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Carl Bereiter (2002). Education and Mind in the Knowledge Age

Annotated by Ben Wilbrink

Carl Bereiter (2002a). Education and Mind in the Knowledge Age. Erlbaum. questia

This is an important book for designers of education, in particular also for designers of achievement test items. See Bereiter (2002b) on design research. The issues:

• Bereiter attacks the folk psychology of educators, researchers and even psychologists: the idea of knowledge as a kind of stuff in the brain.
• Folk ideas are problematic in almost all disciplines, Bereiter is especially interested in folk conceptions of mind, knowledge, and teaching.
• Folk psychology is not bad in itself, of course: it makes it possible to do the things that have to be done on a daily basis, without much ado, without much thinking. In educational design the risk of trusting one's folk psychological concepts is that educations gets degraded - reduced - into activities, listings of content, or exercises in self-expression.
• Bereiter's hope is to get educators to educate for understanding, understanding being whatever it takes to enable further understanding. This is very much the Deweyan conception that learning is only learning if it leads to further learning. Deanna Kuhn would say, more humbly, do not waste the student's time (with activities, lists of things to be remembered for the next test, self-expression)
• Bereiter uses the concept of 'knowledge objects' to explain what he is after. The 'knowledge object' is an idea from Popper's World Three philosophy. 'Knowledge objects' exist in World Three in somewhat the same way substances exist in world one. Education, then, is about access to the knowledge objects in world three, even participating in the knowledge objects already existing in, or in the process of development, in World Three. Understanding then becomes a kinfd of World Three activity.
• The 526 pages book is tough going, not only because of its World Three mystique, also because Carl Bereiter deemed it necessary to treat every and all concepts of even remote importance to the subject of his book. The following excerpts and annotations, therefore, is my attempt to make this book my own knowledge object.

p. ix: Here we are in the Information Age, relying on a theory of mind that is older than the wheel.
p. ix: The trouble with this story is that for most purposes the effect of cognitive science has not been to replace folk theory but to reinstate it, after its exile by behaviorism.
p. x: What is being challenged is the basic conception of the mind as a container of objectsÑbeliefs, desires, conjectures, remembered events, and the likeÑthat the mind works on in cognition.
p. x: Folk theory of mind lives on, I believe, because it has never been put to severe tests.
p. x: Better to say we need a new way of thinking about knowledge and the mind.
p. x: What I have been calling, following a common usage, "folk theory of mind" is not actually a theory. It is just a way that we commonly think about knowledge and mentation. (...) (p. xii:) a conception that treats knowledge as stuff in people's minds and learning as a process that produces it there.
p. xii. Knowledge is the pivotal idea in this book. p. 4: The argument I develop throughout this book is that education's conceptual tools are woefully inadequate. (...) Better tools are coming available, but it takes conceptual tools to understand and use them. The most basic of tools are our conceptions of knowledge and mind. That, I argue, is where change has to start if education is to become unstuck.

3. Knowledge outside the mind

The naive idea is that basically we live simultaneously in two different worlds: the physical one, and our own mental one. This leaves our cultural heritage dangling somewhere nowhere. Popper is one of the philosophers tackling the problem by positing a third world, the world of our cultural heritage, of scientific theories, etcetera.

Assessment in education in the naive conception is the almost impossible task to assess what students think of the physical world. That looks like a mission impossible: in what world is the assessment, or the assessor, living? It is quite evident that Bereiter (Popper) has a point here: there is a need for the somewhat strange concept of world three, the world of the models science holds on the physical world, the kind of stuff we'd like to teach in education, isn't it? Well, let's see what the exposition by Bereiter tells us about the game of assessing students.

Literature

Carl Bereiter (2002b). Design research for sustained innovation. Cognitive Studies, Bulletin of the Japanese Cognitive Science Society, 9, 321-327. pdf

• "Design research is an emerging effort to bring what Whitehead called Òdisciplined progressÓ into education, but it has not yet taken on a clear form or purpose. Design research is not defined by its methods but by the goals of those who pursue it. Design research is constituted within communities of practice that have certain characteristics of innovativeness, responsiveness to evidence, connectivity to basic science, and dedication to continual improvement."
• I am attracted by the title of this article by Carl. I just might be the case that the test item design project needs the kind of conditions Carl sketches in the article.

  http://www.benwilbrink.nl/literature/bereiter2002.htm