Routledge Library Editions: Education Series

Individual Development and the Curriculum

by Kieran Egan

Published 10 July 1986

This book describes four `layers' or stages of education - Mythic, Romantic, Philosophic and Ironic and shows how children at each stage most effectively learn, and how they can be helped towards educational maturity. While drawing on a wide range of philosophical and psychological literature, this new theory is primarily constructed from close observation of children in their common and intense imaginative engagements, and in everyday educational practice.

Education and Psychology

by Kieran Egan

Published 6 December 1984

Psychology of education has long held a place in the curriculum for training teachers but what implications can psychological theory legitimately have for educational practice? In this book the author makes a direct attack on the current role of psychology in education, showing important differences between psychologists' and educators' interests in topics such as learning, motivation and development, and questioning the validity of many of Piaget's most fundamental ideas. He compares two developmental theories that superficially have much in common - Plato's and Piaget's - and focuses on their implications for learning in the classroom. He shows why Plato's theory (whether or not we agree with it) serves as a model of a useful educational theory and why Piaget's theory has no implications for education. He reaches the conclusion that psychological theories and research based on them are irrelevant to educational practice.

Primary Understanding

by Kieran Egan

Published 20 April 1989

In this book, now available in paperback, Kieran Egan has taken a new approach to early childhood teaching from which he has formulated a theory of education. Beginning with descriptions of the ways in which children make sense of their experience and the world, such as fantasy, stories and games, he argues that the foundational layer of their understanding is made up of sets of "cultural sense-making capacities", reflected in oral cultures throughout the world. Egan sees education as the acquisition of these sets of sense-making capacities and postulates a theory of primary education which synthesizes progressivism and traditionalism in such a way that both the needs of the individual child and the accumulation of knowledge can be satisfied. "Primary Understanding" is the first in a projected series of four books dealing with the educational process as a sequence of progressively more sophisticated layers of understanding. This book should be of interest to students and lecturers in education, curriculum studies, philosophy of education and early childhood education.