The Informed Vision

Sound Bite

An education classic presents 15 essays on how children learn, offering insights to educators, parents, and all who are concerned with schools and the relationships between teachers and children.

About the Book

Many of the essays in this book use science and mathematics education as the starting point for the author's concern with the way children develop their understanding of the world around them - the principal focus of Hawkins' work. Two essays describe some of the work of the Elementary Science Study and will help the reader understand why the approaches developed in the ESS were widely adopted in elementary schools across the US. Throughout this book, the reader will share Hawkins' inquiry into the human capacity to learn. "I, Thou, and It" explores a deceptively simple aspect of the paths of communication between adults and children. The author acknowledges his intellectual debt to John Dewey in many of the essays, and provides a clear reappraisal of Dewey's educational thought in "John Dewey Revisited." In the final and longest essay, "Human Nature and the Scope of Education," which is particularly rewarding for the serious reader, the author outlines his general theory of education in "unabashedly philosophical" terms. This essay (not unlike the others) stimulated considerable inquiry and discussion among educators in the late 1960s and 1970s. The book was first published by Agathon Press (now an imprint of Algora) in 1975; many of the essays first appeared in the Harvard Education Review or other pedagogical periodicals.

Introduction

In the title essay of this volume, I have tried to capture or at least suggest an aspect of the spirit of science which seems to me to be of the utmost importance for contemporary education for all ages, though it is one which can all too easily be missed along the highways of formal schooling. Science has enriched a dimension of experience which I would call esthetic or, in an unpretentious sense, religious. But I would not use either term except, as I hope the essay clearly says, as a way of suggesting qualities of the good life which, though they have always been important, our age cries out for. The essay concerns ends, with only a hint about means and obstacles ' a hint which is developed much farther in other essays.No American philosopher can write well about education today who has not come to terms with the writings of John Dewey ' or so I believe. Though my own education was not strongly influenced by Dewey in any direct way, there were strong indirect influences. His teachers were my teachers' teachers and for that reason I have always found him easy to read, in spite of his notorious style. According to one of my teachers this style was a product of Dewey's devotion to women's liberation, via several writing boards stationed in laundry and kitchen.In the process of coming to terms with Dewey I reach many strong and admiring agreements but never am quite rid of residual dissatisfaction. I am pleased that both these reactions are visible in the first essay, though more fully developed later. This essay could not have been written without Dewey's Art as Experience, but also not without some critical reactions against his half-truth that the method of science is somehow more important than its content. Dewey would not have relished the bowdlerized versions in which this half-truth has frequently appeared, but I think nevertheless he can share some responsibility for them. What I find most admirable (and comforting) in Dewey is that he, almost uniquely among philosophers since Plato, sees education as a topic so large '�  larger even than politics or than religion ' and so pervasive, as to be a kind of final challenge and focus for all philosophy. By any such standard all of these essays are groping and fragmentary. I hope they serve at least to suggest the validity of that claim.

Table content

PrefaceAn Essay on Science Education3Mind and Mechanism in Education19Childhood and the Education of Intellectuals41I, Thou, and It51Messing About In Science65The Bird in the Window77Two Essays on Mathematics Teaching99Mathematics'Practical and Impractical101Nature, Man and Mathematics108Development as Education131On Environmental Education147John Dewey Revisited159On Living in Trees171On Understanding the Understanding of Children193Human Nature and the Scope of Education205