Kieran Egan is the author of more than twenty books, mostly about education. In 1991 he received the Grawemeyer Award in Education. In 1993 he was elected to the Royal Society of Canada, and in 2000 he was elected as Foreign Associate member to U.S. National Academy of Education. He received a Canada Research Chair in 2001, and won the Whitworth Award in 2007. His other books include The Educated Mind: How Cognitive Tools Shape Our Understanding (University of Chicago Press, 1997), Getting It Wrong from the Beginning: Our Progressivist Inheritance from Herbert Spencer, John Dewey, and Jean Piaget (Yale University Press, 2002), An Imaginative Approach to Teaching (Jossey-Bass, 2005), and Teaching Literacy: Engaging the Imagination of New Readers and Writers (Corwin Press, 2006).
I suppose, being a university professor dripping with awards and prizes, that I have played the schooling game well. But I was never sure what sense it all made. Why did I have to learn to decline those Latin irregular nouns, or be able to prove that opposite interior angles of a parallelogram are congruent, or recall the provisions of the treaty of Ghent? Much of the time I and everyone I knew was bored with schooling, and had difficulty relating what was happening in class with human life and its enhancement. My book is an attempt to show that, indeed, everything in the world is wonderful, but that schools are designed almost to disguise this slightly shameful fact. We represent the world to children as mostly known and rather dull. The opposite is the case: we are surrounded by mystery, and what we know is fascinating. My book is an attempt to show how we can reconceive the school and the process of education to engage students’ emotions and imaginations with knowledge.
Kieran Egan The Future of Education: Reimagining Our Schools from the Ground Up Yale University Press208 pages, 5 ½ x 8 ¼ inches ISBN 978 0300110463
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