything.  After a few minutes of chuckling about the cringe factor of the 80s, th...

In this episode, we didn't just learn about teaching; we learned about life...well, sort of. Shaun realizes that he once was a clown. He seems to believe that he is no longer one. Jon fancied himself a hero and clearly has given up on that self image. The two discuss other personas and think about student responses to those personas. They analyze popular teaching styles in a way that is less than...

These two tormented souls try to mount a proper case for society emphasizing certain essential schooling, but within minutes of the start of the show, they refer to society at large as tyrannical and spend the rest of the episode mounting the weakest defense imaginable for literacy, numeracy, and citizenship. Despite this failure, the listener finds himself strangely sympathetic to these two teach...

Shaun asks Jon why he chose to study English in college and explains how he came to deeply appreciate his own choice to study "English." They both then point out how they ruined that study of literature for students by teaching literature. Jon shares why he performed so poorly in math classes in high school before pointing out that he could manage the subject when he had time to approach it on his...

Jon and Shaun tell the story of what their lives were like as students and how they got into teaching, and why both of them left teaching only to return some years later with a more mature eye on the profession. Jon and Shaun have been discussing the nature of education for years and would like to share their insights with a wider audience. Music by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart / CC BY-SA