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In this thoughtful and effervescent book, Kieran Egan challenges pre-eminent educational theories and methods, offers a new paradigm for understanding the nature of learning, and proposes a dramatically revised approach to the whole learning/teaching enterprise. Egan agrees with critics of education, both inside and outside the field, that what we are doing in schools does not make good sense; that it does not lead to healthy well-educated citizens or to the habits of mind that support the lifelong learning required to adapt intelligently to the rapidly changing world.
Egan identifies three prevalent ideas that operate both implicitly and explicitly as recurrent themes in educational discourse. These "old ideas" include education as a socialization process, education as a rigorous introduction to the Truth about life and the world, and education as a facilitator of each child's individuality. Egan concludes that, "At best, schooling is a set of flaccid compromises among these three great and powerful ideas" (p. 24). Combining a neo-recapitulationist theory with Vygotsky's work, Egan's proposes five kinds of understanding, or tools for developing an educated mind: Somatic, Mythic, Romantic, Philosophic, and Ironic. He describes how these five kinds of understanding develop more or less in this sequence, both historically and intra-individually, although he argues that this should not be seen as occurring in rigidly age-demarked stages.
Somatic understanding, according to Egan, is that ineffable prelinguistic knowledge upon which all other knowledge is built, that is, our human/animal understanding, which develops in our comfortableness with and in our bodies. This is where we feel affection and fear and all other emotions that inform and...