Customer Reviews

The Future of Education: Reimagining Our Schools from the Ground Up

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This latest book by Kieran Egan reviews and expands on his earlier pubications. His ideas concerning how to best educate our children are presented clearly and enthusiastically. The vital importance of stories and imagination are reinforced. The only difficulty I had was the somewhat uncomfortable perspective of looking back from the future. Perhaps that is the best way to present the material, but it made me uncomfortable. Then again, perhaps being uncomfortable is an intentional technique to awaken us from our current way of looking at education. I rate this book as 4 3/4.
Thank you Kieran.

At a time when education has everybody confused, Egan brings in fresh and concrete ideas for the class room. His backwards approach is slightly difficult to grasp but as the book proceeds we see a scientific approach on education.
The basic idea of a school is challenged when he writes of the "skhole" in ancient Greece that was a place where literature,music,mathematics,cosmology and geography were studied at leisure. This place soon became a place of study for the young people. The schools in the later years became structures where learning occurred for a specific purpose - to make one virtuous person.
Egan bases his his book on the incompatibility of the three ideas of socialization , Plato's academic idea and Rousseau's developmental idea. He explains the problem in education rises because people use these ideas differently.
He gives diverse examples in different situations to demonstrate the fundamental flaws in the education system.He provides solutions for education by showing means by which this education system can be made successful-by using cognitive tools. For instance, he says the education imparted in schools must be related to the student's immediate reality or environment for the student to experience education.
He divides the future of education in years -from 2010 to 2060- and goes decade by decade to show the reconstruction of education. A fascinating book on education reform in the twenty-first century.

"The Future of Education" is on the ROROTOKO list of cutting-edge intellectual nonfiction. Professor Egan's book interview ran here as a cover feature on January 27, 2009.