Talk:The Educated Mind
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This article doesn't seem to me to reflect Egan's perspective in a neutral manner. For instance, with regard to the opening section of the article here, I would simply refer to one of Egan's own descriptions of his perspective on historical approaches to learning:
We have tended to view intellectual development in one of two main ways. The traditional way, derived ultimately from Plato, was to see intellectual development as driven by the acquisition of particular forms of knowledge. The mind was viewed largely as an epistemological organ. The more modern way, derived mainly from Rousseau, was to see development following an internal schedule of its own, rather like the body, and knowledge serving as "food" to support or "facilitate" the process. In this scheme, perhaps most associated in this century with the work of Jean Piaget, the mind is viewed largely as a psychological organ. Drawing on two of my own books (Egan, 1997, 2000) I want to approach the problems of literacy acquisition in a different way. I invite you to accept for a while the belief that neither of the older accounts of intellectual development is adequate to account for the process. In their place I want to propose "trying on" a different idea: that our intellectual development is best accounted for by the set of cognitive tools we pick up as we grow into a society.
http://www.centreforliteracy.qc.ca/publications/WPno5/4.htm It can be seen that the character of Egan's conceptualisation is very distinct to that of this article.
I would also refer you to http://www.educ.sfu.ca/kegan/Vygotskycogandlit.pdf .
While neither of these works are the book this article concerns itself with, they do give a clear description, by the author, of the same body of his own work which the book deals with. The author's overall perspective as given in parallel documents is pertinent to any study, synopsis, precis, description or interpretation of any part of that body of work.
For these reasons I have marked the article as disputed with regard to having a NPOV (Neutral Point of View).
My own view is that the article here does a considerable dis-service to Egan who's thinking, it appears to me, resides in an entirely differnt level of integrative complexity to the one-dimensional account given in this article.
LookingGlass 11:35, 16 August 2007 (UTC)
The "style" of writing in this article confused me. I have struggled with how to deal with this. The following section now seems to be the main culprit:
In The educated mind, Egan substantially demolishes Piaget, and all the consequential things about "relevance," the "concrete," "hands-on experience" and others [1].
This seems to me to be a debatable and emotionally charged statement of opinion. The citation is to a newspaper article. So I've deleted it and put it here and taken off the NPOV notice. There are a number of these newspaper/review quotations in the article, however they are IMHO less contentious.
In addition to this there is an attempt to draw a "parallel" with Piaget's work in references to other authors.
It is possible to draw parallels with Piaget's stages of development; 'somatic' is a combination of the Sensorimotor stage and the Preoperational stage. 'Mythic' is the Concrete operational stage and 'Philosophic' and 'Ironic' are elaborations of the Formal Operational stage[citation needed].
This would seem to me to be absurd. Piaget is concerned with child development not with a more general theory of ongoing cognitive development. The ability of an 11 yr old to
recognize how inadequately flexible are our minds, and the languages we use
is surely virtually non-existant. This is underscored by reserach into the brains physical maturation process showing that this is only completed sometime in our 20's. Significant areas of neurological growth do not get underway until after adolescence and are not complete until then. As these areas of our brain are responsible for abstract/superordinate constructs, "irony" as referred to by Egan would be impossible.
For the rest, all that seemed to me to be necessary was to make some "minor" edits to clarify some of the statements made in the article i.e. that these are only the statements/arguments made in the book and not statements of "encyclopaedic fact" NPOV etc. Hope you agree.
LookingGlass 07:35, 15 August 2007 (UTC)
Bookandcoffee: Thanks for helping out with this! Ewen
