Imagination and the Engaged Learner by Kieran Egan

Author:Kieran Egan
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780807774595
Publisher: Teachers College Press
Published: 2016-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Hobbies and Collections

We consider now a tool we will not explore in greater detail later, but it is one worth mentioning here because it shows how the literacy-driven fascination with reality can take another distinctive form. Why do children and adolescents often obsessively collect things? Immense energy often goes into collecting one or another of a huge variety of things—bottle caps, foreign coins or stamps, stones, pressed leaves, glass marbles, toy guns, discarded cell phones, almost anything. The energy is intensified if one can complete a set—the most obvious examples, because they are the most exploited commercially, include things like football stickers, hockey cards, Beanie Babies, Smurfs, furnishings for dolls’ houses, and tiny model animals. We may occasionally see the same kind of energy go into an apparent obsession to learn everything possible about a topic such as a particular sport, costume through the ages, American presidents or the kings and queens of England, minerals, or astronomy.

It is odd that educators have paid relatively little attention to this common and powerful drive to learn that is evident in so many students during early adolescence. Many educators are distressed that students are “unmotivated”; they often seem uninterested in learning a great deal of what we would like to teach them. Yet these same “unmotivated” students can often hardly wait to get out of the classroom to perfect their mastery of some area of knowledge that is their hobby or collection. We might indeed be unenthusiastic about their drive to learn the scores made by their favorite soccer player in every game played or to learn to lip-sync the words of every song recorded by their pop-star idol, but if we are interested in learning, it is curious that these obsessive accumulations of detailed knowledge receive so little of our attention. (For one of the fullest studies and discussions of the obsessive collecting of early adolescents, one has to go back to the work of Caroline Frear Burk, supervised by G. Stanley Hall, in 1907!)

How do we account for this very common obsessive learning—an experience we can all surely remember ourselves? What were we doing? What are our students doing now? (There are not entirely satisfactory psychoanalytic explanations that focus on aspects of this, but here we want to consider it with educational eyes.) We propose explaining this phenomenon as another thrust of our initial exploration of autonomous reality. While one strategy for initially exploring reality involves getting some grasp on its extreme limits, we can also get some sense of its scale by exploring some aspect of it in minute detail. This autonomous reality is threatening stuff, of which we cannot bear very much, and initially it may seem virtually limitless. One value of exhaustively learning something—of completing a set—is that it provides some security that the world is not limitless—the world is intellectually graspable and we can hope to make sense of it. Completing a set, or exhaustively exploring some area of a topic in detail, provides some further sense

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