Insights from an Educational Iconoclast, Kieran Egan

The titles of some of Kieran Egan's seminal books give us a clue as to his contributions:

Teaching as Storytelling

Imagination in Teaching and Learning

Teaching literacy: Engaging the Imagination of New Readers and Writers

An Imaginative Approach to Teaching

Imagination and Education

Romantic Understanding: The Development of Rationality and Imagination, Ages 8-15

Educational Development

Individual Development and the Curriculum

The Educated Mind: How Cognitive Tools Shape Our Understanding

Getting It Wrong from the Beginning: Our Progressivist Inheritance from Herbert Spencer, John Dewey, and Jean Piaget

Egan (1966, 2001) points out that differences in educational philosophy relate to our basic educational goals. Three competing views that he identifies are socialization, conveyance of knowledge, and self-actualization. In another work (1978), he had identified a fourth, about which he elaborates at length in a recent book (2002). Correspondingly, the four views define the tasks of students and teachers in the following paragraphs because of the way that learning is defined.

View 1. Learning as socialization - students are to learn what society expects of them, the skills and information necessary for their jobs and to be good citizens. The teacher is a representative of that society, informing and enforcing the societal rules and expectations. The teacher is an authoritarian figure who must exercise control. This philosophical tradition is at the core of traditional teaching and current neo-conservative emphases in education. This perspective was combined with the following view to create the strongest and longest-lasting of our educational perspectives both in Europe and the United States. Anthropologists or sociologists such as Emile Durkheim describe this mechanism in tribal societies and industrialized ones as well.

View 2. Learning as knowledge acquisition - students have a specified, preferably uniform curriculum which will not only prepare them for societal roles but enable them to extend their knowledge, share it with others and improve both their own lives and society in general. Again, the teacher is an authoritarian figure- a subject-matter expert. The key figure in this philosophical tradition is Plato.

View 3. Learning as self-actualization - In the tradition of Rousseau, Dewey and "progressives" in educational circles, there is careful attention to the needs of the individual, to his or her learning styles and developmentally appropriate activities, to the discovery of basic principles and their application, and to a great deal of student autonomy. The teacher is a facilitator, manager of resources, and coordinator of cooperative learning on the part of the group of learners.

"The flaw in progressivism is the belief that we can disclose the nature of the child. Whatever is the substratum of human nature is less accessible and less useful to the educator that understanding the cultural/cognitive tools that shape and mediate our learning, development, and everything else to do with the conscious world of educational activity. And as all tools are not equal so we need to be guided by an overarching theory of education when conducting any educational inquiry" (Egan, 2002, p.105).

View 4. Learning as recapitulation of cultural development - propounded by Herbert Spencer in this typical quote: "If there be an order in which the human race has mastered its various kinds of knowledge, there will arise in every child an aptitude to acquire those kinds of knowledge in the same order... Education should be a repetition of civilization in little." (in Egan 1998) Though he and others have discredited the Spencerian version of this view of learning (2002), Egan proposes that the basic thrust of this idea can be resurrected minus its roots in social evolutionary thought by "using cognitive tools that we have inherited from our evolutionary and cultural history." (1998) The tools he speaks of are mediational tools, those Vygotsky proposed as being both necessary to, and shapers of, our perceptions and shared social meaning. In Egan's understanding, they are "oral language, literacy, theoretic abstractions, irony and their sub-set of smaller-scale cognitive tools." Education is properly the process dedicated to maximizing each student's mastery of these cultural and cognitive tools, the process of extending each student's cultural-cognitive tool-kit, from within a series of narrative frameworks which engage the imagination, which have transcendent qualities, both defining our human heritage and helping us to look beyond its current boundaries.

The means of transmission of these cultural / cognitive tools leading to insight is through mechanisms as old as Homer and as current as the Challenger disaster: language itself, in the clothing of foundational stories which stir the imagination and pass on the values held by the society. There are inevitable and otherwise irreconcilable contradictions when we try to build a theory of learning on any of the first three views. A healthy socialization, required by View 1, knowledge accumulations envisioned by View 2 and psychological development necessitated by View 3 are all subsumed in this view, not by focusing on those needs in particular, but as a natural byproduct of the process of understanding and internalizing the cultural and cognitive development of our intellectual and spiritual benefactors. In this view, the teacher is a story-teller and elder of the tribe who passes on the wisdom of the ages and requires his or her charges to master the basics and internalize the meaning and spirit of this accumulated wisdom in order to be accepted into society as full participants. The tribal mechanisms of old have been recaptured, repurposed, and reapplied. "The main cultural work that cognitive tools enable our brains to perform is understanding. Seeing education as a process of maximizing our cognitive tool-kit, then, is to see it as a process of enlarging our understanding as far as possible given the tools our culture has developed." (Egan 2002, p. 166)

The heart of Egan's argument is that the conceptions of learning and therefore of education espoused by Views 1, 2 and 3 are all fatally flawed. He calls for a reconceptualization of language development and literacy which fully develop the ”tools” or socially mediated mechanisms of learning explored by Vygotsky. The social nature of learning, and the formative nature of language, long after initial child-like acquisition of first language basics, are the building blocks in our understanding of the basic nature of the learning process.

If we think of our accumulated store of external symbols as a kind of tool-kit for the brain, we may use Vygotsky's analogy to explore how the brain becomes transformed by its incorporation of such tools. So literacy, for example, allowed us to leave records and retrieve them later, but, after millennia of development, it has transformed our lives immeasurably. If we see this external symbolic store-house as something whose internalization in individuals' brains constructs their minds and accept Vygotsky's idea that the tools, or 'operating systems' and programs,' for our brains initially exist external to our bodies in our culture, then we may begin to conceive of education's tasks somewhat differently. Education becomes the process in which we maximize the toolkit we individually take from the external storehouse of culture. Cultural tools thus become cognitive tools for each of us. (Egan 2002, p. 166. emphasis added)

Egan explains that oral language and literacy in themselves include these sets of cultural and cognitive tools. He specifically points out that narrative, metaphor, contrasting meaning, vivid literary meanings, humor, irony, rhyme and rhythm, as well as the seminal building blocks of mathematics and insights from scientific developments are the cognitive tools that are needed for a good education. The three Rs do indeed form the basis for education, but they must not be conveyed in a dissected, lifeless, purely analytic form. They need to be presented as vital stories, the storehouse of our civilization. If we are to understand human learning, we need to understand the cognitive tools that are being used in the process. Learning as storytelling, learning as imagination, learning as mastery of basic tools: these are the basics.

Addendum (outlining the conflicts): Competing voices for the curriculum

1) Socialization: “Central to any educational scheme is initiation of the young in the knowledge, skills, values, and commitments common to the adult members of the society.” The purpose of curriculum is to “ensure greater cohesiveness within the social group.” What this entails is that individuals must abide by a restricted set of norms and beliefs, and it makes people more alike.

2) Plato and the Truth about reality: education should not be primarily concerned with the social success of individuals; it should focus instead on knowledge as a rational view of reality. Its goal is to transcend conventional beliefs, prejudices and stereotypes. According to Plato (c. 428-347 BC), the task of education is to show children there is an absolute truth, which is independent of any social or cultural context. This truth can only become apparent after many years of “disciplined study of increasingly abstract forms of knowledge.” What follows is a neo-conservative idea of education, particularly at the university level: the teacher occupies a position of authority (even authoritarian at time) because he or she is the expert in that particular area.

3) Rousseau (1712-1778) and Nature’s guidance: Initially, students should first “learn how to learn.” Before we attempt to teach children, it is necessary to understand the nature of their learning processes. Under this idea, Rousseau promoted:

· Careful observation of children

· The study of learning style differences and age differences as they affect learning

· Teaching styles that address students’ different learning styles

· Emphasis on active learning (inquiry)

· Emphasis on student discovery, rather than pure transmission

This view of education contrasts with Plato’s in that the teacher is more of a facilitator, as opposed to an absolute authority in the classroom. It also follows that there is no core curriculum and the children are more responsible for their own learning. Incompatibilities between these ideas:

I) Plato and socializing: We want the benefits of having homogeneous society (successful socialization) but we also want a healthy skepticism and a dedication to rationality. The contradiction is plain: we want our schools to encourage conformity to rules and specific norms while we expect kids at the same time to question the status quo.

II) Rousseau and Plato: For Rousseau, education is an internal process in which each child is allowed to explore, whereas for Plato curriculum is solid and basic (it’s a given), and knowledge drives development. The differences between these ideas leads to the struggle between “traditionalists” and “progressivists.”

III) Socializing and Rousseau: Socializing has a distinct end view and is a shaping, homogenizing, narrowing process towards that end, whereas supporting the fullest development of students’ potentials involves releasing them to explore and discover their uniqueness.

Conclusions: Differences arise when we accept that more than one idea is necessary for education, but the more we try to implement one the more undermine another. Different stakeholders lean towards different views.