Getting It Wrong from the Beginning: Our Progressivist Inheritance from Herbert Spencer, John Dewey, and Jean Piaget

by Kieran Egan

Book Overview

The ideas upon which public education was founded in the last half of the nineteenth century were wrong. And despite their continued dominance in educational thinking for a century and a half, these ideas are no more right today. So argues one of the most original and highly regarded educational theorists of our time in Getting It Wrong from the Beginning. Kieran Egan explains how we have come to take mistaken concepts about education for granted...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 030010510X
• ISBN13: 9780300105100
• Release Date: July 2004
• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Length: 204 Pages
• Weight: 0.60 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.4" x 8.3"

Customer Reviews

Beyond the obvious

Can't agree with the reviewer below about the dry hard-going style of the book - in fact it must be one of the most engaging academic works I've read (took less than a day). I just found it not a trivial matter that when someone is writing about the flaws of both "traditional" and "progressive" education which thwart their attempts to engage children's minds and imagination - then he himself be able to avoid the same mistakes he criticizes. And Egan goes far beyond this. He's a great story-teller, and he has a great story to tell - about the "permanent revolution" in education that has been going on forever, but succeeded very little, and the likely reasons for this. Of course education - like the youth in general - has been spoiled since Plato, if not the upper Neolithic. So beware - you might not be the first one to seek a cure, and you definitely wouldn't be an exception if the cure you devised - back to the more natural types of learning! just let the child follow her natural course of delevopment and be a support! just take off from where the child is currently situated in terms of "stages"! just let her learn how to learn... would turn in results more drastically defective than the problems you began with. The point Egan makes is that these proposed progressive solutions the development of which he so engagingly follows from Spencer through Dewey and Piaget to our days - together with studies in cognitive psychology and neuroscience of learning etc. are of modest help if we're not philosophically soundly positioned in what is unavoidably a philosophical problem - how do we devise being a wholesome human being? Only by outlining a qualitative theory of development in answer to this can we have real use of quantitative test results, or even decide how relevant are they to our educational aims. So even though basing his theory naturally on observations (and not an insignificant amount at that), Egan doesn't try to strike us with his latest research findings as to the deep seated nature of children's thinking at this or that stage and respective cognitive capacities, which have often had the appalling tendency to overlook what children CAN do (perhaps much better than adults) in favor of what they can't - but envisages his own "not merely objective" approach to teaching as story-telling. A form of education that would make use of the story-form with all it's accompanying characteristics such as the narrative structure (with beginning, unfolding, and an end-conclusion), binary oppositions, rhythm, metaphor etc. which are all basic tools of thinking and categorization in general. It's remarkable how little attention is paid to these motives in textbooks, as if they were a threat to serious scholarship and objectivity (regarding the roots of such an attitude, see Havelock's excellent "Preface to Plato") on the one hand, and on the other - as if they could ever be evaded in principle, regardless of whether we "like" them or not. (see Lakoff and