Resource reviews

Abstract

Education and Mind in the Knowledge Age Carl Bereiter Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2002 ISBN 0 8058 3943 7 The expression “Iapos;m losing my mind” holds new meaning for me, or at least is now a declaration that I will use less frivolously when overwhelmed by daily life. Carl Berieter's book, Education and Mind in the Knowledge Age, conceives of the mind in an illuminating way; something new for most readers. Bereiter disputes the “folk theory of mind” as termed in his book, the common comprehension of the “mind as a container”. This metaphor, as he explains, in extreme depth and with numerous detailed examples, is the basic tenet upon which many current educational systems establish daily policies and procedures. The idea of the “mind as a container” informs and influences most aspects of education ranging from curriculum development to standardized testing, preservice teacher education and professional development. Most of our routine teaching and subsequent student representation of learning begins and ends with the process of filling up the container. However, this “folk theory of mind”, or common understanding of how the mind works, does not allow us to consider the brain, the mind and knowledge as distinct, but interconnected entities. We often see them as one single object or phenomenon Bereiter suggests that we need to disentangle our understanding of knowledge and the mind in order to understand the mind in a fresh way (p. 55). The theory of the “mind as a container” prevents us from viewing the mind, knowledge and consequently education, differently. This commonly accepted perception dooms us to recreate, chronically, our current, mostly static educational practice. Our view of teaching and learning, then, remains the vision of pouring knowledge into little brains, assisting students in filing each new piece of information in certain location to be accessed and used at a later date. Bereiter asserts that a second common perception of the brain “as a computer” reflects a similar fixed interpretation of human understanding and learning as the “mind as a container” theory. With these “folk theories” of understanding in place, when problems arise in teaching and learning, we do not consider the theory behind it. Instead, we question the student's abilities, our presentation of the material intended to be put into the container or the computational expectations of the computer-like brain. © 2003, Copyright Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.