Reviews for The educating act

The average rating for The educating act based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2014-12-26 00:00:00 Cynthia S Milkovits Quite interesting stuff. Picked it up off that Brett Victor humane computing talk (BV sold it quite well, I seem to remember) Tension between ideas about what education is for: socialization (ie. into present society), Truth About Reality (Plato), natural development of child (Rousseau) [sorry if painting w/ very very broad strokes here, was a while ago]. New idea: develop/recapitulate different ways of understanding. Process of recapitulation, start from stage 0, go in order, work your way up, partly tied to brain maturation, partly tied to stages that open up to others. It's not all improvements or building out; you lose things going up to a more "advanced" way of understanding things (and also you don't ditch pre-existing ways; they're still around to an extent)… but in modern society it's still useful to Pokemon them. * Somatic - very physical sense stuff, infants/toddlers, feely stuff… * Mythic - binary contrasts (eg. fairy tales), human qualities (eg. counting tied to ingenuity) * Romantic - fascination with amazing (eg 10 year olds and records), transcendent, Great People, human struggle * Philosophic - ideas, models [think of your standard "smart" teenager who… sigh… discovers Ayn Rand…] (over time you learn about models breaking, and pick up new models) * Ironic - embracing the models not as absolute truths so much but as useful tools Found the Q&A section rather irritating, could have been written in a much more straightforward and dry manner (have to admit, it was funny in places). Seems like the author is super established and respected in education circles (?) so have no idea why they'd have so "self-conscious" a thing going on there. The practical examples section at the end showing how we might apply this stuff was really helpful, kind of clarified how exactly this sort of framework could be applied. Would love thoughts from people who actually do teach…

Review # 2 was written on 2011-01-24 00:00:00 Malcolm Haggerty This book helped me understand and characterize the different phases of my own education. It gave me perspective about why I struggled with my faith in my mid twenties and why that may not have been so atypical. It also gives a rich vision about what being an educated person really means. This book embraces many forms of understanding the world around us, including some we may have mistakenly set aside as unsophisticated. However, Dr. Egan argues for the value in all of these forms of understanding. He advocates for development and appreciation of all of them. This book also helped me realize how boring I have become. It has motivated me to reconnect with many of the things I loved as a child - imagining, listening to stories, wondering about the world.