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How We Teach: Individualist Stories

2020-11-13 · letter vlog · Hank · 3:59 · watch on YouTube

Topic: Everyday life · mode: Personal essay

Replying to John's video on individual genius versus collective progress, Hank argues that education is not only information but also stories that serve as shared lenses; simple individualist stories help people remember facts and teach some responsibility for one's fate, but taught alone they harm, so we should teach that nobody does anything alone and everybody contributes.

What is said

The parts of the video and what is said in each (★ — how much it matters to the video).

00:00:00 — John's video on individual genius; education usually means quantity of information

  • ★★ Hank picks up John's point that great accomplishments are told as stories of individual genius rather than collective progress, a theme the brothers have discussed a lot and Hank wrote a couple of books about. — 00:00:00 · collective action, Vlogbrothers
  • ★★ Hank says you cannot know everything, yet must understand enough of the world to live in it; access to real information, its quantity, is what we usually think of as education. — 00:00:00 · education

00:00:44 — Simplification and the smallpox example: facts versus the story of one person; simple stories help memory

  • ★★ Hank says the focus on imparting quantity of information forces a lot of simplification, which comes at the cost of other tools needed to live in the world. — 00:00:44 · education
  • ★★★ Hank's example: of the smallpox vaccine you should know that smallpox was very bad but we cured it, that a vaccine like today's attenuated-pathogen vaccines did it, and that someone figured it out; the first two are facts, the third just a story. — 00:00:44 · vaccine
  • ★★ Hank says education often simplifies stories to hang facts on, and that is not a problem: simple, good stories in familiar frames are really good ways to help people remember. — 00:01:26

00:01:56 — Stories as shared lenses; how individualist stories serve and harm learners; barriers

  • ★★★ Hank says the story itself does a ton of work: education gives lenses to understand the world, often stories, and shared lenses (knowledge, values, worldviews) that help us live, work and communicate together. — 00:01:56 · education
  • ★★ Hank says it is worth asking how individualist stories serve learners and how they don't; he often takes the anti-individualist side, mostly because we focus on individualism so much. — 00:01:56
  • ★★★ Hank says individualist stories do serve people: we are to some extent responsible for our own fate, and outcomes partly depend on how hard, how much and how smart people work. — 00:02:25
  • ★★ Hank says this is more true for people with fewer barriers, so individualist stories work better for people like him, for whom many barriers were really low. — 00:02:25
  • ★★★ Hank says focusing only on individualist stories can do harm: many people can't see themselves in them, both as representation and because they face barriers others don't. — 00:02:54

00:03:23 — Nobody does anything alone; the stories we tell are what we learn; pride in our species

  • ★★★ Hank says we need stories recognizing that nobody does anything alone and nobody contributes nothing: everybody adds something to the human story, if only through conversations with friends and family. — 00:03:23 · collective action
  • ★★★ Hank says we should fight the urge to individualize every accomplishment but also teach that we are partly responsible for our destinies, and remember that the stories we tell are the thing we are learning. — 00:03:23
  • ★★ Hank says acknowledging, even reveling in, the fact that nothing is possible without millions of people alive and dead does not lessen individual accomplishment; it should increase pride in our species. — 00:03:23

In the description and comments

  • ★★ The description says education gives shared knowledge that helps people work together more effectively, which Hank thinks is one of the main benefits of college education. — video description
  • ★★ The description says it is terrible when higher education is denied to people who can't afford its costs and they are then judged; we need to get better at working with people without shared frames. — video description
  • ★★ The description says luck, for Hank, was writing a Harry Potter song that got him invited to a Harry Potter convention, where he met a conference organizer who helped him build VidCon. — video description · Harry Potter (book series), VidCon
  • ★★★ The description says having no barriers doesn't guarantee success, but being born with enough money to avoid the student loans almost all his peers had is structural inequality, not luck. — video description · economic inequality
  • ★★ The description adds that success is arbitrary and what you decide it is; individualist narratives reinforce one outcome as best, while many find satisfaction in lives not written into books. — video description

Threads in this video

Mentioned

Central: collective action · education · individualism

Also: great man theory · media representation · smallpox · social privilege · vaccine

Only in the description or credits: economic inequality · Harry Potter (book series) · higher education · Luck · Student loan · VidCon

Also centred on individualism: The Most Interesting Thing I've Ever Done

Replies to

  • continues · On Immunity, Inoculation, and Individuals — “In your last video you were talking about how often stories of great accomplishment are told as stories of individual genius rather than, like, collective progress.”

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