Egan, Kieran. (1999). Children's minds, talking rabbits and clockwork oranges. Essays on education. Foreword by Elliot W Eisner. New York: Teachers College, Columbia University.
Kieran Egan's challenge to long-held notions of children's thinking and learning continues in this volume of cogent essays. Eisner describes Egan's "attention to a more generous conception of mind than the constraining programs in practice." Egan chooses to discard social studies from the curriculum questioning the concept of children as 'concrete thinkers.' Instead, Egan shows how education must engage children's imagination.
The author of 'The Educated Mind' stimulates us once again and his convincing rationales and recommendations are uplifting in their challenge. This is a book to be shared with colleagues, and the divisions of the text into essays provides a fine structure for professional development and discussions.
Lenore Sandel, Ed.D. Newsletter of the ASCD: Spotlight on Language, Literacy and Literature, Vol. 11, No. 1, Fall 1999, p.3.
Children's Minds, Talking Rabbits & Clockwork Oranges
By Kieran Egan
Reviewed by Doug Wilson
Kieran Egan has published a collection of essays that deal with how
young people think and how their thinking is different from adults' thinking:
it is greater in complexity abstractness, and sophistication than is generally
understood. Egan - a professor of education at Simon Fraser University - disagrees
with the concept that children learn best using expanding-horizons principles.
These principles form the core of most social science programs in North America
where children learn sequentially about themselves, their families, neighbourhoods,
communities and then increasingly larger political areas.
Egan believes that the profiles of child development attributed to Jean Piaget
are based on limiting biological assumptions and do not take into consideration
such factors as culture, literacy and the vivid and creative imaginations of
young people. He challenges contemporary educational structures such as the
use of planning by objectives and the objectives-content-methods-evaluation
schemes prevalent in schools, textbooks and curriculum documents.
Educators who believe that the arts and oral literacy should be prominent components
of children's learning will enjoy and benefit from Egan's viewpoints. These
essays challenge educators' minds and question the foundations of quality and
effective education for our children.
Professionally Speaking. Ontario College of Teachers Journal.
June 2000.
