The Unschooled Mind by Gardner Howard

Author:Gardner, Howard [Gardner, Howard]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
ISBN: 9780465024391
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2011-03-28T16:00:00+00:00

Although few would have any reason to recognize it, a collision course was virtually inevitable. On the one hand, the demands being made on the school were increasing in virtually exponential fashion. On the other, the ways in which students learn and the kinds of conceptions and skills they bring to school were largely invisible to pedagogues, and even more unknown to those who set educational policy. Only the most optimistic assumption of a preestablished harmony between the student mind and the school curriculum would justify the prediction that the schools as constituted could succeed in their ambitious and ever expanding mission.

By reviewing the arguments presented in earlier pages, I hope to provide some perspective on the vexed mission of the school. Then, in light of these general considerations, I shall turn in this chapter and the next to recently gathered evidence from a range of disciplines and content areas that provides further documentation of the manifold difficulties inherent in achieving effective education. My own recommendations about how best to deal with difficulties will be presented in chapters 11 and 12.

First, however, it is important to underscore one point. One cannot begin to evaluate the effectiveness of schools unless one makes clear one’s ambitions for the school. In what follows, I highlight a single criterion for effective education—an education that yields greater understanding in students. Whereas short-answer tests and oral responses in classes can provide clues to student understanding, it is generally necessary to look more deeply if one desires firm evidence that understandings of significance have been obtained. For these purposes, new and unfamiliar problems, followed by open-ended clinical interviews or careful observations, provide the best way of establishing the degree of understanding that students have attained.

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