Kieran Egan | |
---|---|
Born | Ireland | 22 May 1942
Died | 12 May 2022 | (aged 79)
Occupation | Author, Professor of Education, Canada Research Chair in Education |
Kieran Egan (22 May 1942 – 12 May 2022) was an Irish educational philosopher and a student of the classics, anthropology, cognitive psychology, and cultural history. [1] He has written on issues in education and child development, with an emphasis on the uses of imagination and the stages (Egan called them "understandings") that occur during a person's intellectual development. He has questioned the work of Jean Piaget and progressive educators, notably Herbert Spencer and John Dewey.
He taught at Simon Fraser University. [2] His major work is the 1997 book The Educated Mind.
Egan was born in 1942 in Clonmel, Ireland, and was raised and educated in England. After a brief period as a novice in a Franciscan monastery, [3] he graduated from the University of London with a Bachelor of Arts degree in history in 1966. He subsequently worked as a research fellow at the Institute for Comparative Studies in Kingston upon Thames. He then moved to the United States and began a PhD in the philosophy of education at the Stanford Graduate School of Education. Egan completed his PhD at Cornell University in 1972. [4] [5]
Kieran Egan was the director of the Imaginative Education Research Group, [2] which was founded by the Faculty of Education at Simon Fraser University. The goal of this group is to improve education on a global scale by developing and proliferating the ideas of Imaginative Education. [6]
Egan argued that beneath many of the debates around schools was a more fundamental disagreement: what should the goal of education be? He pointed to three major options:
Egan argued that, when facing these three appealing goals, educational leaders often seek a compromise by combining them together. This, he wrote, was a mistake, the fundamental cause of why schools struggle to educate students well: "these three ideas are mutually incompatible, and this is the primary cause of our long-continuing educational crisis"; [8] the present educational program in much of the West attempts to integrate all three of these incompatible ideas, resulting in a failure to effectively achieve any of the three. [9] Throughout his career, he attempted to develop a new theoretical grounding for education.
Egan suggested that people learn through specific cognitive tools. These tools can be helpfully grouped into five "cultural toolkits", which (excepting the first) don't develop "naturally". Each was the centuries-long creation of a culture; a student can adopt them as they struggle to understand the world.
Education, Egan argued, is the process of helping a student gain and wield these tools. Egan suggested that this approach provides an alternative to the traditional three contradictory goals of education.
Egan's lifelong work was to understand how these tools first developed in history, how they developed in the lives of individual learners, and how teachers could help students develop them to enrich their understanding of reality.
To do this, he drew from fields as diverse as evolutionary history, anthropology, cultural history, and cognitive psychology, and worked with students and teachers around the world.
Students, Egan observed, tend to add on these toolkits in the order they first developed. In sharp distinction from Recapitulation theory (common in the late 19th and early 20th century), Egan suggested that these types of understanding are not "stages" that are moved through, but toolkits to be added on: the mythic toolkit modifies the somatic, the romantic modifies the mythic and somatic, and so on. Also, there is no guarantee a person will gain all the toolkits — many people do not.
Egan was an atheist. He died on 12 May 2022. [3]
Kieran Egan | |
---|---|
Born | Ireland | 22 May 1942
Died | 12 May 2022 | (aged 79)
Occupation | Author, Professor of Education, Canada Research Chair in Education |
Kieran Egan (22 May 1942 – 12 May 2022) was an Irish educational philosopher and a student of the classics, anthropology, cognitive psychology, and cultural history. [1] He has written on issues in education and child development, with an emphasis on the uses of imagination and the stages (Egan called them "understandings") that occur during a person's intellectual development. He has questioned the work of Jean Piaget and progressive educators, notably Herbert Spencer and John Dewey.
He taught at Simon Fraser University. [2] His major work is the 1997 book The Educated Mind.
Egan was born in 1942 in Clonmel, Ireland, and was raised and educated in England. After a brief period as a novice in a Franciscan monastery, [3] he graduated from the University of London with a Bachelor of Arts degree in history in 1966. He subsequently worked as a research fellow at the Institute for Comparative Studies in Kingston upon Thames. He then moved to the United States and began a PhD in the philosophy of education at the Stanford Graduate School of Education. Egan completed his PhD at Cornell University in 1972. [4] [5]
Kieran Egan was the director of the Imaginative Education Research Group, [2] which was founded by the Faculty of Education at Simon Fraser University. The goal of this group is to improve education on a global scale by developing and proliferating the ideas of Imaginative Education. [6]
Egan argued that beneath many of the debates around schools was a more fundamental disagreement: what should the goal of education be? He pointed to three major options:
Egan argued that, when facing these three appealing goals, educational leaders often seek a compromise by combining them together. This, he wrote, was a mistake, the fundamental cause of why schools struggle to educate students well: "these three ideas are mutually incompatible, and this is the primary cause of our long-continuing educational crisis"; [8] the present educational program in much of the West attempts to integrate all three of these incompatible ideas, resulting in a failure to effectively achieve any of the three. [9] Throughout his career, he attempted to develop a new theoretical grounding for education.
Egan suggested that people learn through specific cognitive tools. These tools can be helpfully grouped into five "cultural toolkits", which (excepting the first) don't develop "naturally". Each was the centuries-long creation of a culture; a student can adopt them as they struggle to understand the world.
Education, Egan argued, is the process of helping a student gain and wield these tools. Egan suggested that this approach provides an alternative to the traditional three contradictory goals of education.
Egan's lifelong work was to understand how these tools first developed in history, how they developed in the lives of individual learners, and how teachers could help students develop them to enrich their understanding of reality.
To do this, he drew from fields as diverse as evolutionary history, anthropology, cultural history, and cognitive psychology, and worked with students and teachers around the world.
Students, Egan observed, tend to add on these toolkits in the order they first developed. In sharp distinction from Recapitulation theory (common in the late 19th and early 20th century), Egan suggested that these types of understanding are not "stages" that are moved through, but toolkits to be added on: the mythic toolkit modifies the somatic, the romantic modifies the mythic and somatic, and so on. Also, there is no guarantee a person will gain all the toolkits — many people do not.
Egan was an atheist. He died on 12 May 2022. [3]