The tools Egan refers to are cognitive tools, the kind of mental faculties that "enable the brains to do cultural work" (p. 40). In fact, they are themselves part of the cultural heritage of humankind. One acquires the tools and the abilities associated with their usage by interacting with that cultural heritage. Hence Egan's above cited notion of education. He identifies these tools in the context of five different kinds of understanding, i.e., somatic, mythic, romantic, philosophical, and ironic understanding. The table below provides a quick overview of these five kinds of understanding. A much more elaborate rationale can be found in Chapter 3 of Egan's book.
We develop the cognitive tools in these five domains successively as we grow more mature in our understanding of the world. However, as we become mentally more sophisticated, we mustn't throw out prior ways of understanding as we develop the cognitive tools associated with new ways of understanding. As we progress through life we need them all. We must keep the prior tools in our tool kits as we are continually in need of understanding the world in complex ways and from multiple perspectives.
Egan's idea of 'cognitive tools that allow the brains to do cultural work' leading to different kinds of understanding is based on a conception of the mind as "an ambivalent thing, made up of culture drawn from outside the organism and of cognition within" (p. 84). It creates a framework for thinking about educational reform based on a scheme that "combines epistemological, psychological and emotional characteristics together" (p. 84).
Egan uses that scheme in the second half of the book in which he describes a history of the future of education on earth from 2010 to 2060 in five ten-year intervals from the perspective of a fictitious researcher coming from a planet outside our own solar system. This is an interesting way to test the ideas developed in the first part of the book by means of a thought experiment regarding how the world would change if such ideas were put into practice in such a way as to avoid that they would be rejected. After all, many good ideas get rejected as soon as it comes to implementing them in settings that are impervious to change, as both traditionalist and progressivist educational environments tend to be.
Depending on one's attitude towards anything Utopian, one may variously like the description that ensues. I, for one, was more enthralled by what I read in the first part of the book than by my subsequent exposure to the road to Utopia. The more ideal the world of education became as the story of the future enfolded in Egan's book, the more uncomfortable I felt with the impending state of perfection and the gradual disappearance of problems. Would there be anything left after 2060 that one might want to meaningfully engage in to further improve the world and the human condition?
One of the more provocative assertions regarding the future of education has to do with the use of technology in education. Current expectations are that technology will have a positive influence on the quality of the school environment. Contrary to that expectation, Egan's thought experiment points towards the "near absence" (p. 167) of technology in the schools in the 2040-2050 decade. Says Egan:
'Access to information' had been one of the mantras of the early days, when computers began to have an effect on education. But access to knowledge had never been the problem, and it should have been clear then, and was to many, of course. Even a hundred years earlier, students had access to plenty of knowledge; the problem was getting it into the students, and getting it to mean anything much to them. The most fundamental change in schooling was tied up with precisely that problem. Technology had its uses in providing immediate access to any information required, but the more important feature of the new schooling was the recognition of how to use the older technologies of human communication like the story and mental images, which connect knowledge with human emotions. (pp. 167-168.)No doubt, interesting food for thought!
REFERENCE
Egan, K. (2008). The Future of Education: Reimagining Our Schools from the Ground Up. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.
