On a related note, Piaget
Related to my last thought on teaching students to think for themselves, here’s a quote from Piaget in The Child and Reality:
The ideal of education is not to teach the maximum, to maximize the results, but above all to learn to learn, to learn to develop, and to learn to continue to develop after leaving school.
Amen.
October 25th, 2005 - 10:48 am
[…] I’m still fascinated by asking the question why we teach what we teach in schools. (See previous posts on curriculum, Piaget and Schank.) Today I came across an interview in which Howard Gardner of multiple intelligences (MI) fame discusses the need for curriculum change. He talks about the “mile-wide, inch-deep” problem: So let’s take the area of science. I actually don’t care if a child studies physics or biology or geology or astronomy before he goes to college. There’s plenty of time to do that kind of detailed work. I think what’s really important is to begin to learn to think scientifically. To understand what a hypothesis is. How to test it out and see whether it’s working or not. If it’s not working, how to revise your theory about things. That takes time. There’s no way you can present that in a week or indeed even in a month. You have to learn about it from doing many different kinds of experiments, seeing when the results are like what you predicted, seeing when they’re different, and so on. But if you really focus on science in that kind of way by the time you go to college, or, if you don’t go to college, by the time you go to [the] workplace, you’ll know the difference between a statement which is simply a matter of opinion or prejudice and one for which there’s solid evidence. […]