Volume 46, Number 8 · May 6, 1999
Small Wonders
By Alison Gopnik
The Disciplined Mind: What All Students Should Understand
by Howard Gardner
Simon and Schuster, 287 pp., $25.00
The history of education in the twenty-first century may turn out to be like the history of medicine in the nineteenth century. Both medicine and education have great moral urgency. Passing on what we know to our children is, after all, one of the few ways we have of genuinely defying death; medicine just postpones it. Both medicine and education invoke knowledge to justify their authority. Doctors have always justified their practices by claiming that they understand how our bodies work. Educators have always justified theirs by claiming that they understand how our children's minds work. But for most of history those claims were based on scarcely any systematic research. At best, they were pragmatic generalizations, the outcome of a long process of empirical tinkering.
Review, 4298 words
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