Egan argues that much of educational theorizing pivots around three basic ideas of what the aim of education should be:
to educate people in content that would give them a "privileged and rational view of reality". Here we find the following ideas: reason and knowledge can provide a privileged access to the world; knowledge drives the student mind development; education is an epistemological process.
to realize the right of every individual to pursue his own educational curriculum through self-discovery. Here we also find the ideas that student development drives knowledge and that education is a psychological process.
to Socialize the child - to homogenize children and ensure that they can fulfill a useful role in society, according to its values and beliefs.
Egan argues in Chapter One that "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.
"Cultural recapitulation" theory
Egan theory on how knowledge and understanding develop in the mind through learning is five categorical kinds of understanding. This individual process reflects "logical and psychological pressures." Egan differentiates his theory from the conceptions of recapitulation common in the late 19th century and early 20th century. People can learn cognitive tools that are grouped and classified into five kinds of understanding:
Somatic - somatic understanding is the innate understanding of one's physical functions as well as emotions. This understanding persists in the way children "model their overall social structure in play". This understanding comes before language acquisition and the development of language
Mythic - mythic understanding is understanding of "binary opposites" such as Tall/Short or Good/Evil. Tools or methods such as images, metaphor, and story-structure are used in pre-literate sense-making.
Romantic - romantic understanding is when the "limits of reality" discovered. This is the stage when there is a 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"
Philosophic - philosophic understanding is the creation of principles which underlie patterns and limits found in data, and ordering knowledge into coherent general schemes.
Ironic - ironic understanding is 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". This includes the ability to consider alternative philosophic explanations, and is characterized by a Socratic stance in the world.
"Drawing from an extensive study of cultural history and evolutionary history and the field of cognitive psychology and anthropology, Egan gives a detailed account of how these various forms of understanding have been created and distinguished in our cultural history". Each stage includes a set of "cognitive tools", as Egan calls them, that enrich our understanding of reality. Egan suggests that recapitulating these stages is an alternative to the contradictions between the Platonic, Rousseauian and socialising goals of education. Egan resists the suggestion that religious understanding could be a further last stage, arguing instead that religious explanations are examples of ironic understanding preserving a richly developed somatic understanding.
1997 The Educated Mind: How Cognitive Tools Shape Our Understanding. University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
1999 '. Teachers College Press, New York.
2002 Getting it Wrong from the Beginning: Our Progressivist Inheritance from Herbert Spencer, John Dewey, and Jean Piaget. Yale University Press, New Haven.
2005 An Imaginative Approach to Teaching. Jossey-Bass, San Francisco, CA.
