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

Prof. Kieran Egan (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 1, 2002

The ideas upon which public education was founded in the last half of the 19th century were wrong. Despite their continued dominance in educational thinking for a century and a half, these ideas are no more right today. So argues Kieran Egan, an educational theorist, in this study. Kieran Egan explains how we have come to take mistaken concepts about education for granted and why this dooms our attempts at educational reform. Egan traces the 19th-century sources of Progressive thinking about education and their persistence even now. He diagnoses the problem with our schools in a radically different way, and likewise prescribes novel alternatives to present educational practice. This volume seeks to be both persuasive and full of promise.

Editorial Reviews

Review

One of the most highly regarded educational theorists of our time explains that the ideas upon which public education was founded—and which continue to dominate our educational thinking—are wrong. Kieran Egan diagnoses our school problems in a radically different way, shows why our attempts at reform are doomed, and offers promising, novel alternatives.

“As we have come to expect from Kieran Egan, this book is full of brilliant insights. He has a great gift for posing fundamental, yet non-obvious, questions in such a way that we find some of our most deeply held assumptions up for grabs.”—James Wertsch, Washington University

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

From the Back Cover

"As we have come to expect from Kieran Egan, this book is full of brilliant insights. He has a great gift for posing fundamental, yet non-obvious, questions in such a way that we find some of our most deeply held assumptions up for grabs." – James Wertsch, Washington University

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 204 pages
• Publisher: Yale University Press (September 1, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0300094337
• ISBN-13: 978-0300094336
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.9 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,279,759 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

21 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Getting it wrong form the beginning, August 20, 2003

By 

"klara813" (San Diego) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Getting It Wrong from the Beginning: Our Progressivist Inheritance from Herbert Spencer, John Dewey, and Jean Piaget (Hardcover)

It has been a long time since I read a book that both frustrated me and at the same time challenged the most fundamental "truths" that I have been taught about education. It is easy to both love some of the insights in this book and then be left lost trying to understand the alternative. I think I would of gained a better understanding of Egan's insights if I had read the predecessor The Educated Mind. One of Egan's main arguments is that the progressive school and its theories have resulted in "the reduction of academic content in primary schools in the 20th century". All the emphasis on making learning "natural" and "play-like" has cheated American students out of acquiring "cultural-cognitive tools" which should be the basis of all education. He challenges many of the long held beliefs of education and if anything I would recommend this book as a way of reconsidering the psychological pillars of education that all new teachers are trained in.

8 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Getting it Right in Hindsight., February 20, 2005

By 

Bernard Chapin "Ora Et Labora!" (CHICAGO! USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Getting It Wrong from the Beginning: Our Progressivist Inheritance from Herbert Spencer, John Dewey, and Jean Piaget (Paperback)

This is an outstanding title for a book and I could not wait for it to arrive in the mail. The author proves to be quite witty and authoritative regarding the history of education and the way in which it has been influenced, and in turn dominated, by the progressives. His recapitulation of the career of the Herbert Spencer was quite insightful but no where is Egan stronger than in the chapter that discusses the impact that progressivism has had on the study of history and all other forms of knowledge that are not directly useful to the real world (such as Latin).

Many of his observations about progressive education are worth highlighting, but the reason I could not give "Getting it Wrong from the Beginning" a higher rating is that I did not find the book to be particularly readable. It is a dry slog that takes longer than one would expect based on its less than 200 pages. Had he included more examples from our modern public schools I would have found it more useful as a reference work. Egan's put considerable thought into his positions though so the book is definitely worth a serious skim.

7 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Beyond the obvious, June 20, 2007

By 

Andres Kurismaa (Estonia) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Getting It Wrong from the Beginning: Our Progressivist Inheritance from Herbert Spencer, John Dewey, and Jean Piaget (Paperback)

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 Johnson's "Philosophy in the Flesh" for instance). The author himself definitely knows how to use these devices of information organization when building his philosophical anthropology for the development modern man, both descriptive and proscriptive.

Egan really brings us closer to the center of problems facing us when trying to understand and improve the situation of our current educational practices. A vastly important and very accessible work.

A word of warning though - if you're already familiar with some of Egan's prior work, you probably won't find so much new stories added to the edifice with each new book, as rather getting a look from a different angle.