Kieran Egan (philosopher)
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
He taught at Simon Fraser University.[2] His major work is the 1997 book The Educated Mind.
Early life
Egan was born in 1942 in
Career
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]
Educated Mind
Criticism of previous education theories
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:
- to give students the same understandings and habits to help them succeed in society. (Egan called this the "socialization" goal, and suggested it may have been the original purpose of schools.)
- to give students an understanding of truth, allowing them to change society. (Egan called this the "academic" goal, and suggested that this goal was introduced by Plato.[7])
- to give students the chance to develop their own understandings and skills through a process of self-discovery, allowing them to create themselves as individuals. (Egan called this the "psychological" goal, and suggested it came from Rousseau.)
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.
"Cultural toolkits" theory
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.
- Somatic toolkit: the humor.
- Mythic toolkit: the ways of understanding the world that come when a person first learns to speak, including stories, riddles.
- Romantic toolkit: the ways of understanding the world that come when a person masters the skills of reading and writing, including wonder and mystery, a sense of the heroic, and a thirst for the limits of reality.
- Philosophic toolkit: the ways of understanding the world that come when a person has already learned so much about a topic that they can think about it theoretically. These include the search for authority & metanarratives.
- Ironic toolkit: the ways of understanding the world that come when a person has mastered all the previous toolkits, and finds them insufficient to describe the world. These tools include ambiguity, an appreciation for the limits of understanding, and a flexible, Socratic stance toward ideas.
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
, 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.
Personal life
Egan was an
Main works
- 1976 ISBN 0-8224-6550-7
- 1979 ISBN 0-19-502458-3
- 1983 ISBN 0-8077-2717-2
- 1988 ISBN 0-415-90003-4
- 1988 ISBN 0-8077-2878-0
- 1989 ISBN 0-226-19031-5
- 1990 ISBN 0-415-90050-6
- 1992 ISBN 0-226-19033-1
- 1997 ISBN 0-226-19036-6
- 1999 ISBN 0-8077-3808-5
- 2002 ISBN 0-300-09433-7
- 2005 ISBN 0-7879-7157-X
- 2006 ISBN 1-4129-2788-9
- 2008 ISBN 978-0-300-11046-3
- 2010 ISBN 978-0-226-19043-3
- 2014 ISBN 978-0-807-75583-9
- 2015 ISBN 978-0-807-75714-7
Awards and honors
- 1991: Grawemeyer Award in Education[10]
- 1993: Elected to the Royal Society of Canada
- 2000: Elected as Foreign Associate member of the National Academy of Education (U.S.)
- 2001: Killam Research Fellowship
- 2001: Appointed to a Canada Research Chair in Education[4]
- 2010: Utne Reader magazine listed Egan as one of the "25 Visionaries Who Are Changing Your World."[11]
References
- ^ Theodora Polito, Educational Theory as Theory of Culture: A Vichian perspective on the educational theories of John Dewey and Kieran Egan Educational Philosophy and Theory, Vol. 37, No. 4, 2005
- ^ a b Egan, K., & Judson, G. (2008). Of Whales and Wonder. Educational Leadership, 65(6), 20-25.
- ^ a b "Kieran Egan Obituary (1942 - 2022) The Globe and Mail". Legacy.com. Retrieved 19 July 2022.
- ^ a b Egan, K. (2005). An imaginative approach to teaching. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.
- ^ "Kieran Egan's "Press Kit"" (PDF). Educ.sfu.ca. Retrieved 19 July 2022.
- ^ "About the IERG — Imaginative Education Research Group Portal". Archived from the original on 23 July 2011. Retrieved 13 November 2010.. Accessed on 13 November 2010
- ISBN 0-226-19036-6.
- ISBN 0-226-19036-6.
- ^ D. James MacNeil, review of The educated mind, for the 21st Century Learning Initiative, September 1998
- ^ "1991- Kieran Egan". Archived from the original on 10 June 2015.
- ^ "Kieran Egan: Teacher of the Years". Utne.com. Retrieved 19 October 2010.