Kieran Egan (philosopher) facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Kieran Egan
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Egan in 2004
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| Born | 22 May 1942 Ireland |
| Died | 12 May 2022 (aged 79) |
| Occupation | Author, Professor of Education, Canada Research Chair in Education |
Kieran Egan (born May 22, 1942 – died May 12, 2022) was an Irish thinker who studied how people learn and how education works. He looked at ideas from classics, how people behave in groups (anthropology), how our minds work (cognitive psychology), and the history of different cultures.
Egan wrote many books and articles about education and how children grow and learn. He focused a lot on how important our imagination is for learning. He also talked about different ways people understand things as they get older. He questioned some ideas from famous educators like Jean Piaget and John Dewey.
He taught at Simon Fraser University in Canada. His most famous book, The Educated Mind, came out in 1997.
Contents
Early Life and Education
Kieran Egan was born in 1942 in a town called Clonmel in Ireland. He grew up and went to school in England. For a short time, he was training to be a monk. Later, he went to the University of London and earned a degree in history in 1966.
After university, he worked as a researcher in England. Then, he moved to the United States to study for his PhD in the philosophy of education. He finished his PhD at Cornell University in 1972.
Career and Imaginative Education
Kieran Egan led a group called the Imaginative Education Research Group. This group was started by the Faculty of Education at Simon Fraser University. Their main goal was to make education better around the world. They did this by developing and sharing ideas about something called Imaginative Education. This way of teaching focuses on using imagination to help students learn deeply.
Understanding How We Learn
Different Goals for Education
Egan believed that many arguments about schools came from a bigger question: What should education really try to achieve? He pointed out three main ideas for what schools should do:
- Helping students fit in: This goal is about teaching students the skills and habits they need to do well in society. Egan called this the "socialization" goal. He thought it might have been the first reason schools were created.
- Helping students find truth: This goal is about giving students a deep understanding of truth. This way, they can think for themselves and even change society for the better. Egan called this the "academic" goal. He suggested that the ancient Greek philosopher Plato first introduced this idea.
- Helping students discover themselves: This goal focuses on letting students develop their own ideas and skills. It's about self-discovery and helping each person become a unique individual. Egan called this the "psychological" goal. He believed it came from thinkers like Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
Egan thought that when people tried to combine these three goals, it caused problems. He said these ideas don't really mix well. Trying to do all three at once makes it hard for schools to do any of them well. He spent his life trying to find a new, better way to think about education.
"Cultural Toolkits" Theory
Egan suggested that people learn by using special "cognitive tools." These tools are like different ways of thinking and understanding the world. He grouped them into five "cultural toolkits." Most of these toolkits don't just appear naturally. Instead, they were developed by cultures over hundreds of years. Students can learn to use these tools as they try to understand the world around them.
- Somatic toolkit: These are the natural ways we understand the world even before we learn to speak. They include our senses (like sight and touch), our emotions, copying others, and humor.
- Mythic toolkit: These tools appear when a person first learns to speak. They include stories, metaphors (like "the world is a stage"), ideas of opposites (like good and evil), mental imagery, jokes, and riddles.
- Romantic toolkit: These tools come when a person learns to read and write well. They include a sense of wonder and mystery, a feeling for heroes, and a strong desire to explore the limits of what is real.
- Philosophic toolkit: These tools appear when a person knows a lot about a topic and can think about it in a deep, theoretical way. They include searching for truth, looking for general rules, testing ideas with experiments, and understanding big stories about how the world works.
- Ironic toolkit: These tools come when a person has mastered all the other toolkits. They realize that even with all those tools, the world can still be complex and hard to fully describe. These tools include understanding things that are unclear, appreciating that we can't know everything, and asking questions like Socrates did.
Egan believed that education is about helping students get and use these tools. He thought this approach could be a better way than trying to mix the three different goals of education.
He spent his life studying how these tools first appeared in history and how they develop in each person. He also worked with teachers and students to find ways to help students learn these tools. He used ideas from many different fields, like the history of how living things change, how different cultures work, and how our minds think.
Egan noticed that students tend to learn these toolkits in the same order they first appeared in history. He said these are not "stages" that you move past. Instead, they are toolkits that you keep adding on. For example, the mythic toolkit changes how you use the somatic toolkit. There's no guarantee that everyone will gain all the toolkits; many people don't.
Personal Life
Kieran Egan was an atheist, meaning he did not believe in God. He passed away on May 12, 2022.
Main Works
- 1976 Structural Communication
- 1979 Educational Development
- 1983 Education and Psychology: Plato, Piaget, and Scientific Psychology
- 1988 Primary Understanding: Education in Early Childhood
- 1988 Imagination and Education
- 1989 Teaching as Story Telling: An Alternative Approach to Teaching and Curriculum in the Elementary School
- 1990 Romantic Understanding: The Development of Rationality and Imagination, Ages 8-15
- 1992 Imagination in Teaching and Learning: The Middle School Years
- 1997 The Educated Mind: How Cognitive Tools Shape Our Understanding
- 1999 Children's Minds, Talking Rabbits & Clockwork Oranges: Essays on Education
- 2002 Getting it Wrong from the Beginning: Our Progressivist Inheritance from Herbert Spencer, John Dewey, and Jean Piaget
- 2005 An Imaginative Approach to Teaching
- 2006 Teaching Literacy: Engaging the Imagination of New Readers and Writers
- 2008 The Future of Education: Reimaging Our Schools from the Ground Up
- 2010 Learning in Depth: A Simple Innovation that Can Transform Schooling
- 2014 Whole School Projects: Engaging Imaginations Through Interdisciplinary Inquiry
- 2015 Imagination and the Engaged Learner: Cognitive Tools for the Classroom
Awards and Honors
- 1991: Won the University of Louisville Grawemeyer Award in Education.
- 1993: Became a member of the Royal Society of Canada.
- 2000: Became a Foreign Associate member of the National Academy of Education in the U.S.
- 2001: Received a Killam Research Fellowship.
- 2001: Was named a Canada Research Chair in Education.
- 2010: Utne Reader magazine named him one of the "25 Visionaries Who Are Changing Your World."
