Kieran Egan

Kieran Egan (1942 to 12 May 2022) was an Irish educational philosopher and a student of the classics, anthropology, cognitive psychology and cultural history. He wrote on education and child development, with an emphasis on the uses of imagination and on the stages, which he called understandings, that occur during a person's intellectual development. He questioned the work of Jean Piaget and of progressive educators, notably Herbert Spencer and John Dewey. He taught at Simon Fraser University, and his major work is the 1997 book The Educated Mind. His challenge to developmental and progressive orthodoxy makes him a distinctive voice in debates about what education is for.