Primary Understanding

In this book, now available in paperback, Kieran Egan has taken a new approach to early childhood teaching from which he has formulated a theory of education. Beginning with descriptions of the ways in which children make sense of their experience and the world, such as fantasy, stories and games, he argues that the foundational layer of their understanding is made up of sets of "cultural sense-making capacities", reflected in oral cultures throughout the world. Egan sees education as the acquisition of these sets of sense-making capacities and postulates a theory of primary education which synthesizes progressivism and traditionalism in such a way that both the needs of the individual child and the accumulation of knowledge can be satisfied. "Primary Understanding" is the first in a projected series of four books dealing with the educational process as a sequence of progressively more sophisticated layers of understanding. This book should be of interest to students and lecturers in education, curriculum studies, philosophy of education and early childhood education.