“Although few members of this community make a direct connection with feminism, there is a convergence of intellectual values — a “revaluation of the concrete.” These challenges to the dominant epistemology are intellectually assertive and politically self-conscious. A third challenge most often presents itself as neutral and technical. It is a challenge from within computation, […]
“From the perspective of the 1990s, it appears bizarre or downright reactionary that Mindstorms makes no reference to gender or multiculturalism. I have become convinced that recognizing the androcentric nature of traditional ways of knowing will play a central role in producing change in education. A political reason for this conviction is feminism’s strength as
“The word educology reminds us that we need a theory of education. One might say theories already exist. There is educational psychology; there is a theory of instruction; there are courses on the theory of how to administrate schools. But these are not theories of education as a whole. They are theories of small aspects
“When I met Piaget my passion for understanding mathematics came together with my desire to know how the mind works and to create a theory of intelligence. Plaget fascinated me because he managed in the same breath to say something both about the nature of mathematics and issues fundamental to philosophy and at the same
“This neat picture of successive stages has aroused such strong positive and negative reactions that the ensuing debates have obscured Piaget’s really important contribution: His description of different ways of knowing is far more important than quibbling about whether they neatly follow one another chronologically. And what is especially important is the description of the
“Of course I’d known about Piaget before I met him. In fact, just about a month before I met him I had quite a violent fight with a friend about how bad Piaget was. Until I met him I focused mainly on the Piaget who speaks about what children can’t do – they can’t learn
“The supervaluation of abstract thinking vitiates discussion of educational issues. The reason is that educators who advocate imposing abstract ways of thinking on students almost always practice what they preach—as I tried to do in adopting a concrete style of writing—but with very different effects. A simple example is seen in the formulation of research
“Since the prevailing image of the computer is that of a logical machine, and since programming is seen as a technical and mathematical activity, the existence of anything but an analytic approach in this area makes a dramatic argument for pluralism. But the computer’s most specific contribution to the critique of canonical styles depends on
“After World War I Piaget moved to Zurich to attend Carl Jung’s lectures on experimental psychology, and then to Paris to study logic and abnormal psychology. Working with Théodore Simon in Alfred Binet’s child psychology lab, he noticed that Parisian children of the same age made similar errors on true-false intelligence tests. Fascinated by their
“School as we set it up is tailor-made for certain personality types. I like to think of certain scales of oppositions: like obsessional-compulsives and hysterics. This is a little over-simplified. but will help us talk quickly. Our hyperactive child is toward the extreme end of the hysteric scale. The hysteric likes generalities, likes dramatic effects,
September 21, 2011 Read More »