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Egan, K (1997) The Educated Mind: How Cognitive Tools Shape Our…

- - - - A New Idea
        
        An unfolding sequence of somewhat distinctive kinds of understanding. education can best be conceived as the individual’s acquiring each of these kinds of understanding as fully as possible in the sequence in which each developed historically
        
        Each kind of understanding results from the development of particular intellectual tools that we acquire from the societies we grow up in
        
        I will focus largely on those evident in language: the successive development of oral language, literacy, theoretic abstractions, and the extreme linguistic reflexiveness
        
        Another [aim] is to establish as the appropriate aim of education a kind of Ironic understanding that is quite distinct from the traditionalist conception of the educated person
        
        The gains that come with each new set of intellectual tools are represented as entailing some loss of the understanding associated with the prior set.
        
        Vygotsky’s idea was that we make sense of the world by use of mediating intellectual tools that in turn profoundly influence the kind of sense we make. Intellectual development cannot be understood in terms of the knowledge we accumulate or psychological stages but of the role played by intellectual tools available in the society into which a person grows
        
        The processes of intellectual development, then, is to be recognised in the individuals degree of mastery of tools and of sign systems such as language (Vygotsky, 1978)
        
        This new idea then suggests what is recapitulated is not knowledge or psychological processes but mediating intellectual tools and the kinds of understanding they generate
        
        Each kind of understanding becomes a constitutive element of the later understanding
        
        Inadequate Somatic development leaves one susceptible to difficulties constructing meaning and seeing patterns and rhythms in events; inadequate Mythic development leaves one susceptible to uncritical and simplistic beliefs; inadequate Romantic development leaves one susceptible to sentimentality and cynicism; inadequate Philosophic development leaves one susceptible to know-all, imagine-nothing general schemes; and inade- quate Ironic development leaves one susceptible to alienation
- - - - For some, science was not dissolving the knowledge world [by demonstrating that our senses provided only a very limited perspective on a superficial level of reality] but, rather, constructing a new and more reliable account of reality. But the ironists doubted this no less than they had doubted he old “reliable accounts”
      - We discard the distraction between fiction and truth - one that masquerades as truth and one that recognizes itself as fiction. Causality is just one of the stories we impose on reality. Interpretation left open to the multiple perspectives of its witnesses
    - - The idea that the Western intellectual enterprise has been a gradually progressive one, closing in on the truth, getting reality clearer, accumulating a comprehensive and accurate account of the nature of things, has been definitively given up in postmodernism. We cannot get outside of our own conceptual schemes, so we cannot reach a position from which to judge how adequately our conceptual schemes represent reality
      - Liberal ironist conceives of objectivity as a term useful to refer to those things relatively, say to achieve the widest intersubjective agreement. Knowledge is constructed in dialogue out of agreement. Truth a reference to beliefs widely and easily shared, not as corresponding to reality. Liberal ironists do not construct theories so much as tell stories - they value imagination more highly than the intellectual skills supposedly required for accurately representing reality
      - Those still committed to the Enlightenment project question the utility of the postmodern enterprise. The response is that one can construct meanings, and so “solidarity”, with others for purposes of living well and not causing pain
  - - - A number of general schemes might be constructed from a particular body of knowledge without the Ironic understander’s making a commitment to the truth of any of them - the general schemes become alternative perspectives, some perhaps better or more useful for particular purposes than others
    - - The capacities of Romantic understanding contribute energy, engagement, life and affective meaning without which irony is solipsistic and dryly alienating
    - - Mythic capacity for oppositional thinking is reduced in Romantic understanding, but still used in exploring extremes of experience and the limits of reality.. Oppositional thinking modified further in Philosophic understanding - appearing in the dialectical thinking. The reflexivity of irony ensures that ensures that when some features of the world are represented in story forms
    - - We may consciously make up our own contingent stories, constructing meanings that are good to believe for living well, but we must not suffer the confusion of thinking tat these meanings derive from the reality on which we impose them
- - - - If the teacher thinks of the lesson or unit as more like telling a good story than conveying a body of information, then the need to focus on how to tell the story as crisply and vividly as possible rather than the attempt to meet sets of knowledge, skills, and attitude objectives. Doesn’t just end when run out of material, it involves the revelation of some deeper meaning. In evaluating, we will be looking for affective engagement, imaginative involvement, and the deployment of the intellectual tools that constitute Mythic understanding.
      - See Mythic Planning Framework
    - - Select and highlight content that is not simply relating a sequence of facts or events but that one has a story to tell, and that the set of facts and events have a unity of some kind. What makes others’ lives interesting to us is the degree to which we can imaginatively grasp them in terms of he emotions, hopes, fears, and intentions we can share. As with any story, we need to find some satisfactory ending; the sense of an epiphany. Evaluation will focus on whether the students can use the knowledge in contexts other than those in which they learned it
      - See Romantic Planning Framework
    - - Philosophic schemes have developed for composing meaning in our lives and in our world and so have an affective dimension, so engagement must not be purely intellectual. The aim is not to destroy students’ general schemes rather, teachers must be sensitive to the degree to which students are committed to their general schemes and aim to make these more sophisticated by introducing anomalies. The longer-term aim is to change students’ perceptions of the status of their general schemes - not exchange one general scheme for another - so that they see them eventually as not simply true or false but as more or less useful.
      - See Philosophic Planning Framework
  - - - Mythic Stories
        
        Simple stories designed to tap into and develop the emotional, imaginative, and metaphoric abilities of learners. Utilise binary concepts and complexifying through mediation and fantasy; abstract thinking through connecting to felt story themes; metaphor to aid sense-making; rhythm & narrative to aim memory of important knowledge (lore); images that are evocative; and stories and that make 'events, facts, ideas and people... affectively meaningful’. They stimulate wonder in “nature”
      - Romantic Stories
        
        Stories that represent ‘crucial elements of rationality… along with persisting features of myth’. They explore the extremes and limits of reality, who hero characters who are able to transcend ‘the constraints of everyday world’. They hold qualities we all share, just to an unusual degree. These stories humanise knowledge and events through human ‘hopes, fears, or intentions’. Builds distinct, but desperate knowledge of the world.
      - Philosophic Stories
        
        Stories that act as meta-narratives about how life is organised and functions. These stories have moved from the level of individuals and transcendent heroes' motives and events to that of ideas and generalities that link them to the world not through individual choices, but by the laws of nature, human psychology and social interactions. This realisation serves to raise consciousness. These stories are presented as single “truths” although maintain imagination and emotive (not necessarily cold and rational). Abnormalities serve to develop schemes, which adjust to accomodate. Piece together desperate knowledge of the world to form systematic meta-narratives, where ideas are the focus.
      - Ironic Stories
        
        Stories that recognise that there is no one fixed truth - and that meta narratives are created by those who most gain from them. They recognise that all our understandings of reality are stories that we construct, more or less useful, but none representing “truth”. Multiple perspectives, selecting the ones more or less useful, at different times. Breaking down the distraction between fiction and truth.
    - - Maths, science, language and history often taught as having a nature to which the child must conform - with success measured in terms of the degree of conformity. This approach instead seeks accommodation between the “nature” of the disciplines and the intellectual tools by which they engage in them. Designing Mythic curriculum then is a matter of selecting that content within these disciplines that the mediating tools of Mythic understanding make accessible, meaningful and engaging
    - - The great achievements, most terrible disasters, most exotic features of human experience and the natural world - this is the criteria for content. We will search within each topic for content with these characteristics. Discuss records, key lives, human qualities. Allow one topic to be examined exhaustively. The aim is to build gradually and randomly a particular level of knowledge about the world that stimulates wonder and awe at being alive in the world at this time
    - - Shift from the wonderful towards the systematic - agents constrained by the processes that determine the workings of the world. Human Qualities will shift to focus on Human Ideas. Brief Lives might change to People and Their Theories. Theory of Knowledge may be one new section to introduce. Through university years, history curriculum will focus increasingly on particular topics, though students will persistently be challenged to form, defend, and undermine general schemes.