Kieran Egan 1942-2022

I found out the other day that another person who has inspired my work has passed away. Kieran Egan’s book, The Educated Mind: How Cognitive Tools Shape Our Understanding greatly influenced my thinking on public education. I have curated some of his work that has been shared on this blog over the past two decades. It remains pertinent to this day.

Egan said that Western education is based on three incompatible ideas:

Education as Socialization (age cohorts, class groupings, team sports)

Education as learning about Truth & Reality, based on Plato (varied subjects, academic material, connection to culture)

Education as discovery of our nature, based on Rousseau (personal sense-making, teacher as facilitator)

One of these ideas may be dominant at any given time but no education system can foster all three at once. Therefore we keep trying to re-balance something that can never be balanced. It’s a constantly shifting three-legged stool. In addition, each one by itself is inadequate in a modern society, wrote Egan.

Socialization to generally agreed norms and values that we have inherited is no longer straightforwardly viable in modern multicultural societies undergoing rapid technology-driven changes. The Platonic program comes with ideas about reaching a transcendent truth or privileged knowledge that is no longer credible. The conception of individual development we have inherited is based on a belief in some culture-neutral process that is no longer sustainable.

Egan later wrote a short article that summarizes the main premises of the book — Why Education is So Difficult and Contentious .

“… educational thinking draws on only three fundamental ideas – that of socializing the young, shaping the mind by a disciplined academic curriculum, and facilitating the development of students’ potential. All educational positions are made up of various mixes of these ideas. The problems we face in education are due to the fact that each of these ideas is significantly flawed and also that each is incompatible in basic ways with the other two. Until we recognize these basic incompatibilities we will be unable adequately to respond to the problems we face … We have inherited three foundational ideas about education. Each one of them has flaws, at least one flaw in each being fatal to its ambition to represent an educational ideal we might reasonably sign on to. And the worse news is that each of the ideas is incompatible with the other two. These warring ideas hovered around the cradle of the public schools, proffering their gifts. The schools eagerly took them all, and so education remains difficult and contentious.”

Egan’s suggestions for a curriculum based on process, not content, have made sense to me ever since I read The Educated Mind in 1997.

France in 2000 year (XXI century). Future school as viewed in 1901 —Wikimedia

Egan’s major work, in my opinion, was to put forward the concept of five stages of development, which can apply to individuals as well as collectives (societies) — Somatic, Mythic, Romantic, Philosophic, and Ironic. This informed my understanding of Lene Rachel Andersen’s concept of metamodernity.

1. Somatic — (before language acquisition) the physical abilities of one’s own body are discovered, as are our emotions; somatic understanding includes the communicating activity that precedes the development of language; as the child grows and learns language, this kind of understanding survives in the way children “model their overall social structure in play”.

2. Mythic — binary opposites (e.g. Tall/Short or Good/Evil), images, metaphor, and story-structure are prominent tools in pre-literate sense-making.

3. Romantic — the limits of reality are discovered and rational thinking begins, connected with the development of literacy. Egan connects this stage with the desire to explore the limits of reality, an interest in the transcendent qualities of things, and “engagement with knowledge represented as a product of human emotions and intentions”

4. Philosophic — the discovery of principles which underlie patterns and limits found in data; ordering knowledge into coherent general schemes.

5. Ironic — it involves the “mental flexibility to recognize how inadequately flexible are our minds, and the languages we use, to the world we try to represent in them”; it therefore includes the ability to consider alternative philosophic explanations, and is characterized by a Socratic stance in the world. —The Educated Mind

A planning framework for teaching to each of these stages was developed by Egan, but ironically, there is no framework for Ironic understanding. Here is the framework for teaching at the Philosophic stage of understanding, which touches on Ironic understanding.

1. Identifying relevant general schemes

What general schemes seem best able to organize the topic into some coherent whole? What are the most powerful, clear, and relevant theories, ideologies, metaphysical schemes, metanarratives?

2. Organizing the content into a general scheme

2.1 Initial access
How can the general scheme be made vivid? What relevant content best exposes the general scheme and shows its power to organize the topic?

2.2 Organizing the body of the lesson or unit
What content can be used to articulate the topic into a general scheme? What metanarrative provides a clear overall structure to the lesson or unit?

3. Introducing anomalies to the general scheme
What content is anomalous to the general scheme? How can one begin with minor anomalies and gradually and sensitively challenge the students’ general schemes so that they make the schemes increasingly sophisticated?

4. Presenting alternative general schemes
What alternative general schemes can organize the topic? Which can best be used to help students see the contingency of such schemes?

5. Conclusion
How can we ensure that the student’s general schemes are not destroyed or made rigid, but are recognized as having a different epistemological status from the facts they are based on? How can we ensure that the decay of belief in the Truth of general schemes does not lead to disillusion and alienation? How can one lead students towards a sophisticated Ironic understanding of the topic?

6. Evaluation
How can we know whether the content has been learned and understood, whether students have developed a general scheme, elaborated it, and attained some sense of its limitations?

Getting to Ironic understanding is an important challenge for our society. Sensemaking through irony may give us the right perspective to address and change the many problems with our current systems, such as cronyism, despotism, fascism, and severe inequality. Thank you Kieran Egan for your inspiration.

Irony is a powerful sensemaking tool