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30 of 34 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Gardner's Rolling Stone, October 15, 2002
This review is from: The Disciplined Mind: Beyond Facts and Standardized Tests, the K-12 Education that Every Child Deserves (Paperback)
Fortunately for readers (and anyone connected to education), Gardner has not been idle since he first published his benchmark book Frames of Mind. I sincerely appreciated reading how he has continued to develop his thinking in cognitive psychology and his suggestions for education need to be taken seriously as a blueprint for change. Along with Postman, Kohn, Ravitch, Darling-Hammond, Allen, and Perrone, Gardner takes the position that education relates cultural values as much as anything. Further, those values need to engage the student in sustained, meaningful encounters in science, art, and narrative that produce a vigorous, cognitive growth. His candid suggestions for educators to assimilate units on truth, beauty, and goodness suggest that Gardner is not only willing to make a radical suggestions for the advancement of learning among children (in the spirit of Dewey and Bruner), but also that the humanitarian interests in education are worth sustaining; that is, for Gardner, meaning needs to take ascendency in our instruction. Gardner is a fantastic writer. He has a gift for explanation and explication; I recommend the book if only for the Appendix. He delineates between two world views in education and it is worth the price of the book itself. Yes, his suggestions are radical and extreme, but being normal is only taking education down to a new nadir. I heartily endorse this book.
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24 of 27 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A New Golden Standard for the Educated Person, October 12, 2005
This review is from: The Disciplined Mind: Beyond Facts and Standardized Tests, the K-12 Education that Every Child Deserves (Paperback)
In previous books, Professor Gardner has introduced us to important concepts like multiple intelligences (Frames of Mind) and how little university graduates can make practical application of anything they learn (The Unschooled Mind). In The Disciplined Mind, he takes those concepts and combines them to define a minimum educational standard: Introducing students to the thought processes of major disciplines to appreciate important issues from the perspective of multiple intelligences.
To exemplify the point, Professor Gardner develops examples of his concept involving Darwin's Finches (as a window on evolutionary thinking), one scene from The Marriage of Figaro by Mozart (as a window onto social commentary and music) and the Wannsee Conference in Nazi Germany (as a window onto the banal evil of the Holocaust). He sees the fundamental questions that education should address as following into the subjects of truth, beauty and goodness (or good versus evil) which these three examples epitomize.
Those sections were great fun, but the most valuable part of the book comes in chapter 10 where he addresses "Getting There". It's a marvelous description of how to create positive organizational change within education. Professor Gardner gets tough in pointing out that good leadership is essential. Otherwise, multidisciplinary means just messing around with whatever appeals to you . . . and not learning a darn thing of lasting importance.
I can relate to that point. One of my first college courses was intended to teach us the historical discipline by working with primary sources about the Entresol Club in France before the Revolution. But the case didn't really work for that purpose and the leadership was muddled. The only thing I learned was the entresol was the floor above the ground floor in a French building. That has helped me in elevators several times since then. But I had to learn the historical discipline elsewhere.
He points out several key lessons:
Have a long-term perspective
Be flexible and seek small victories
Anticipate setbacks and be prepared for them
Allow time for reflection
Build on strengths
Pay attention to implicit messages in the institutional culture
Create a community that cares
Visit and be visited
Cultivate new energies
Commit yourself to the process of change
I was reminded of Peter Senge's excellent book, The Dance of Change, as I read this section.
The next best part of the book came in chapter 9 where Professor Gardner explained how multiple intelligences can be brought to bear for understanding.
This material is a classic for introducing any important subject:
1. Provide powerful points of entry that engage students.
2. Offer apt analogies to make the material accessible.
3. Deliver multiple representations of the core ideas of the topic that capture each of the multiple intelligences.
Many of the people who have been honored with the MacArthur Prize Fellowship (the so-called Genius award) fail to impress me as being geniuses. Professor Gardner is the happy exception to that observation. This book is a marvelous summation of his perspective and how to bridge the unsatisfying gap between classical "memorize everything" education to produce the "whole person" and the pressure now to produce highly functional "specialists" who are ignorant outside their specialties.
Bravo, Professor Gardner!
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7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
The Importance of Being Earnest, November 16, 2008
This review is from: The Disciplined Mind: Beyond Facts and Standardized Tests, the K-12 Education that Every Child Deserves (Paperback)
Well, it took some discipline on my part to finish it. Because I passionately agree with Gardner on the importance of going slow and deep, because throughout the book I felt I was listening to someone of congenial temperament (likely an abstract idealist), because I admire his triplet examples of the good, the true & the beautiful and his respect for mastery of the disciplines, I am flummoxed by my inability to spark to the book, which I found almost painfully circumspect. The language is of that heavy, deadly, academic variety, you know, as if he's trademarking concepts such as "pathways to understanding." Then there's the emphasis on "community", a ruined word for me thanks to my undergraduate years in the politically-correct late '80's and early '90's. Students, ideally, would give "performances of understanding" to the community. Kind of like writing a book review for the Amazon community? My approval score is pretty low, so maybe that's why I'm dragging my feet.
Recently, I attended a riveting seminar given by a Ph.D. in soil fertiity on the subject of "life force energy" and particularly emphasizing the work of Wilhelm Reich. The lecturer emphasized the rarity of functional thinking, the ability to see common functioning priciples in order to make connections in research; he talked about how the repression of emotions and impulses is a barrier to making contact with natural living systems; he contrasted this type of rich, syncretic thinking with the mechanistic or materialistic thinking one sees in the academy today. I tried to make a connection with Gardner's emphasis on depth. I wondered, as I often do, if Ken Wilber and Integral Philosophy folks could help here, but unfortunately they seem to have little use for children in their sexy Integral Universe.
Here's what I see in my daughter's public school classroom: Of 20 kids, you've probably got 1 of idealistic temperament, 1 of rational temperament, the rest the more conventional artisan or guardian temperaments (I'm using Meyers-Briggs theory here). The experienced and seasoned teacher has a highly-conventional guardian temperament and an average I.Q. Most of the kids have average I.Q.s, maybe a couple are mildly-to-moderately gifted and only one is highly-sensitive and quite-highly gifted, and the teacher gets irritated with her for working ahead and not following directions. The ages in this classroom span a four-year difference. As a backdrop, you've got a lot of parental and "community" support and involvement, plus the wretched "No Student Left Behind" curriculum with its frequent standardized testing. I needed a bit more help from Howard Gardner in deepening my understanding of how his disciplined approach with its theory of multiple intelligences would work in a classroom where the majority, including the teacher, are of average ability and temperament. My favorite part of the book was on Mozart's opera and the trio of colliding agendas; that was so great, it made the reading worthwhile; I can only imagine, ironically, that you get a fourth colliding agenda when you add the classroom teacher's voice to the mix, and then things get really funny.
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