Date: Wed, 12 Apr 1995 10:07:46 -0700 (PDT)
From: Scott London <london@rain.org>
Subject: THE UNSCHOOLED MIND by Howard Gardner


Book Review:
~~~~~~~~~~~~

THE UNSCHOOLED MIND:
How Children Think and how Schools Should Teach
By Howard Gardner
New York: BasicBooks, 1991, 303 pages


According to Gardner, an "overwhelming body of educational research"
suggests that our schools are failing to live up to their missions. 
Even the most successful students typically fail to exhibit "genuine
understanding" -- as opposed to "acceptable mastery" -- of the
materials and concepts they are taught.  The core problem, in
Gardner's view, is that scholastic and disciplinary forms of knowing
are often at odds with "the unschooled mind" within nearly every
student.  Surveying a wide range of research on early learning and
cognition (much of it his own), Gardner maintains that most children
tend to develop deeply entrenched patterns of thinking and learning by
the time they are five years old.  These patterns include general
ideas about the physical world and the world of others, stereotypic
views of events, familiar scripts, and simplified preferences.  These
early learning patterns and primitive theories tend to be acquired
intuitively, in much the same way as a language is learned.  When the
child begins school, however, he or she is introduced to scholastic
and disciplinary forms of knowing that often bypass, and sometimes
even interfere with, earlier frames of reference.  The result for many
young students is an uneasy dichotomy between intuitive learning and
the academic learning that takes place in schools.

     Gardner contends that true understanding can come about only if
the student is allowed to integrate the prescholastic and the
scholastic and disciplinary ways of knowing.  "The problem," he
writes, "is less a difficulty in school learning per se and more a
problem in integrating the notational and conceptual knowledge
featured in school with the robust forms of intuitive knowledge that
have evolved spontaneously during the opening years of life." 
Educating children for genuine understanding therefore involves
designing educational environments and methods that help students
synthesize their several forms of knowing.  

     To this end, Gardner sets forth a number of proposals for school
reform, including child "museums" and apprenticeship programs.  He
also recommends what he calls "Christopherian encounters," an
experiential form of learning where students are confronted with the
inconsistencies between their various frames of reference.  In
addition, teachers must devise ways to approach subjects in at least
five ways:  through narrative; through logical-quantitative
approaches; through philosophical, or foundational, inquiries; from an
aesthetic point of view; and in ways that create and draw upon student
experiences.  Finally, he insists that schools need to cultivate a
"folio culture," and policy-makers must embrace more robust ways of
assessing progress.  Educators must acknowledge the many forms of
intelligence students bring to school and address intellectual
strengths far more directly than they have in the past.


                                   Scott London * london@rain.org