When I was in the first year of my Masters of Teaching, my lecturer Dr Catherine Scott recommended a book to me. The book was Kieran Egan’s The Educated Mind.

This book fundamentally changed how I think about the world, and about education.

Foreshadowing Cognitive Tools

The central tenet of The Educated Mind is that humans use ‘cognitive tools’ to think with, and that education should be focussed on furnishing students with these cognitive tools.

Cognitive tools? That sounds complicated! I agree, and it took me a really long time to work out what Egan meant by ‘cognitive tools’. So I want you to hold that thought, whilst I share with you why Egan’s book changed my mind. Then we’ll come back to cognitive tools more broadly.

Why my mind was changed

My mind was changed by Egan’s book because, within it, he outlines 5 different kinds of ‘understandings’. Egan argues that humans move through these kinds of understandings as life progresses, if they meet the right learning opportunities to do so. More importantly, each of the kinds of understandings unlocks a new realm of possibility for us.

Here’s a brief overview of these kinds of understandings (as I remember them).

Somatic understanding: Somatic understanding is when your primary way of comprehending the world is through physical interaction with it. Think of a baby putting things in their mouth to try to work out what things are.

Mythic understanding: When young kids start to try to make more cognitive sense of the world, they do this through considering binaries. E.g., good vs. bad. tall vs. short, big vs. small, etc.

Romantic understanding: As young people grow, they begin to move beyond binaries, and are particularly interested in limits of reality (think ‘Guinness World Records’), as well as stories of inspiring individuals (e.g., getting obsessed with Taylor Swift).

Philosophic understanding: People at this stage begin to see the world through ‘-isms’: capitalism, consumerism, communism, nationalism, colonialism. Think passionate uni students here. Or, form the educational context: Traditionalism vs. Progressivism!

Ironic understanding: Ironic understanding is characterised by a mental flexibility that enables an individual to recognise the benefit of different philosophical approaches and identify their varying applicability in different contexts.

Note: These ‘understandings’ aren’t binary categories that statically progress through. Rather, they’re categories that you move flexibly in and out of throughout life, and even from moment to moment. I encourage you to read Egan’s text in more detail for a much fuller and more nuanced understanding than the extremely brief summary above.

The reason why this book changed my mind is that, as I read it, I realised that I was firmly stuck within a philosophic understanding. I was focussed on ‘-isms’, and was living my life trying to identify which ‘-ism’ I wanted to tie myself to, all the while getting confused and frustrated as none of the ‘-isms’ I was trying out seemed to have all the answers.

Knowing that there was a mindset sitting beyond the world of the ‘-isms’, a flexible ‘ironic’ approach, allowed me to move beyond ‘-isms’, and begin to ask more complex and nuanced questions and approach different areas of education, and life, with a more open mind.

This is the basis of what I know strive for in my interviewing style with all ERRR Podcast guests. My ultimate goal is to approach each conversation with an open mind, free of ‘-isms’, and with a hunger to, rather than argue, get to the heart of what works, for whom, under what circumstances, for what purpose, and compared to what (to paraphrase Adrian Simpson).

A reminder of Egan’s work

I was reminded of the impact of Egan’s book this week when listening to an excellent EconTalk episode with Arnold Kling on his Three Languages of Politics.

In a similar framework to Egan’s Kinds of Understanding, Kling offers a framework for understanding how liberals, conservatives, and libertarians view the world. Here’s a brief overview:

• Liberals see the world as a battle between oppressors and the oppressed

• Conservatives see the world as a battle between civilisation and barbarism

• Libertarians see the world as a battle between individual choice and coercion

This framework rang so true to me that I literally stopped walking and just stood there, dumbstruck at how such a simple set of three distinctions could so comprehensively capture the basis of many of the disagreements we see in the world.

I personally realised that I had been unconsciously applying a liberal perspective to most of what I see on both the national, and international stage, and that this was limiting me to a philosophical (liberal-ism) understanding in many arenas, and preventing me from benefitting from the richness of multiple perspectives.

Needless to say, I started digging deeper into different international issues, seeking out a variety of viewpoints, and I feel all the better for it!

A return to Cognitive Tools…

So, what’s all this got to do with Cognitive Tools?

Well, it turns out that both of the examples just shared, Egan’s Kinds of Understanding, and Kling’s Languages of Politics, are both cognitive tools. They’re lenses that we can apply to different problems or scenarios, to help us to gain different perspectives of them.

Cognitive tools exist in almost all domains, here are some examples:

• Mathematics: Exponential growth

• Chemistry: Catalysts

• Biology: Natural Selection

• Physics: Leverage

• Economics: Opportunity cost

• Cognitive Science: Limited working memory

• Systems thinking: Feedback loops

Each of these ideas, once grasped, provides the holder with a new and powerful way to see the world.

Egan’s argument within The Educated Mind was that it is these cognitive tools are what we should centre our education systems around, and that each learning experience should drive towards, or relate to, helping students to understand one of these cognitive tools more deeply.

I must say, I haven’t quite worked out how this is best done in an educational context as yet. It’s really quite a tricky problem. But I always try to keep it as a thought, and a valuable framework, in the back of my mind.

When it comes to deep learning, it’s cognitive tools, all the way down!

Postscript: Cognitive Tools = Mental Models

Another phrase for ‘cognitive tools’ that some readers may be more familiar with is ‘mental models’, Mental models themselves are a bit confusing, because they also sound a bit like ‘schemas’, which are a related but not entirely overlapping concept related to cognition and understanding.

Aside from make this cognitive tool to mental model connection, I thought that some people might be interested in exploring the most comprehensive list of cognitive tools that I’ve found online here. Big props to Shane Parrish for collating this excellent list.

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