Why do we learn to write, paint, play music, code? Why do we bother trying to understand difficult ideas and turn that understanding into new work?

Our culture of virality and fame suggests that we make work to make it big. We're told by educational institutions that they're developing cultures of "excellence," and that idea of excellence is represented to us as landing big jobs (at google or amazon) or finding a massive audience.

But most of us will never do any of this; and even if we did, it wouldn't make us happy. So what if, instead, the goal of making things were simply to find meaning in the world around us?

We're joined in this episode by Lisa Rathje, Executive Director of Local Learning: The National Network for Folk Arts in Education; Jean Tokuda Irwin, Arts Education Manager for the Utah Division of Arts and Museums; and Keith Taylor, author and A.L. Becker Collegiate Lecturer in English, Emeritus, at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

All of us in education, whether teachers or students, navigate a paradox. To build deep knowledge of any particular kind, we have to drill into the limited areas of study we call disciplines. But our experience of the world isn't disciplinary: We're confronted with experiences and challenges of so many different types, all the time.

And that tension between specificity and generality is only growing more fraught in a time where our problems seem so huge and so transdisciplinary.

In this episode, we speak with Peter Dougherty, Director of the American Philosophical Society Press, and the architect Mokena Makeka about how we can navigate these competing needs for building specialized knowledge and for addressing problems that can't be defined through any one practice.

Anytime we try to learn to learn something--whether in a classroom or out in the world--we have to decide whether we trust whoever is teaching us. Trust is, however, hard to find here in 2024, a mere two weeks before an election that pits two seemingly contradictory visions of reality in competition with one another.

In this episode, we speak with the philosopher Jennifer Nagel about knowledge itself: What counts as knowledge? Who has it? What makes it possible for us to share it? And how can we reason our way toward a future we actually want to live in?

We also talk with the artist Alfred Dudley III, who challenges listeners to think hard about how students experience the truth claims teachers make. What happens if students can tell the teacher doesn't trust them?