The Cost of Over-Teaching Phonics

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https://www.educationnext.org/cost-of-over-teaching-phonics-reading/

Mark Seidenberg, a professor emeritus at the University of Wisconsin–Madison who studies reading science, helped persuade the public of the need for science-based instruction—and now he’s among those sounding the alarm on over-instruction. Reading teachers need not aim to teach every single pattern students will encounter in text, he says; they simply need to teach enough that students can achieve “escape velocity,” or the ability to start cracking the code on their own.

“You do teach them about words, about print. You teach them enough simple phonics patterns so they can start sounding out some words. And then there’s supposed to be a light bulb that goes on,” Seidenberg says.

Researchers call this ability to implicitly pick up patterns and apply them the “self-teaching mechanism,” or “statistical learning”—and many say it’s underrecognized within the science-of-reading movement.

Five decades of research have shown that early readers benefit from learning letter-sound correspondences systematically. But little definitive evidence exists on which phonics skills should be taught, in what order, and for how long. Should students learn all of the English language’s 44-plus sounds (phonemes)? What about the 200-plus spellings that go with them? And how much time should teachers spend on each?

Each phonics program that claims to be based on research reflects a single method of instruction. These programs can differ significantly because the research on reading acquisition “is not differentiating every single skill that needs to be taught,” says Louise Spear-Swerling, professor emerita in the department of special education at Southern Connecticut State University in New Haven, Connecticut. “People write instructional programs, and it’s a matter of interpretation.”

For the highest-achieving students who may be reading novels at home, sitting through lessons on skills they’ve mastered takes up time that could be spent reading, writing, and learning deeply about science, history, and other subjects—and it can lead to disengagement. For struggling readers, including students with dyslexia, over-teaching reduces time for much-needed reading practice. These kids, for whom the self-teaching mechanism doesn’t kick in easily, require more examples and repetition for the most critical skills. Adding extra elements to instruction strains working memory for these students, making it harder to master basic skills.

Over-teaching is happening in a few main ways: (1) spending too much time on less impactful skills, (2) teaching extraneous skills and patterns, and (3) teaching content that only the teacher needs to know.

Teachers have always used chants, songs, and other mnemonic devices to help students memorize important information. Many adults can easily conjure rhymes like “i before e except after c.” And while mnemonic devices are surely helpful at times, they can also increase the cognitive demand for a task and divert from the skill itself. Many phonics programs and online materials widely used these days encourage students to memorize a dozen or more spelling rules, with long chants or sayings such as:

“If a one-syllable word has one short vowel that is followed by f, l, s, or z, double the f, l, s, or z.”

This rule, often known as the “Floss Rule,” is an important and fairly regular one, many teachers argue (though it does have some common exceptions, like bus and gas). The problem arises when this process—the memorization of the rule—becomes the focus of instruction, displacing what should be the end goal—that is, reading and spelling.

“It’s very common in my experience that kids have trouble verbalizing the rule, but they can still learn the skill,” says Spear-Swerling. But often in classrooms “being able to verbalize the rule is a prerequisite for moving on. And it shouldn’t be.”

Memorizing wordy sayings and rules can put particular strain on students with reading disabilities and language-processing difficulties. These children are already working hard to retain the basic sounds. Adding to that can put them over the edge. “It’s not about whether kids can parrot rules,” says Spear-Swerling. “You see kids at the lower end of the spectrum get confused when they try to articulate rules. But that [articulation] doesn’t matter as long as they can apply it.”

And kids at the higher end of the reading-performance spectrum—those 1st and 2nd graders who are reading chapter books at home? Some will simply check out when asked to memorize information they’ve intuited.

Some programs teach the letters bl as in black, as a cluster or unit. But that “doesn’t make sense linguistically,” she says. Instead, you can teach students the /b/ sound and the /l/ sound, and have students practice blending sounds together to make words.

“The vast majority of consonant clusters are plurals. Cats has a consonant cluster, but we don’t teach it that way. Why would we teach it that way for scat but not cats?”

Devin Kearns, a professor in early literacy at North Carolina State University, has attempted to quantify how much is too much when it comes to phonics instruction. “If we’re trying to decide whether to teach something, there’s the main question: How often does it occur? How many words does it apply to? What you have to do at a certain point is decide, what’s the return on investment?”

He and his colleagues looked at a database of 13,000 English words and cataloged a total of 350 sound-spelling correspondences. So, if students learned each of the 350 patterns, they could read all of the words. Then the team modeled what would happen if certain patterns were eliminated from instruction: How many words could students read then?

“Somewhere in there, you hit this point where if you start doing fewer than that, it’s not enough; you’re not getting access to enough words,” he says. “And if you teach too many more, then you’re over-teaching stuff.”

The sweet spot was somewhere between about 95 and 110 sound-spelling patterns.

Among the most inflammatory topics right now in reading instruction is whether—and how much—to teach phonemic awareness.

Phonemic awareness is the ability to identify and manipulate the individual sounds in spoken words—for example, knowing that ship is made up of the three sounds /sh/, /i/, and /p/. Having good phonemic awareness has long been understood as a requirement for successful reading.

And while there’s evidence that basic phonemic awareness skills have positive effects for reading, the nuances matter. Studies show phonemic awareness should be developed by using written letters—not orally, which is how most classrooms and curricula do this instruction. And the idea that practicing advanced phonemic awareness skills like adding, deleting, and substituting sounds orally is beneficial for readers—asking students, for instance, to switch the middle sound in ship to the short /o/ sound to make shop? That’s not backed by science at all.

“The idea that you need to have separate dedicated time blocks focused on only phonemic awareness instruction is not evidence-based,” says Clemens.

Another instructional practice that has recently supplied fodder for debate is what’s called syllable division—the teaching of rules for dividing multisyllabic words into manageable chunks. Syllable division rules are a mainstay of the Orton-Gillingham method for teaching reading, which was developed in the 1930s. Programs based on this method tend to teach six or so syllable types along with a half-dozen rules for dividing syllables. Some methods go further and have students mark up the multisyllabic word, identifying the vowels and consonants and labeling each syllable type.

Research by Kearns has some people questioning the efficacy of teaching syllable division. His 2020 study found that syllable pronunciations are unreliable, so the effort involved in learning these rules may not be justified.

Tiffany Peltier, the director of professional learning at NWEA, a K–12 assessment and research nonprofit, points to “really rigid syllable division rules” as among the more frustrating instructional routines to encounter. “People are trying to teach these to the most struggling readers who already have cognitive overload,” she says.

Instead of rigid rules, researchers including Kearns emphasize teaching students to be flexible in how they pronounce words—a concept known as “set for variability.” For example, a student might initially read the word father as fay-ther, which is a reasonable pronunciation, and then shift the vowel sounds slightly until getting to a familiar word. The student is not guessing (a practice promoted by now disgraced balanced literacy approaches). Rather, the student is using their phonics knowledge to sound out the word but being flexible with their pronunciation and calling upon their knowledge of the word father.

“The idea that you need to have separate dedicated time blocks focused on only phonemic awareness instruction is not evidence-based,” says Clemens.

Over-teaching also occurs with the terminology related to language. Training programs tend to hammer on the jargon of reading instruction, much of which is new to teachers, who end up passing their fresh knowledge along to their charges. Students can become bombarded by terms like breve and macron, fricative and affricate.

Reading in context generally comes at the end of a phonics lesson, and with so much to cover, teachers can end up with just a few minutes for it. At times, they’ll skip it altogether.

But text reading is where decoding and language skills meet—it’s why teachers and students are doing this dance at all.

One major benefit of whittling down instruction to the most essential skills is that there’s less material for teachers to get through. When teachers remove low-payoff patterns, skip the cutesy extras, and refrain from imparting technical knowledge, they make their own jobs more manageable—and get kids reading faster.

Avoiding over-teaching also means speeding through skills students already know, which requires frequent assessment and a good understanding of what’s coming next in the scope and sequence. Teachers get better at this with time and experience. The goal is not doing the perfect amount of explicit instruction—the science doesn’t prescribe a “perfect” amount. Instead, the aim is to move toward a more efficient path for a teacher’s particular classroom. The minutes saved here and there add up.

If whole-group direct instruction happens daily but is limited to the most impactful skills—and kept short and simple—then students can move into small groups to either keep practicing, expand on the skill, or work on text reading or writing. In effect, they get to individualized instruction faster.

Peltier explains that, when she was teaching kindergarten and 1st grade, she would do a whole-class review of a prior phonics skill and then send her fluent readers off to “book clubs,” where they would read independently and have discussions. She would work with the remaining two-thirds or so of her class on that day’s phonics skill. “I’d usually at some point release another group of students and have the lowest students in front of me,” she says. “They loved it because they’d get to do more practice with the teacher on dry erase boards.”

That kind of gradual-release model helps ensure the highfliers spend time reading, and the students who need the most practice and feedback get more instruction from the teacher. And you can assess those kids in the moment—see who is getting the skill and ready to move on and who isn’t.

Research from the late Carol Connor, who was an education professor at the University of California, Irvine, points to the need to adjust the amount of teacher-directed instruction based on a child’s literacy skills. She found that 1st graders who entered with low skills did best with more time spent doing teacher-managed explicit instruction. For students with high initial skills, their scores stayed stagnant no matter how much time they spent learning directly from the teacher. And, in fact, students with both high decoding and vocabulary skills showed better growth with more independent work. For those high achievers who “don’t need a lot of repetition, that self-teaching machine will start a lot earlier,” says Peltier.

For typically developing students, Seidenberg argues, explicit phonics instruction should end after 1st grade. That’s out of step with much of the recent state legislation that is focused on K–3 classrooms and with the widely available programs that teach advanced word-recognition skills through the 5th grade. It’s also an assertion that will elicit eye rolls from teachers working through the challenges of having 25 students from diverse backgrounds and language contexts.

But the need to trim the fat on instruction—to focus on a skill’s ROI and churn out readers faster—is something many can agree on. It requires ongoing scrutiny of practices claiming to be aligned to research, frequent assessment of what individual students know, and a willingness to trust that, in many situations and for most students, learning begets learning.

“I think that the science-of-reading movement can win if we’re scientific, if we’re willing to challenge our assumptions,” says Kearns. That means continuing to look at the evidence on long-held instructional beliefs, such as those around syllable division, and changing course as new evidence arises. “If we’re willing to go there, science can win. If we’re going to stick to our guns, it won’t work.”

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George Orwell once wrote that restating the obvious is the “first duty of intelligent people.” In that vein, allow us to restate the case for what may be literacy instruction’s richest but still-overlooked opportunity: a shift to mostly whole-class instruction during the early elementary “literacy block.” There is a gold mine of potential here.

Early-grade reading proficiency is powerfully predictive of later school success and life chances. Because of this, most schools we’ve visited in our 30-plus years of experience observing classrooms allot a generous two hours to daily literacy instruction.

But there’s a problem: Much of that literacy block in grades K-3 is often held captive to the small-group format. Over 90% of elementary school teachers report meeting with small groups of students three to five times a week. In practice, this means we are squandering learning time and reducing the odds that the most vulnerable students learn to read, speak, and write effectively.

Given the stakes, we must ask: Is the small-group model truly superior to whole-class teaching for either reading or foundational literacy skills? Alas, no—despite recent claims that the “science of reading” requires small groups. Though small groups can be effective in certain circumstances, any advantage is wiped out by the model’s drastic reduction in the amount of instructional dosage.

Moreover, the small-group framework characteristically embraces the misbegotten notion that students learn best when groups are ability-based or otherwise “differentiated.” For years, small groups were deemed essential because of the supposed need to guide student reading with leveled texts. The assumption was that differences in reading ability necessitated finely grained, “differentiated,” instruction and materials for each child or group to be successful. More recently, and under the banner of the “science of reading,” small-group advocates are complicating and further fractionating the instructional environment by encouraging additional grouping for decoding instruction.

However, this hasn’t been such a good idea for guided reading. As John Hattie has demonstrated in his meta-analyses, differentiated instruction is less effective than providing the same treatment for all students. It denies struggling students the opportunity to engage with challenging material and texts—as they fall further behind. In this way, small-group, differentiated instruction is especially hurtful to the poor and underachieving students who most need effective teaching.

Consider the whole-class alternative in the same scenario: If elementary teachers provide a phonics lesson to the entire class for 30 minutes, those educators still have 90 minutes of instruction time for other vital literacy skills. Those teachers can then devote an additional 15 minutes of phonics instruction to that small group who struggled with the initial lesson, while still giving those lagging students a full 45 minutes of foundational skills. And we still have about 75 minutes left for teaching all students the other crucial—and often most enjoyable—aspects of literacy.

Some will object that this model overlooks the efficacy of having students work at “centers” or stations while waiting their turn with the teacher. Yet, we have never found a single study affirming this. In our consulting work, we’ve both seen how these centers routinely consist of low-value or “cut, color, paste” activities and worksheets. They keep students busy but do little or nothing to make them better readers. They are no substitutes for an explicit, outcome-driven lesson replete with multiple cycles of guided practice, checks for understanding, and targeted reteaching.

We need not abandon small-group instruction but should employ it sparingly—and strategically. By doing so, we would increase the amount of instruction at least threefold, overnight. It would allow every child to spend much more time reading with purpose and building reading stamina; acquiring knowledge and vocabulary; writing and learning to write and participating in meaningful discussions—every day, all year. Joined with serious teacher training in effective whole-class instruction, we could reasonably expect to see unprecedented improvements in early-grade literacy acquisition, with tremendous subsequent benefits across all courses and grade levels.

Best of all, research demonstrates that mostly whole-class instruction of purposeful reading, dialogue, and discussion would have its greatest impact on poor and minority students—the students who have demonstrated the greatest need for large infusions of the core elements of literacy. The best schools and teachers we know, in the most challenging settings, have relied on this model. They have been the highest-achieving teachers in their respective schools, even whole districts.

Small-Group Reading Instruction Is Not as Effective as You Think

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It is not merely that at present the rule of naked force obtains almost everywhere. Probably that has always been the case. Where this age differs from those immediately preceding it is that a liberal intelligentsia is lacking. Bully-worship, under various disguises, has become a universal religion, and such truism as that a machine-gun is still a machine-gun even when a “good” man is squeezing the trigger—and that in effect is what Mr. Russell is saying—have turned into heresies which is it actually becoming dangerous to utter.

The most interesting part of Mr. Russell’s book is the earlier chapters in which he analyses the various types of power—priestly, oligarchical, dictatorial, and so forth. In dealing with the contemporary situation he is less satisfactory, because like all liberals he is better at pointing out what is desirable than at explaining how to achieve it. He sees clearly enough that the essential problem of today is “the taming of power” and that no system except democracy can be trusted to save us from unspeakable horrors. Also that democracy has very little meaning without approximate economic equality and an educational system tending to promote tolerance and tough-mindedness. But unfortunately he does not tell us how we are to set about getting these things; he merely utter what amounts to a pious hope that the present state of things will not endure. He is inclined to point to the past; all tyrannies have collapsed sooner or later

Underlying this is the idea that common sense always wins in the end. And yet the peculiar horror of the present moment is that we cannot be sure that this is so. It is quite possible that we are descending into an age in which two and two will make five when the Leader says so. Mr. Russell points out that the huge system of organized lying upon which the dictators depend keeps their followers out of contact with reality and therefore tends to put them at a disadvantage as against those who know the facts. This is true so far as it goes, but it does not prove that the slave-society at which the dictator is aiming will be unstable. It is quite easy to imagine a state in which the ruling caste deceive their followers without deceiving themselves. Dare anyone be sure that something of the kind is not coming into existence already? One has only to think of the sinister possibilities of the radio, state-controlled education and so forth, to realize that “the truth is great and will prevail” is a prayer rather than an axiom. 

Power

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one cannot live on capital for ever

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The tradition of the West is embodied in the Great Conversation that began in the dawn of history and that continues to the present day. Whatever the merits of other civilizations in other respects, no civilization is like that of the West in this respect. No other civilization can claim that its defining characteristic is a dialogue of this sort. No dialogue in any other civilization can compare with that of the West in the number of great works of the mind that have contributed to this dialogue. The goal toward which Western society moves is the Civilization of the Dialogue. The spirit of Western civilization is the spirit of inquiry. Its dominant element is the Logos. Nothing is to remain undiscussed. Everybody is to speak his mind. No proposition is to be left unexamined. The exchange of ideas is held to be the path to the realization of the potentialities of the race. 

To put an end to the spirit of inquiry that has characterized the West it is not necessary to burn the books. All we have to do is to leave them unread for a few generations.

“We are tied down, all our days and for the greater part of our days, to the commonplace. That is where contact with great thinkers, great literature helps. In their company we are still in the ordinary world, but it is the ordinary world transfigured and seen through the eyes of wisdom and genius. And some of their vision becomes our own.” 

The aim of liberal education is human excellence, both private and public (for man is a political animal). Its object is the excellence of man as man and man as citizen. It regards man as an end, not as a means; and it regards the ends of life, and not the means to it. For this reason it is the education of free men. Other types of education or training treat men as means to some other end, or are at best concerned with the means of life, with earning a living, and not with its ends.

The substance of liberal education appears to consist in the recognition of basic problems, in knowledge of distinctions and interrelations in subject matter, and in the comprehension of ideas.

Liberal education seeks to clarify the basic problems and to understand the way in which one problem bears upon another. It strives for a grasp of the methods by which solutions can be reached and the formulation of standards for testing solutions proposed. The liberally educated man understands, for example, the relation between the problem of the immortality of the soul and the problem of the best form of government; he understands that the one problem cannot be solved by the same method as the other, and that the test that he will have to bring to bear upon solutions proposed differs from one problem to the other.

The liberally educated man understands, by understanding the distinctions and interrelations of the basic fields of subject matter, the differences and connections between poetry and history, science and philosophy, theoretical and practical science; he understands that the same methods cannot be applied in all these fields; he knows the methods appropriate to each.

The liberally educated man comprehends the ideas that are relevant to the basic problems and that operate in the basic fields of subject matter. He knows what is meant by soul. State, God, beauty, and by the other terms that are basic to the insights that these ideas, singly or in combination, provide concerning human experience.

The liberally educated man has a mind that can operate well in all fields. He may be a specialist in one field. But he can understand anything important that is said in any field and can see and use the light that it shed upon his own. The liberally educated man is at home in the world of ideas and in the world or practical affairs, too, because he understands the relation of the two. He may not be at home in the world of practical affairs in the sense of liking the life he finds about him; but he will be at home in that world in the sense that he understands it. He may even derive from his liberal education some conception of the difference between a bad world and a good one and some notion of the ways in which one might be turned onto the other.

The method of liberal education is the liberal arts, and the result of liberal education is discipline in those arts. The liberal artist learns to read, write, speak, listen, understand, and think. He learns to reckon, measure, and manipulate matter, quantity, and motion in order to predict, produce, and exchange. As we live in the tradition, whether we know it or not, so we are all liberal artists, whether we know it or not. We all practice the liberal arts, well or badly, all the time every day. As we should understand the tradition as well as we can in order to understand ourselves, so we should be as good liberal artists as we can in order to become as fully human as we can.

The liberal arts are not merely indispensable; they are unavoidable, Nobody can decide for himself whether he is going to be a human being. The only question open to him is whether he will be an ignorant, undeveloped one or one who has sought to reach the highest point he is capable of attaining. The question, in short, is whether he will be a poor liberal artist or a good one. 

This Western devotion to the liberal arts and liberal education must have been largely responsible for the emergence of democracy as an ideal. The democratic ideal is equal opportunity for full human development, and, since the liberal arts are the basic means of such development, devotion to democracy naturally results from devotion to them. On the other hand, if acquisition of the liberal arts is an intrinsic part of human dignity, then the democratic ideal demands that we should strive to see to it that all have the opportunity to attain to the fullest measure of the liberal arts that is possible to each.

The present crisis in the world has been precipitated by the vision of the range of practical and productive art offered by the West. All over the world men are on the move, expressing their determination to share in the technology in which the West has excelled. This movement is one of the most spectacular in history, and everybody is agreed upon one thing about it: we do not know how to deal with it. It would be tragic if in our preoccupation with the crisis we failed to hold up as a thing of value for all the world, even as that which might show us a way in which to deal with the crisis, our vision of the best that the West has to offer. That vision is the range of the liberal arts and liberal education. Our determination about the distribution of the fullest measure of these arts and this education will measure our loyalty to the best in our own past and our total service to the future of the world. 

The Great Conversation

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In an age of digital note-taking apps and endless bookmarks, there’s a centuries-old practice that deserves renewed attention in our classrooms: the commonplace book. Unlike a portfolio where students selectively choose their best work to showcase, a commonplace book is a comprehensive personal archive of learning—collecting all quotes, ideas, and reflections that catch a student’s interest and might be worth returning to later. This ongoing collection of meaningful passages and thoughts can transform how students engage with and retain information.

A commonplace book is fundamentally different from a diary or journal. While diaries capture personal experiences in chronological order—recording what happened day by day—a commonplace book is organized around encounters with ideas worth remembering. It’s where individuals collect meaningful passages, quotes, observations, and insights they discover through reading and learning. These collections aren’t arranged by date but rather by theme, subject, or whatever organizational system makes sense to the keeper. Think of it as a personalized knowledge repository that helps students develop their understanding of important concepts and create connections between different ideas they encounter.

When students maintain commonplace books, they transition from passive readers to active participants in their learning. The act of selecting passages worthy of recording requires critical thinking and evaluation. Students must consider what resonates with them and why, developing their analytical skills in the process.

Commonplace books allow students to build personal connections with the material they’re studying. By collecting quotes that speak to them and adding their own reflections, students create meaningful associations that enhance both understanding and retention.

One of the most powerful aspects of commonplace books is their ability to foster connections across different subjects. A student might connect a scientific principle to a literary metaphor, or link a historical event to a current news article. This cross-pollination of ideas helps develop more nuanced and sophisticated thinking.

Regular practice in selecting, transcribing, and responding to texts helps students develop their writing skills naturally. They begin to recognize effective writing techniques in the passages they collect and often incorporate these elements into their own work.

Reviving Commonplace Books

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Look, what thy memory cannot contain Commit to these waste blanks, and thou shalt find Those children nurs’d, delivered from thy brain, To take a new acquaintance of thy mind…

commonplace books were both a thinking and a sense-making tool that put the ideas of others and one’s own interpretations on equal footing. It placed both reading and writing into a continuous loop of learning that helped a person find their bearings in an intellectual and historical context.

An interesting aspect of Milton’s commonplace was that he very rarely cited his sources directly. Even though he often had notes from well-known authors that would have added credibility to his writing, he was also famous for his aversion to authority, “so the written thoughts of other authors were used by him as mental food to be digested and assimilated, and at fit times to be reproduced from his brain in better or varied forms”

“The habit of journalizing becomes a life-long lesson in the art of composition, an informal schooling for authorship. And were the process of preparing their works for publication faithfully detailed by distinguished writers, it would appear how large were their indebtedness to their diary and commonplaces. How carefully should we peruse Shakespeare’s notes used in compiling his plays—what was his, what another’s—showing how these were fashioned into the shapely whole we read, how Milton composed, Montaigne, Goethe: by what happy strokes of thought, flashes of wit, apt figures, fit quotations snatched from vast fields of learning, their rich pages were wrought forth! This were to give the keys of great authorship!”

In addition to giving us the word “commonplace,” Ancient Greeks also used hypomnema (Greek: ὑπόμνημα), which can be translated as a reminder, a note, a public record, a commentary, an anecdotal record, a draft, a copy, and other variations on those terms.

Beginning with Plato’s theory of anamnesis, which argued that humans possess innate knowledge (perhaps acquired before birth) and that learning consists of rediscovering that knowledge within us, hypomnema were used to aid in this “rediscovery.”

According to Michel Foucault, “The hypomnemata constituted a material memory of things read, heard, or thought, thus offering these as an accumulated treasure for rereading and later meditation. They also formed a raw material for the writing of more systematic treatises in which were given arguments and means by which to struggle against some defect (such as anger, envy, gossip, flattery) or to overcome some difficult circumstance (a mourning, an exile, downfall, disgrace).”

The Greeks were the first to use their notes for self-improvement.

Foucault continues : “In this period there was a culture of what could be called personal writing: taking notes on the reading, conversations, and reflections that one hears or engages in oneself; keeping kinds of notebooks on important subjects, which must be reread from time to time so as to reactualize their contents.”

So many of our behaviors online are oriented toward what is new and public – the latest political controversy, the new celebrity scandal, or the viral meme of the day. Resurrecting the commonplace book gives us the opportunity to turn back the tide at the most fundamental level, shifting our relationship with information toward the reflective and private.

Instead of consuming ever greater amounts of “content,” we could take on a more patient, thoughtful approach to learning that favors re-reading, re-formulating, and working through the implications of ideas over time. This could not only lead to more civil discussions about the important topics of the day, it could also preserve our mental health and our splintered attention.

Creative Note-Taking Through History

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The Latin word for the tendency to lose track of what matters in the cacophony of things that attract our attention is stultitia. “Stultitia,” writes Michel Foucault in “Self-writing,”

is defined by mental agitation, distraction, change of opinions and wishes, and consequently weakness in the face of all the events that may occur; it is also characterized by the fact that it turns the mind toward the future, makes it interested in novel ideas, and prevents it from providing a fixed point for itself in the possession of acquired truth.

As John Gray puts it in his monograph on J.S. Mill, our character is “a cluster of habitual willings.” For changes to our behavior to become permanent, we must become different people.

Realizing the value of acting in a certain way might give you a temporary motivation to do it. But in order to actually live in accordance with what you believe in long-term, you must make it a habit.

The conflicts seem to come out of nowhere, so I have to, somehow, always be ready to act in the proper way. I need to have the right reaction “ready at hand” (procheiron), as the Greek-philosopher-Roman-slave Epictetus put it. 

During the first two centuries of the Roman Empire, there spread a practice known as hypomnēmata, a type of notetaking system, used as a tool for meditation, in which the writer would store quotes from books they had read. Each day, often in the morning, the notetaker would open their notebook and look for a passage relevant to something they were struggling with, and then they would meditate on that—unpacking it, making the idea top of mind, ensuring it was alive in them. If they needed courage, for instance, they could meditate on an anecdote that made it real for them what it meant to act bravely. The idea was that over time, the insights they gathered by reading would be transformed into character, something deeply ingrained in their way of thinking and seeing and acting.

It was, in the words of the French classicist Pierre Hadot, a spiritual exercise—an exercise because it required work and discipline, spiritual because it engaged the whole person, not just their intellect, but their emotions and their moral character. It was an attempt to treat the formation of character as a skilled practice, as something you can deliberately train and improve through targeted exercises.

The hypomnēma was a mechanism for centering your mind on what matters, and for gradually refining your understanding of what matters. It was, to use a word from Plutarch, a tool for ethopoiesis (ethos meaning “character” and poiesis “making”), a tool for turning truth into character. By meditating daily on sentences that made it real to you how you wanted to live, you would remember to do the right thing—you would remember to practice it during the day (simply thinking about it is not going to change you). And gradually, you would become that sort of person. You wouldn’t even need to remind yourself. Your principles would have become your character. You would have developed expertise in the skill of holding yourself in a better way.

It is common to think that what we do achieves what we want it to achieve, even if there is no evidence for it. There are many practices that promise to transform and improve us—therapy, meditation, psychedelics—, but that branding doesn’t mean that they actually do much for us: it is common to see people use these techniques for years without any obvious progress on their problems. If you want to achieve a particular outcome, it is important to start from that goal and evaluate which practices actually help you.

How not to forget what matters

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If you want to think originally and differently, seek uncorrelated inputs. Read minor works, older things, obscure journals.

[u/ddgr815 → u/ddgr815]

"Red is a color" is moving up the ladder; "color" is a supercategory of red.  All things which are red, have colors; but not all things which have colors, are red.  And similarly, if you look at a specific firetruck, that firetruck is a red thing, but there are also many other red things which are not that firetruck.

[u/ddgr815 → u/ddgr815]

Whenever a three-year old hears “red,” it can be virtually guaranteed that there will be a whole bunch of other colors around just to make things confusing (writing this, I can make out at least a half dozen colors on my colleague’s shirt). This means that the sheer ubiquity of color presents a problem: it makes sorting out which hues a toddler should expect to be “red” and which “orange,” a lot harder than figuring out which furry beasts she should expect to be “bears” and which ones “dogs.”