1. Introduction

Kieran Egan (born 1942) is a contemporary educational philosopher and a student of the classics, anthropology, cognitive psychology, and cultural history.^[1] He has written on issues in education and child development, with an emphasis on the uses of imagination and the intellectual stages (Egan calls them understandings) that occur during a person’s intellectual development. He has questioned the work of Jean Piaget and progressive educators, notably Herbert Spencer and John Dewey.

He currently works at Simon Fraser University.^[2] His major work is The Educated Mind.

2. Biography

Egan was born in 1942 in Clonmel Ireland, though he was raised and educated in England . He graduated from the University of London with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1966. He subsequently worked as a research fellow at the Institute for Comparative Studies in Kingston upon Thames. He then moved to the United States and began a Ph.D in the philosophy of education at the Stanford Graduate School of Education. Egan completed his Ph.D at Cornell University in 1972.^[3][4]

3. Imaginative Education

Kieran Egan is the director of the Imaginative Education Research Group,^[2] which was founded by the Faculty of Education at Simon Fraser University. The goal of this group is to improve education on a global scale by developing and proliferating the ideas of Imaginative Education^[5]

4. Main Works

• 1976 Structural Communication. Fearon Publishers, Belmont, Calif. ISBN:0-8224-6550-7
• 1979 Educational Development. Oxford University Press, New York. ISBN:0-19-502458-3
• 1983 Education and Psychology: Plato, Piaget, and Scientific Psychology. Teachers College Press, Columbia University, New York ; London. ISBN:0-8077-2717-2
• 1988 Primary Understanding: Education in Early Childhood. Routledge, New York. ISBN:0-415-90003-4
• 1988 Imagination and Education. Teachers College Press, New York. ISBN:0-8077-2878-0
• 1989 Teaching as Story Telling: An Alternative Approach to Teaching and Curriculum in the Elementary School. University of Chicago Press, Chicago. ISBN:0-226-19031-5
• 1990 Romantic Understanding: The Development of Rationality and Imagination, Ages 8-15. Routledge, New York. ISBN:0-415-90050-6
• 1992 Imagination in Teaching and Learning: The Middle School Years. University of Chicago Press, Chicago. ISBN:0-226-19033-1
• 1997 The Educated Mind: How Cognitive Tools Shape Our Understanding. University of Chicago Press, Chicago. ISBN:0-226-19036-6
• 1999 Children's Minds, Talking Rabbits & Clockwork Oranges: Essays on Education. Teachers College Press, New York. ISBN:0-8077-3808-5
• 2002 Getting it Wrong from the Beginning: Our Progressivist Inheritance from Herbert Spencer, John Dewey, and Jean Piaget. Yale University Press, New Haven. ISBN:0-300-09433-7
• 2005 An Imaginative Approach to Teaching. Jossey-Bass, San Francisco, CA. ISBN:0-7879-7157-X
• 2006 Teaching Literacy: Engaging the Imagination of New Readers and Writers. Corwin Press, Thousand Oaks, Calif. ISBN:1-4129-2788-9
• 2008 The Future of Education: Reimaging Our Schools from the Ground Up. Yale University Press, New Haven, CT. ISBN:978-0-300-11046-3
• 2010 Learning in Depth: A Simple Innovation that Can Transform Schooling. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL. ISBN:978-0-226-19043-3

5. Awards and Honors

• 1991: University of Louisville Grawemeyer Award in Education^[6]
• 1993: Elected to the Royal Society of Canada
• 2000: Elected as Foreign Associate member of the National Academy of Education (U.S.)
• 2001: Killam Research Fellowship
• 2001: Appointed to a Canada Research Chair in Education^[3]
• 2010: Utne Reader magazine listed Egan as one of the "25 Visionaries Who Are Changing Your World."^[7]