Kieran Egan (educationist)

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.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 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.Egan, K., & Judson, G. (2008). Of Whales and Wonder. Educational Leadership, 65(6), 20-25. His major work is the 1997 book '' The Educated Mind''.

Early life

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, 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.Egan, K. (2005). An imaginative approach to teaching. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

Career

Kieran Egan was the director of the Imaginative Education Research Group, 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.

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.Kieran Egan (1997). The educated mind (page 13). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. .)
# 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"; 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.D. James MacNeil, review of ''The educated mind'', for the 21st Century Learning Initiative, September 1998 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 innate