(2023-02-28) Jarche Kieran Egan 1942-2022

Harold Jarche: 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

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)

no education system can foster all three at once. Therefore we keep trying to re-balance something that can never be balanced.

In addition, each one by itself is inadequate in a modern society, wrote Egan

various mixes of these ideas

each of these ideas is significantly flawed and also that each is incompatible in basic ways with the other two.

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.

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.

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

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.