CHAPTER TWO
Accumulating Cognitive Tools
Kieran Egan
Introduction
Education is a process in which something good is done to the mind. When we
regret what has been done to someone’s mind as a result of what they
have learned we call it mis-education or indoctrination, or something less
polite. Our problems about how to educate people have been tied up with our
being unsure what the mind is and, consequently, how to do the best for it.
You will prescribe different things to improve the mind if you think of it
primarily as an information-processing device rather than as the residence
of the sinful soul or as an aesthetic organ. If someone’s notion of
the mind is wrong, there’s not much hope for their prescriptions to
improve it. Or, at least, the prescriptions will be inadequate in much the
same way as the notion. The challenge for this chapter is to present a more
adequate notion of the mind than has so far been common in Education, and
to provide a set of prescriptions for property educating such minds.
We know that the mind is connected with the brain somehow. The brain is a
chunk of wrinkled stuff, of which each of us has one that is uniquely our
own, whereas the mind is made up of all kinds of less obviously material stuff,
like language and culture, which we share in complicated ways with others
and which would exist even if you or I didn’t. We have tried to make
sense of our minds by means of analogies with our technology; clockworks and
telephone systems had a misleading run; and now we are offered various analogies
with computers. So we are invited to think of our brain as like computer hardware
and the mind as its operating system or the programs it is running.
One evident feature of our minds is that they are cultural organs. Humans
have, for reasons that no doubt seemed evolutionarily good at the time, developed
the means to store symbols outside our biological memory in such a way that
we can access and retrieve their meaning at later times. It’s been an
immensely clever trick, but not without its costs, as we’ve seen already.
Another common analogy--common, at least, since Vygotsky showed its utility--is
to think of the relationship between this externally stored symbolic material
and our brains as a bit like the relationship between tools and our bodies.
This analogy invites us to reflect on our peculiar use of tools. Many animals
use tools for particular purposes—to enable them to winkle grubs out
from decaying wood or to break shells, etc.—but we seem to incorporate
our tools in a quite distinctive manner. A new tool doesn’t only enable
us to perform some specific task; it changes our image of what we can do and
even what we are. Once we invent a tool for some purpose we become alert to
what else we can do with it. Long ago, our first tools were not invented with
the idea of building metal machines that fly or huge skyscrapers or space
vehicles, but the accumulation of tools and imagined possibilities for their
use has led to these constructions. Our en-tooled body becomes transformed
in our imaginations in is potency and possibilities.
If we think of our accumulated store of external symbols as a kind of tool-kit
for the brain, we may use Vygotsky’s analogy to explore how the brain
becomes transformed by its incorporation of such tools. So literacy, for example,
allowed us to leave records and retrieve them later, but, after millennia
of development, it has transformed our lives immeasurably. Once the tool of
writing was invented for recording quantities of stored grain and wine, humans
begin to explore what other uses it could be put to. This is a bloodless way
of briefly and abstractly sketching something that has been complicit in all
modern human lives, and in our joys, fears, plans, and so on. While we begin
with simple utility, we stretch our symbolic tools in the direction of unsuspected
possibilities. The stretch may be like that in Flaubert’s most famous
lines from Madame Bovary about the uses of language: it ”is like a honky-tonk
on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, yet all the while we long
to move the stars to pity.” As the Hebrew God muttered, observing the
human creatures trying to build a tower to the heavens: “Behold …
how nothing will be restrained from them, from what they have imagined to
do “(Genesis, II, 6). Tools plus imagination make new worlds.
So these references to an “external store of symbolic material”
should be understood as the receptacle of our dreams as well as of our more
utilitarian records. The building of this cultural storehouse is compared
by Merlin Donald (1991, 2001) to a major evolutionary change in human intellectual
functioning, and, he argues, we should see this cultural store-house as having
as much influence on the modern mind as the architecture of the brain itself.
That is, our brain and culture together create the lineaments of the mind.
Our brains include many capacities, such as those for language and abstract
thought, that are never realized in people who survive alone, apart from a
culture; such brain capacities are not a part of the mind unless stimulated
and developed within a culture.
If we see this external symbolic store-house as something whose internalization
in individuals’ brains constructs their minds and accept Vygotsky’s
idea that the tools, or “operating systems” and “programs,”
for our brains initially exist external to our bodies in our culture, then
we may begin to conceive of education’s tasks somewhat differently.
Education becomes the process in which we maximize the tool-kit we individually
take from the external storehouse of culture. Cultural tools thus become cognitive
tools for each of us.
Apart from its unfamiliar terms, this might not seem obviously different from
current ideas about education. Everybody has seen education as a process in
which we select from what is available in our culture that which will best
enhance the brain’s capacities. One trouble with this abstract and general
discussion, of course, is that it may be too easy to shift words a little
to hide differences or exaggerate them. Let me take this chapter, then, to
work out in more detail how education would look different from current norms
and practices if we see it as a process of maximizing our cognitive tool-kit.
What are cognitive tools?
There is a short answer to this and a longer answer. The longer answer will
take up most of this chapter, in which I will describe and give examples of
the main cognitive tools that we should attend to in educating people. The
short answer is that cognitive tools are the things that enable our brains
to do cultural work. Our brains, like those of any animal, are responsible
for an array of physiological and social work. But we have also amassed that
external symbolic material that constitutes our culture. As we learn features
of our cultural inheritance, the brain is provided with the tools that enable
it to realize various of its capacities. Alone, no one learns to speak, to
read and write, or to think with theoretic abstractions. These potentials
of human brains are actualized only by the brain learning, and learning to
use, particular pieces from our cultural storehouse. Culture, as it were,
programs the brain. It is simplistic to push the analogy of brain as computer
and culture as operating systems and programs, but the analogy is helpful
in so far as it locates a significant part of our minds in that culture material.
I recall my very Catholic family being scandalized, but also guiltily amused,
by a doctor who, on the mention of the word ‘soul’ said that he
had cut up men and women, black and white, and he’d never found a soul
in any of them. We might offer a related comment to those who believe that
studies of the brain will expose the working of the mind. There is no mind
in the brain until the brain interacts with the external symbolic store of
culture. People who think we have souls don’t expect them to be visible
to the anatomist, and people who reflect on the mind shouldn’t expect
neurophysiologists to provide new knowledge that will alter our understanding
of what we need to do to minds in order to educate them. Well, one can easily
run into trouble pushing analogies too far. The point of this one being the
near-invisibility of the mind in our current understanding of the brain, but
the very plain visibility of the mind when viewed in terms of the culture
our brains interact with.
One trouble with giving the short answer to the question of what cognitive
tools are is that it is so general that it doesn’t make clear what differences
for educating people follow from thinking of education as maximizing cognitive
tools. It might help, in moving on to the longer answer, to consider some
other features of our brain/computer analogy.
Perhaps, like me, you have recently upgraded the operating system of your
computer. In these early years of personal computer, such updates are not
always a simple matter. The companies that make these complex software systems
tend to assure us--with balloons, flashing lights, and earnest managers of
vast networks—that the upgrade will significantly increase our productivity,
extend the speed, power, and reliability of the computer, and enable us to
run even better programs than those we currently use--which the same company
is generously willing to sell us. (I write this with a ballpoint pen; one
of the less troublesome upgrades to the writing technology I favor).
But operating system upgrades are rarely as simple as we are assured they
will be. Sometimes you discover that a neat little utility you have relied
on in the past no longer runs under the new O.S. and there is no announcement
about when there might be a new version. You find that some comfortable routines
are disrupted, and you need to learn new work-arounds for unexpected problems.
And odd things keep happening to our email. And those files you had saved
in … you no doubt recognize all this too painfully well. In general,
though, you find that the new O.S. allows you to perform relatively easily
functions that were previously cumbersome or impossible, and the programs
that take advantage of the new O.S. enable you to work better and achieve
some new tasks efficiently. That is, in general the new O.S. significantly
improves what your computer hardware can do, but at a cost. Sometimes the
cost is very small, sometimes quite big, and sometimes for some people in
some circumstances the cost outweighs the benefits. We will find analogues
to these costs and benefits in education.
If we think of our brains as like our computer hardware, we may think of cognitive
tools a having two forms, equivalent to operating systems and to programs.
Below I will describe five somewhat distinctive “operating systems”
that our culture makes available to our brains. These five major cognitive
tool-kits are available for downloading from our cultural storehouse. But
their basic codes are complexly inter-related, so that for the optimum functioning
of your mind they need to be downloaded in the sequence in which they were
compiled in the first place. (O.S. 5, as it were, can’t be successfully
installed if you are running O.S. 2; you have to upgrade to O.S. 3 then O.S.
4 before you can get all the benefits of O.S. 5.)
Each O.S. enables you to run a large set of programs—smaller scale cognitive
tools. Many of these are reverse compatible, but within variable limits; many
of those compatible with the previous O.S. will still run under the new system,
some will not, and some will run but behave eccentrically. The task of education,
given this analogy, is to ensure the fullest downloading from our culture
of the five main “O.S.” cognitive tools in proper sequence, and
also downloading for each the maximum range of “program” cognitive
tools.
Again, this is a useful but limited analogy. The use will, I hope, become
clear as I describe education in terms of maximizing our cognitive tool-kits.
The limit—or one limit—is that unlike computer operating systems
the smaller-scale “program-like” cognitive tools are in part constituents
of the “O.S.” cognitive tools. But keep going, and I think you’ll
see what I mean.
The mind’s operating systems and programs
The main cultural work that cognitive tools enable our brains to perform is
understanding. Seeing education as a process of maximizing our cognitive tool-kit,
then, is to see it as a process of enlarging our understanding as far as possible
given the tools our culture has developed. I will, then, describe the main
“operating systems” cognitive tools as kinds of understanding,
which I call somatic, mythic, romantic, philosophic, and ironic. (I have made
some earlier attempts to describe these, summed up in Egan, 1997.) I will
first give a general characterization of each kind of understanding and then
describe a sub-set of “program”—smaller scale cognitive
tools that work best with each “operating system”, and are also—breaking
out of the analogy—constituents of the “operating system.”
At the end of the chapter I’ll explore some additional features of this
model of the mind and its implications for educating people.
Somatic Understanding
