Response to comments on “narrative and learning: A voyage of implications”

Abstract

I am grateful for the stimulating set of responses to my article (Egan, 1993) and would like to reply to some of the many issues raised. As some of the responses go beyond the article to some other sins I have committed elsewhere, perhaps I might briefly contextualize it. “Narrative and Learning” was written for delivery at a conference whose audience included a variety of educational researchers and some teachers. The anticipated audience dialogically influenced the article, obviously. It was designed to be somewhat provocative, and built on work I had published elsewhere. The general argument I have been developing represents education as a recapitulationary process, in which what are recapitulated are somewhat distinctive kinds of understanding. I distinguish four kinds: mythic, romantic, philosophic, and ironic. These kinds of understanding are constructed from the main “technologies” or “mediational means” that affect thinking. So, to put it simplistically, the first layer is made up from implications or consequences of the development of language, the second of literacy-and as the later layers are more difficult to characterize crudely, I will ignore them here. Children’s recapitulation of “mythic thinking,” then, is not due to some mysterious psychological causal mechanism (as tended to be proposed in 19th-century recapitulation schemes such as Herbert Spencer’s) but as the consequence, historically and individually, of learning language. Language shapes thinking in particular ways, and I have been trying to construct an inventory of implications of language use and for “romantic understanding” of literacy, and so on. “Narrative and Leaming” deals only with characteristics of the early layer: preliteracy. Given the tenor of the responses, perhaps I might discuss binary opposites first. I fixed on binary opposites because they represent one basic implication of language use: “Binary opposites are intrinsic to the process of human thought. Any description of the world must discriminate categories in the form ‘p is what not-p is not” (Leach, 1967, p. 3). Leach perhaps should have said that binary opposites are not intrinsic to thought but that they are a consequence on thought