Smart Schools: From Training Memories to Educating Minds

The past twenty years have seen breakthroughs from cognitive scientists investigating thinking and learning as well as school anthropologists probing the culture of classrooms, schools, and their community contexts; but these valuable insights have yet to be applied to public education on a broad scale. Smart Schools is the first book to show how these pathbreaking findings can he effectively used within the classroom.
Although there has been much debate over the sad state of American education today, and a variety of solutions have been offered ranging from school choice to national testing, surprisingly little attention has been paid to how children actually learn to think. As Perking persuasively demonstrates, we cannot solve our education problems by simply redistributing power or by asking children to regurgitate facts on a multiple choice exam; rather we must look at the kinds of knowledge students typically acquire in school. As his own and others' research indicates, students from first grade on through college often have only the most fragile and superficial kind of knowledge even after considerable instruction in a subject. He shows where students typically make mistakes by examining the kinds of misguided strategies they use in trying to understand a topic. He also shows why traditional teaching approaches often result in the students' limited grasp of a subject. Perking then introduces an impressive array of methods that have been shown to dramatically increase a student's understanding. His is a workable, practical model for change.
Parents, teachers, principals, and members of school boards, as well as all those concerned about the state of education in our nation today, will find Smart Schools indispensable reading that offers systematic methods to help students to think and perform more effectively.

A curriculum based on vague notions of cultural literacy won't work for the same reasons that rote learning doesn't--because people accumulate knowledge through understanding, argues Harvard cognitive learning theoretician Perkins, who here plumbs the essences of learning, understanding and knowledge. Summoning recent pedagogical research, he addresses teachers, setting forth fresh goals and showing how to help students apply new knowledge beyond the classroom. Thinking leads to knowledge, as do effort and the right mental images, Perkins stresses. He offers the novel idea (to which many may object) that teachers need larger and fewer classes so they will have more time to build their own knowledge base. And teachers shouldn't have to cover every fact in a textbook, either, he adds. Instead, he contends that they should expend more effort helping students learn their "metacurriculum," which is how they learn. This is an enjoyable read, peppered with interesting examples.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Perkins, best known for his work in cognitive development ( The Mind's Best Work , LJ 11/1/81. o.p.), does not believe that inner-city poverty and social problems constitute the essence of the challenge to schools. Children are poorly educated and lack motivation because they are not intellectually stimulated. Learning is a consequence of thinking, Perkins reiterates. Illiteracy is not the problem, inertia is. Instead of knowledge-centered schools, he recommends "smart schools," where students learn to think, integrate the knowledge they acquire, and use it. The author combines contemporary psychological advances with the ideas of progressive educators, especially John Dewey. He also joins their current counterparts Mortimer Adler and Theodore Sizer in their call for a humanistic approach to education. Smart Schools reflects all the best of past thinking in education with new insights into the psychology of learning and intellectual development. Recommended for most education collections.
- Arla Lindgren, St. John's Univ., Jamaica, New York
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.