| |
 Print
Looking Back to Move Forward
10-04-2017
As a society, we invest billions of dollars into schools hoping that they will produce decent intelligent citizens with the skills needed for each student to reach his or her full potential. SFU professor Kieran Egan says the goals are worthy, but the current setup of the educational system is unworkable. His alternative method, originally called Cognitive Tools Theory and more recently known as Imaginative Education, draws inspiration from the cultural history of humankind. He traces societal development to uncover how our shared understanding of the world has progressed in a particular sequence.
In Egan’s reconceptualization of education there are five kinds of understanding: Somatic, Mythic, Romantic, Philosophical, and Ironic. Teachers use various cognitive tools to deepen student (and their own) understanding in each area– aiming to incorporate them all, but concentrating on building foundational competence in each area at different ages.
Somatic (birth – age 2): Somatic understanding involves mastery of our physical body and non-verbal appreciation of the world. An infant’s mind discovers its body. Babies steadfastly refine their movements and actions, and they pay attention to the world’s response to what they do. Sight, hearing, touch, taste, and smell provide rich information that help make sense of one’s surroundings. As we grow, we integrate balance, movement, pain, pleasure, hunger, tension, speed, distance, time, and so on into our being. Too often, adults stop “listening to their body” and we become disconnected from this primary source of wisdom.
Mythic (ages 3-7): Mythic understanding emphasizes oral communication. Egan uses the term “mythic” from the Greek word for story. Stories let listeners vicariously learn life lessons and feel the emotions wrapped up in an experience without physical risk or effort. In Egan’s vision, schooling during the primary years is a rich immersion in oral language. Importantly, the social nature of living in community is prominent in Mythic understanding as children learn a culture’s beliefs and taboos and begin developing a personal sense of morality.
Romantic (ages 8-14): Egan does not mean “romance” as in love. He traces the term back to its French roots where it indicated a type of flowery prose depicting heroic adventures and transcendent human qualities (flattering and not) such as ingenuity, treachery, compassion etc. Here the child learns to appreciate that “writing is oral language made visible, and that writing allows us to do things with language that were not possible in oral cultures.” Teachers build literacy, and numeracy, skills through stimulating awe and wonder so that the student is drawn into any content by seeing the human hopes, fears, intentions, and angst at play. Romantic understanding roots the child in an identity of an autonomous being and who is gradually comprehending the fascinating complexity of our wide and wonderful world.
Philosophic (ages 15 – 20): From an integrated base of Somatic, Mythic, and Romantic understanding, the teenager is now able to begin to think in theoretic abstractions. Egan explains, “The Philosophic mind focuses on the connections among things, seeing laws, theories, and larger purpose as tying together the previously disconnected phenomena and experiences.” The teacher’s role becomes one of helping students make their general schemes more sophisticated by fueling the desire to gather further detailed knowledge so that anomalies can be accounted for and nuances enhanced. Science is a natural Philosophic subject, bursting with known principles that lead to unknown mysteries. As the Philosophic mind fervently searches for “the truth” layers upon layers of truths are unveiled.
Ironic (age 21+): Irony is a way of expressing a concept as something different from the literal meaning, often the opposite. In Ironic understanding the main goal is to be self-reflective in order to hold multiple perspectives and merge all the ways of knowing (Somatic, Mythic, Romantic, and Philosophic) into a wholistic understanding that is recognized as a subjective and constructed reality that does not exist “out there” in some objective world. Egan explains, “If Philosophic understanding is well developed (as it presently is for relatively few people), one will eventually run up against the limits of systematic, theoretic thinking, and the illusion that language can ever capture everything that is important about the world. From this realization grows Ironic understanding.” Ironic understanding has a lightheartedness sense of humour– it doesn’t take itself too seriously even as it seriously contemplates the world.
Egan’s alternative vision of what education could and should be is passionately unique. Under his system, schools would “tell a vital part of the human story that will help students make sense of the world and the society into which they are growing.” Through looking back at human development, we can imagine a brighter future.
For more information visit http://ierg.ca/. Zainab Dhanani can be reached at z_dhanani@yahoo.ca
Footnotes:
|