“There is only one subject-matter for education, and that is Life in all its manifestations.”
Alfred North Whitehead
Picture a four-year-old crouched over an ant trail on the sidewalk. She lays a twig across it, watches the ants climb over and then go around, moves the twig, and watches again. Then an adult taps her on the shoulder and calls her inside for the science lesson.
Inquiry and Practice asks what it would take to build a child's days, and eventually a person's life, around that moment. Its answer is a new model of human development and a working method for raising people by it, concrete enough that a parent can run it at the kitchen table on a Tuesday morning.
Learning runs on two systems. Inquiry is the open, self-directed pursuit of a question. Practice is the disciplined repetition that turns a skill into a possession. A moment of learning can lean on either one or run on both, and schools have long served one while starving the other.
The book is written for innovative educators, and for homeschooling parents who are innovative educators in their own right. It moves from theory to daily practice, with worked examples from infancy through adulthood.
Multiplication, deliberately. Anything times zero is zero.
The model stands on the shoulders of thinkers who each explained one part of how a person grows. The book assembles those parts into something none of them attempted alone, and makes three new moves.
A research finding from the mathematics classroom, that understanding and skill advance in alternating turns, applied to every line of development. Long division, the violin, and telling a friend a hard truth all run on Inquiry and Practice. The drill camp and the discovery camp were each half right.
Cognitive engagement, read separately on each system by adults who know the child well, replaces the Friday quiz as the daily signal. When the two readings rise together, the systems are feeding each other. Outcome tests become the check on the instrument.
Two dials tune any experience: fidelity, how real it feels, and worth, whether its output matters to someone. Two lenses frame it: Egan's kinds of understanding and Wilber's lines and quadrants. Agency decides, moment to moment, who steers.
The model in brief: two systems, one measure, and the dials and lenses for designing a single morning.
Why high school Spanish goes silent in a Mexico City café, and what it takes for Inquiry and Practice to mesh on the same object.
The evidence that understanding and skill advance in alternating turns, and a rhythm that grows from loop to spiral.
Free throws in the dark: cognitive engagement as the daily measure of learning, and how to read it.
Desirable difficulty and the flow channel: keeping work at the edge of what a learner can do.
From a coconut stall in Brazil to the flight simulator: how real an experience needs to feel, and when more stops helping.
The toddler who hands back the dropped marker, and why work someone actually uses teaches what busywork can't.
Driver or passenger: following the learner's pull, supplying the structure, and handing the work over.
The summer reading chart: when an outside driver captures a learner, when it engages one, and the road inward.
The red block on the rug: models, rivals, partners, audiences, and the people who make a thing worth wanting.
Day 412 of a language streak: stories that draw a learner in, scoreboards that keep one busy, and how to tell them apart.
The depth gate and the timing schedule, and how mastery and spacing together make a skill stay put.
Developmental lines as a map of humanness, and the grid that gives each learning object its depth.
Egan's five kinds of understanding as the lens that sets the right register for any learner.
What history's tutored minds had, and how care and craft can reach ordinary families.
From the best human tutors to an ideal one: the learner model, the two graphs, and the risks to watch.
The ant trail again: the worked path, who does what, and the single measure that governs it all.