CONCEPT
Imaginative Education
Egan's educational program — developed through the Imaginative Education Research Group at Simon Fraser University — that treats imagination as the core engine of cognitive development rather than as a decorative supplement to analytical thinking.
Imaginative Education is the applied framework through which Egan's theoretical account became a practical pedagogy. Its core claim is that imagination is not a luxury added to the serious business of learning but the cognitive mechanism through which learning actually occurs. Every topic, at every developmental stage, can be taught through the specific imaginative tools available to the learner at that stage — mythic narratives for young children, romantic wonder for adolescents, philosophic systems for older students, ironic recognition for mature learners. The approach reorganizes curriculum design around the deployment of cognitive tools rather than the coverage of content domains, and has influenced educators worldwide through the Imaginative Education Research Group Egan co-founded.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The framework emerged from Egan's long critique of what he called the three incompatible purposes of Western education — Platonic rationalism, Rousseauian naturalism, Spencerian utilitarianism — each of which treated imagination as peripheral to the real work of education. Egan's