The Unschooled Mind: How Children Think and How Schools Should Teach
By Howard Gardner

Click here for more info and the ability to order at Amazon discoun...

Merging cognitive science with educational agenda, Gardner makes an eloquent case for restructuring our schools by showing just how ill-suited our minds and natural patterns of learning are to the prevailing modes of education. This reissue includes a new introduction by the author.

From Publishers Weekly
The failings of schools have been discussed and analyzed from a dazzling array of perspectives. In this study, the author, a professor at the Harvard School of Education and a practitioner of cognitive science based on a theory of multiple intelligences, adopts a credibly innovative approach, contending that even when a school appears to succeed, "it typically fails to achieve its most important missions." The root flaw, as he views it, is a lack of "genuine understanding"--as opposed to "acceptable mastery"--on the student's part. Gardner sees access to better education in the alliance of three potential teammates: the intuitive preschooler, the traditional older child working through a curriculum, and an expert/teacher capable of extending skills and understandings in new ways. One answer to why so many students lose their enthusiasm for school is found here, as well as promising proposals for school reform, like museum collaborations and apprenticeship projects. Gardner's study offers a wealth of material for significant school restructuring.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews
A convincing call to reexamine the way children learn in their earliest years, and to make use of those new findings in classrooms. MacArthur fellow Gardner (Education/Harvard; To Open Minds, 1989, etc.) developed a theory that human beings learn and perform through multiple intelligences (seven, to be precise, from verbal to kinesthetic and interpersonal). His own and other studies in these areas revealed that students who may be letter-perfect in a school subject such as physics fail spectacularly in transferring that knowledge from classroom exercises to problems in the real world. Even adults abandon book learning and invoke pictures of the world--including stereotypes about the forces of gravity or about skin color--that they constructed as early as five years old. The emperor is exposed as being not only naked but ignorant. If such early childhood ``schema,'' as Piaget called them, are so tenacious, then harness them for learning in the advanced classroom, Gardner advises. He recommends reevaluating the concept of apprenticeships and using the hands-on, multimedia techniques seen in children's museum programs. The developmental theories of Piaget and Chomsky are respectfully challenged, the push to ``cultural literacy'' and ``back to basics'' less respectfully. At issue is the unexamined idea. Gardner calls for schools and teachers to encourage personal ``Christopherian confrontations,'' the encounter between belief and reality that Christopher Columbus presented when he did not sail off the edge of the world. An exciting proposal for restructuring schools in order to guide students to a genuine understanding of the world. A bonus is the extraordinary insight into why children and adults seem to resist learning and why they often behave in such mystifying ways. -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Review 

Chicago Tribune, Editor’s Choice
“The idea of multiple intelligences is so much a part of our cultural conversation that it is hard to believe that these ideas are fairly new and that this book was published just two decades ago. This anniversary edition feels fresh and as urgent as it did in its original form.”