Name: The educated mind
ISBN: 9780226190365

The educated mind

The Educated Mind offers a bold and revitalizing new vision for today's uncertain educational system. Kieran Egan reconceives education, taking into account how we learn. He proposes the use of particular "intellectual tools"—such as language or literacy—that shape how we make sense of the world. These mediating tools generate successive kinds of understanding: somatic, mythic, romantic, philosophical, and ironic. Egan's account concludes with practical proposals for how teaching and curriculum can be changed to reflect the way children learn.

What Hacker News says

scary-sizeDec 2023

This book review of Kieran Egan‘s Educated Mind: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-book-review-the-educat...

I haven’t thought much about education and school, but this got me interested.

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theptipJul 2023

Scott Alexander hosted a book review on this subject recently, “The Educated Mind” by Egan. I’m interested in exploring these ideas too.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-the-e...

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jesperlangDec 2017

I just recently read a bit about different ways that human understand and I think there is an interesting point you can make in this 'us vs them' in relation to this. I'm still digesting it but it's a very interesting view of the mind.

I will try to keep this short, so bare with the simplifications. The idea is that humans understand in many different types of ways and they are connected/overlapped. These ways are: mythic, romantic, philosophic, ironic and somatic. Mythic understanding comes out of oral culture and brings along with it narrative, fantasy, metaphors, binary structuring, etc. Romantic understanding came out of literacy and brings romantic rationality, humanized knowledge, transcendence within reality, etc. Ironic understanding brings self-reflection, and so on. One type of understanding is not better/worse than the other, they are important in different ways. For those who are interested, check out "The Educated Mind" by Kiearn Egan.

So, us-vs-them comes out of a mythic understanding of the world. The gut reaction is often to reject the source from which the bad behaviour comes from completely. But mythic understanding and it's binary structuring (along with fantasy, metaphors, abstract thinking) is crucial for human sense-making. So I don't think we should suppress mythic understanding and all that comes along with it, we need to have a balance between these different ways of understanding. Just imagine how many great things invented started as fantasy and strange metaphors in someones head!

That's the epistemological view of it, then you have the political one, that's a totally different beast and so I will end my comment here.

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