Individual Development and the Curriculum

Kieran Egan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136716737
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

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.

1

THE MYTHIC STAGE

Approximate ages,
up to about 7 years

CHARACTERISTICS
What children know best

It is a truism that in educating young children, we should start from what they know best and expand outward from that. This notion, so obvious to us today, is relatively new. When James Boswell asked Dr. Johnson what children should learn first, Johnson replied:

there is no matter what children should learn first, any more than what leg you shall put into your breeches first. Sir, you may stand disputing which is best to put in first, but in the meantime your backside is bare. Sir, while you stand considering which of two things you should teach your child first, another boy has learnt ‘em both.¹

We still tend to stand disputing while our educational backside is bare, but, these days, we do have some grounds for thinking it is important that children should learn certain things first and that there is a certain sequence in which things should be introduced.

Acceptance of the truism that one should begin from what children know best has led to various forms of the expanding horizons curriculum. Take, for example, the social studies curriculum that is dominant throughout North America and, increasingly, in Great Britain. We may infer at a glance what its designers assume children know best. It begins with units on families, homes, communities, and so on, those things children have daily contact with. Children, it is assumed, will have developed a concept of family, which can be used as the basis for the content of a unit that expands that concept. That is, despite rhetoric about inquiry-based curricula, the implicit question about what children know best is answered in terms of content.

Proponents of a child-centered curriculum propose “relevance to the child's needs” as one of the principles to be used in constructing the curriculum. A teacher might use the child's experience of shopping in a supermarket as a starting point for a unit; and this might lead to lessons on such topics as the typical layout of a supermarket, the sources of various products, the means by which the products are brought to the shelves, making change, the structure of neighborhoods, and other kinds of shops. That is, the child's needs are interpreted in terms of specific content to be learned. Even the more radical approach to early education that claims to construct a curriculum out of children's expressed interests seeks and accepts expression of these interests in terms of content. What alternative is there?

Instead of focusing on such content, we might examine those things that most engage children's interest (for example, fairy stories and games) and try to see “through” their content to the main mental categories children seem to use in making sense of them. I will consider stories and games in more detail below, but even a casual view from this perspective suggests that what children know best when they come to school are love, hate, joy, fear, good, and bad. That is, they know best the most profound human emotions and the bases of morality. Children, for instance, have direct access to the wildest flights of fantasy—to princesses, monsters, and witches in bizarre places and once upon a times. Typical fairy stories are built on vivid and dramatic conflicts involving love, hate, joy, fear, good, bad, and so on. Their engaging power derives from their being the purest embodiments of the most basic emotions and moral conflicts.

This simple observation undermines the foundation of the typical expanding horizons curriculum, allowing us to see that children's access to the world need not be, as it were, along lines of content associations moving gradually out from families, homes, communities, and daily experience, or from things judged relevant on grounds of some kind of physical proximity. Far from condemning ourselves to provincial concerns in the early grades, we may provide direct access to anything in the world that can be connected with basic emotions and morality. We will see what effect this may have on the design of lessons, units, and curricula after considering some characteristics of children's thinking.

Mythic thinking

I call this first stage of educational development mythic because young children's thinking shares important features with the kind of thinking evident in the stories of myth-using people. I will consider four roughly parallel features.

First, a main function of myth is to provide its users with intellectual security. It does this by providing absolute accounts of why things are the way they are and by fixing the meaning of events by relating them to sacred models.² All people look for intellectual security amid the changes of life in the world, and young children in western industrial societies seem to establish a first security in a manner not dissimilar from that evident in myth stories. They seek absolute accounts of things, and they want precise, fixed meanings. Young children have great difficulty deriving meaning from the ambiguous and complex. For reasons I will discuss later, children need to know how to feel about a thing in order for that thing to be clear and meaningful; they need to establish some personal and affective relationship with what is being learned.

Second, myth stories and children lack what has been generally called a sense of otherness—concepts of historical time, physical regularities, logical relationships, causality, and geographical space. Some analysts of myth suggest one of myth's functions is to obliterate history, to assert that nothing has changed in the world since the sacred beginning, thus providing a kind of eternally valid charter for things as they are. Children's lack of the concepts of otherness, however, may be accounted for simply as a lack of experience and knowledge of change and causality on a historical scale in a geographical arena.

A third feature of mythic thinking is its lack of a clear sense of the world as autonomous and objective. The conception of the world as an impersonal, objective entity is the achievement of a mature rationality. The child's world is full of entities charged with and given meaning by those things the child knows best: love, hate, joy, fear, good, bad. The world is, as it were, absorbed into the child's vivid mental life. Much more than is the case for an adult, children's imaginative life colors and charges their environment with a meaning derived from within. Piaget has expressed this well in the observation that at this age there is “a sort of confusion between the inner and the outer, or a tendency to fix in objects something which is the result of the activity of the thinking subject.”³

Fourth, myth stories tend to be articulated on binary oppositions. In the case of myth stories, the oppositions may be between important elements in the life of their users: nature/culture, life/death, raw/cooked, honey/ashes. In the mental life of children, important basic oppositions include big/little, love/hate, security/ fear, courage/cowardice, good/bad. Typical fairy stories are built on sets of such binary opposites, and children tend initially to make sense of things in binary terms, using only a couple of concepts at one time. These binary opposites are then elaborated by a process of mediation between the binary poles. For example, the concepts of hot and cold will normally be learned as the first temperature distinctions. These will then be mediated by warm or by quite hot and quite cold. Thereafter, children may learn to mediate between cold and warm, and warm and hot, leading gradually to a set of concepts along the temperature continuum. Attempts to mediate between other binary opposites perceived in their environments lead to more than simple conceptual elaborations along continua of size, speed, temperature. When the same process tries to mediate between humans and animals, we get those dressed and talking bears, dogs, rabbits that play so prominent a part in children's imaginations. Attempts to mediate between life and death give us ghosts and spirits of various kinds—things that are both alive and dead, as things warm are both hot and cold.

This is not to suggest that children at the mythic stage can understand things only if they are put in terms of binary opposites. Greater or lesser elaboration between binary opposites will have been achieved depending on the degree of progress they have made through the stage. However, binary opposites are still fundamental to children's thinking at this mythic stage; even though considerable elaboration from the initial binary terms may have been achieved, meaning derives most clearly from the basic binary distinctions. That is, if something is to be most clearly meaningful, it should be built on and elaborated from clear binary opposites.

Claude Lévi-Strauss concludes that myth stories are also built on or elaborated from basic binary opposites perceived in their users’ environments.⁴ Lévi-Strauss has also argued, drawing on Roman Jacobson's work in phonetics, that the kind of binary thinking I have alluded to is basic to all thought and reflects a basic structure of the human mind. Whether or not this is the case, it is evident that such binary structures are prominent in young children's thinking.

These four characteristics of young children's thinking, then, are important because they influence profoundly how children can derive meaning from the world, how they learn, and what they can learn. Taken together, these characteristics help to explain the power of stories in the mental life of young children and lead to clear conclusions for teaching, learning, and motivation. The ability of stories to engage children's interest is worth dwelling on a little more, because features that give stories their power can also be used in engaging children's enthusiasm in learning about the world. First, though, we should consider the general process whereby the characteristics of children's thinking outlined above are used in their learning. That is, we should characterize in a general way how children learn at the mythic stage.

Projection and absorption: learning, feeling, and meaning

Learning at the mythic stage involves making sense of the unknown world without in terms of the known world within. The things children have available to learn with are those things they know best, love, hate, joy, fear, good, bad. These are the intellectual tools and conceptual categories that children can employ in making sense of the outside world. The process of learning at the mythic stage involves projecting these known things onto the outside world and, as it were, absorbing the world to them.

Initially, the world becomes known in terms of the basic forms and characteristics of children's mental life. It could hardly be otherwise. Learning is a matter of connecting the known categories to the outside world and fitting the things in the world to them. The clearer the connection between categories and things in the world, the more successful will be the learning. As children develop through the mythic stage, knowledge about the world expands the initial set of mental categories. The world provides not only knowledge as such, but the things in the world that the child perceives and experiences become concepts the child thinks with; that is, the child uses the world to think with. I will discuss this in more detail at the beginning of the next chapter when considering the move from the mythic to the romantic stage.

The confusion between inner and outer that Piaget observed, which I have described as the result of making sense of the unknown world without in terms appropriate to the child's mental life, is not a confusion restricted to children. It persists in all of us to a greater or lesser degree, though, in at least one dimension, we measure development in terms of the clarity with which we can distinguish between what is true about the world and what we think about the world. This confusion is also a common feature of myth-using people's thinking.⁵ It is not, then, simply an error to be overcome; it is a valid way of making sense of the world and of one's place in it. For young children, it is a necessary way of making sense of things and of learning.

This is a point I will repeat in different ways for each stage; we must be sensitive to the changing character of children's thinking and learning and must not see any of the stages as confusions or errors. They are stages of development, and the achievement of further development does not come by hurrying children to make sense of things in more sophisticated ways. The first requirement for educational development is that children develop the characteristics of each stage as fully as possible.

Young children's thinking and learning are in important qualitative ways different from adults’. Children's major intellectual tools and categories are not rational and logical but emotional and moral. This is not a casual nor insignificant difference. It means that access to the world must be provided in the terms of emotion and morality, or knowledge will be simply meaningless. It will always be possible to make children store things in memory and repeat them on request, but such knowledge will remain inert and will contribute nothing toward the development of children's understanding of the world or their place in it. True learning at this stage must involve their being able to absorb the world to the categories of their own vivid mental life and to dialectically use the world to expand the intellectual categories they have available. The most effective teaching will be that which provides best access to the world, by organizing what is to be known in terms that children can best absorb and use.

Now we need to see how the characteristics of children's thinking that we have considered lead to principles for organizing knowledge in terms that children can best absorb and use. First, though, let us return to stories and see what clues their engaging power offers towards clarifying such principles.

The necessity of the story form

It is worth noting that analyses of the fairy stories that most powerfully engage children's interest suggest underlying characteristics similar to those outlined above as the basic characteristics of children's thinking.⁶ The Grimm-type stories lack realistic concepts of action, place, change, causality; they make little call on the simultaneous combination of ideas; the number of characters is small and homogeneous; the characters are composed from one or two outstanding characteristics (big and bad, beautiful and industrious, etc.); the characters are differentiated by simple contrasts, or binary opposites (rich or poor, big or little, obedient or disobedient, clever or stupid); meaning is always clear, in the sense that it is always understood who is to be approved of or disapproved of and what one should feel about the events.

The similarities are hardly surprising, though, given the close relationship between fairy stories, folktales, and myth stories. Like myth stories, fairy stories derive their power from being more or less pure reflections or embodiments of those characteristics basic to children's thinking. These are preeminently the terms in which children can make sense of things; they understand things put in these terms.

However, we need to ask what is a story? Perhaps the most important feature of a story is that it is the linguistic unit that can ultimately fix the meaning of the events that compose it. Take, for example, the event, “He shot Tom.” By itself the event is not very meaningful; we don't know how or why or where he shot Tom, or who he and Tom are, or, most important, whether to feel glad or sorry that he shot Tom. The only linguistic unit that can finally answer all these questions is the story. The story, as Aristotle⁷ pointed out, has a beginni...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgement
• Foreword
• Introduction to the Hutchinson edition
• Introduction to the first edition
• 1 The Mythic Stage
• 2 The Romantic Stage
• 3 The Philosophic Stage
• 4 The Ironic Stage
• 5 Some Comments on the Stages
• 6 Sensitive Periods and Content
• 7 Curriculum Areas
• Conclusion
• Index