chapter 19
Educating Adolescents
The prolonged schooling of modern Western societies has posed
special challenges for the education of adolescents, that is, those people
who are neither children nor adults. Conventional approaches and struc-
tures (e.g., begin with the known, the local, the concrete) have been
demonstrably unsuccessful, yet continue to be regularly employed. In this
chapter Kieran Egan advocates dramatically different strategies based
on examining what actually engages the imaginations of adolescents (e.g.,
electronic games, MTV videos, Archie comics) and adapting some of the
same tactics in efforts to educate young people.
His inventory of tools takes advantage of adolescents’ keen interest
in figuring out who they are and how they fit into their social world.
Their particular interest in narrative, for instance, is partly due
to the capacity of story to fix emotional meaning, and helps insecure
adolescents learn how they should feel about important events. Their
vulnerability in the face of daunting futures is relieved somewhat by
associating themselves with personalities who embody the very heroic
qualities that trump reality (athletes, movie stars). Egan is concerned that
we remember that “all knowledge is human knowledge” and that “edu-
cation is very largely a realm dominated by values and meanings.”
Attempts to educate adolescents need to take these considerations into
account.
Kieran Egan is a professor of education at Simon Fraser University in
Burnaby, BC, Canada. His most recent book is The Future of Education:
Re-imagining the School from the Ground Up (2008). His other books
include The Educated Mind: How Cognitive Tools Shape Our Understanding
(1997) and An Imaginative Approach to Teaching (2005).
274
www.95gowu.com
.
.
Educating Adolescents
kieran egan
Human beings adapt with astonishing fluency to social environ-
ments in their early years. We are born programmed to harmonize
ourselves with any of an indeterminate range of social conditions and
varied belief systems that ensure ou