On the Necessity of Ironic Understanding

Kieran Egan identifies five Kinds of Understanding. The first is Somatic, and is the result of our bodily and social inheritance as human beings. The next two Kinds of Understanding, Mythic and Romantic, are built upon the acquisition of first oral, then written, language. Though vestiges of each of these Kinds of Understanding will continue to inform us throughout our lives, there are certain areas of study that are built upon, and require, Philosophic Understanding. The sciences are the prime example of Philosophic Understanding.

Philosophic Understanding becomes possible when students are able to make generalizations, theorize, and follow scripted procedures (mathematical formulas, for example). Philosophic Understanding harnesses a drive toward certainty, to know 'for sure' what is 'really' going on. High School, with its discrete courses of study (chemistry, biology and physics rather than 'general science', for example) is the reasonable educational embodiment of Philosophic Understanding.

In fact, the differences between Philosophic Understanding and Romantic Understanding are the basis for the differences between Corbett's High School and Middle School approaches. Schools that try to design middle school like high school (which the vast majority do and which the State of Oregon virtually requires!) or high school like middle school (which a few brave souls have tried and which may have good therapeutic outcomes but will never graduate hordes of AP Scholars) are making huge categorical mistakes. They are mistaking one sort of thing for another. Their results speak for themselves.

Philosophic Understanding allows access to the sciences, to mathematics, to literary analysis, to advanced performance techniques, to the application of technique to works of art, and to the study of economics, history, and politics. It allows the appreciation of grammar and syntax, sine and cosine, evolutionary theory and plate techtonics.

Philosophic Understanding enables human beings to predict, control and (to limited degrees) manipulate nature to their own advantage. Philosophic Understanding is what Sir Frances Bacon had in mind when he said 'Knowledge is Power'. Philosophic Understanding put a man on the moon (vestiges of Mythic Understanding ensured that it had to be a MAN!).

Philosophic Understanding is potent. But what are its limits? We know that Philosophic Understanding is adequate to a deep understanding of rocks. A well-trained scientist can bring to bear multiple perspectives from which almost nothing that can be known about rocks will remain hidden. And the scientist need never leave the comfort of Philosophic Understanding in this undertaking. But what about the person who wants to understand the scientist who is employing Philosophic Understanding in order to understand the rock? Can Philosophic Understanding fully comprehend the thinker who is practicing Philosophic Understanding? This is more than word play. If the answer is 'no', the consequences are immediate and significant. If the answer is 'no', then Imaginative Education has something to teach us not just about educating children, but about how we think about education.

Irony is, at its core, the understanding that the language we use to communicate our experience of the world is never fully adequate. For everything that is said, there is something made un-say-able. When we dig deeply to uncover one truth, we are building a burial mound beneath which another truth is ever less available. We have built certain habits into our ways of speaking in order to attempt to acknowledge this dilemma. We say, "one the one hand...but on the other hand", or "looking at it from one point of view", or "from my perspective". These ways of speaking pay homage to a world that simply overflows our descriptions, one in which simple categories and causal relations fail to capture our experience.

Does all of this add up to cynicism? Not in the least. To nihilism? Only in the hands of a beginner. Ironic Understanding at its best is the cautionary tale that reminds us that good science enables certainty regarding only some aspects of the world and that it should be tempered with humility regarding other matters. It reminds us that the paradigm that allows us to understand and predict chemical reactions does not necessarily generate understanding or predictability regarding, for example, the learning (or teaching) of chemistry.

And if you have ever wondered why we seem so often to be at odds with what is going on in the education 'universe' around us, then imagine this: expertise at education requires Ironic Understanding. Among other things, the Cognitive Tool of Reflexivity must be brought to bear as part of any attempt to understand to multiple, simultaneous human interactions that constitute the educational enterprise. Attempts to comprehend education from the standpoint of Philosophic Understanding, untempered by Ironic Understanding, result in bad theorizing, bad policy-making, and ineffective practice.

So Ironic Understanding is not just a guide to better classroom practice. It offers the means to think deeply and well about education in general. It offers a critic of the 'scientific' approach to education that is crippling our schools and truncating the educational experiences of the vast majority of our children.

And now consider the direction that education policy has taken over the past 20 years. It celebrates its emphasis on Philosophic Understanding, touts its 'scientific' orientation, and fails to recognize that Philosophic Understanding represents an adolescent approach to understanding the world: powerful in some respects, but incomplete in others, and with regard to certain phenomena (the work of educators, for example) utterly incompetent. Ironic, isn't it, that the institutions with the greatest influence over K-12 education should suffer from arrested development?

That's where we live. Those are the attitudes and beliefs that we have to work around in order to be effective. Those are the people to whom we have to report the number of minutes per day that our students are spending in P.E. classes...by grade level!

Ironic Understanding rarely wins friends or elections. Socrates, a master of irony, was offered Hemlock for his efforts. But doing our best for kids has to take priority over 'getting along' or currying the favor of The Powers That Be. Irony is our defense against the worst excesses of misapplied social science, against ill-informed regulation. Irony is the difference between great education and meaningless skill-building. It's the difference between teaching facts and building the capacity for limitless learning. It's what we do. Perhaps it won't win friends, but it will help our children secure a good future. It's a simple matter of values. All we need is love. And Ironic Understanding.

What is Imaginative Education? (Or is JM right?)

"Imagination is ...reason in its most exalted mood."...Wordsworth

Imaginative Education posits that education consists in the initiation of young people into their cultural inheritance. What is that inheritance? In the broadest terms, it includes all of the achievements of humankind. More particularly, as it pertains to education, it consists in the Cognitive Tools that have been created over the course of human history. The Cognitive Tools are embedded in five Kinds of Knowing that are generally chronological, though the Cognitive Tools associated with more sophisticated Kinds of Knowing may appear 'out of sequence'. In the chronology that follows, any generalizations regarding sequence should not be mistaken for absolutes. Life is messy.

Somatic Understanding refers to those abilities that seem innate to human children as the result of their essential bodily and social experience. Somatic Understanding is predominant from Birth to the acquisition of oral language.

The Cognitive Tools associated with Somatic Understanding are: Bodily Senses. Emotional Responses and Attachments, Rhythm and Musicality, Gesture and Communication, Referencing and Intentionality.

Mythic Understanding refers to those abilities that are related to the acquisition of oral language. Mythic Understanding is predominant through the acquisition of literacy.

The Cognitive Tools associated with Mythic Understanding are: Story, Metaphor, Abstract Binary Opposites; Rhyme, Meter and Pattern; Joking and Humor; Forming Images, a Sense of Mystery; and Games, Drama and Play.

Romantic Understanding refers to abilities that are possible as the result of the development of written language, of literacy.

The Cognitive Tools associated with Romantic Understanding are: Extremes and Limits of Reality; Sense of Reality; Association with Heroes; Wonder; Humanizing of Meaning; Collections and Hobbies; Revolt and Idealism; and Context Change and Role Play. Romantic Understanding is embedded in literacy and dominates the imagination until the acquisition of Philosophical Understanding.

Philosophic Understanding is characterized by the desire for generalizations and theories, and by the quest for certainty. It is the full flower the adolescent mind. It depends on the theoretic use of language.

The Cognitive Tools of Philosophic Understanding are a Drive toward Generality, A Facility with Processes, the Lure of Certainty, General Schemes and Anomalies, the Search for Authority and Truth. The Scientific Method is the Zenith of Philosophic Understanding.

Ironic Understanding depends on the reflexive use of language. It entails a recognition of the limits of theoretical thinking, the particularity of the moment, the tenuousness of our knowledge.

The Cognitive Tools of Ironic Understanding are Reflexivity and Identity, the Limits of Theory, Particularity and Radical Epistemic Doubt. Ironic Understanding requires years of preparation and intellectual courage. That's the goal. Everything else is preliminary.