Name: Rethinking school
ISBN: 9780393285963

Rethinking school

"Our K-12 school system is an artificial product of market forces. It isn't a good fit for all--or even most--students. It prioritizes a single way of understanding the world over all others, pushes children into a rigid set of grades with little regard for individual maturity, and slaps "disability" labels over differences in learning style. Caught in this system, far too many young learners end up discouraged, disconnected, and unhappy. And when they struggle, school pressures parents, with overwhelming force, into "fixing" their children rather than questioning the system. With boldness, experience, and humor, Susan Wise Bauer turns conventional wisdom on its head: When a serious problem arises at school, the fault is more likely to lie with the school, or the educational system itself, than with the child. In five illuminating sections, Bauer teaches parents how to flex the K-12 system, rather than the child. She closely analyzes the traditional school structure, gives trenchant criticisms of its weaknesses, and offers a wealth of advice for parents of children whose difficulties may stem from struggling with learning differences, maturity differences, toxic classroom environments, and even from giftedness (not as much of a "gift" as you might think!). As the author of the classic book on home-schooling, The Well-Trained Mind, Bauer knows how children learn and how schools work.

What Hacker News says

martttJul 2022

Great question and many great suggestions here! If I was the librarian facing your task, I would probably try to collect books that 1) cover different programming language paradigms, and 2) books that teach you how to think differently, using a computer language as a medium.

In this regard, I would add "The AWK Programming Language" by Aho, Kernighan and Weinberger. Published in 1988, but it was an excellent introduction to computing for a layman like me around a decade ago. Clear, concise writing; really teaches you to think. Still relevant in 2022, especially considering that awk has gained some attention in recent years. Great warm-up to approaching C via K&R. Can't go wrong with Brian Kernighan as a teacher, I guess.

Another worthwhile book is "Modern Perl, Fourth Edition" by chromatic (2015): https://pragprog.com/titles/swperl/modern-perl-fourth-editio...

Also, "Higher Order Perl" by Mark Jason Dominus (2005). Functional programming techniques with Perl; also ticks the "general thinking book" box. Lots of praise on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Higher-Order-Perl-Transforming-Progra...

Leo Brodie's "Starting Forth" and "Thinking Forth" probably also count as timeless classics in the "thinking book" section.

Lastly, see also Seymour Papert's books "Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas" (1980) and "The Children's Machine: Rethinking School in the Age of the Computer" (1993). These are brilliant for anybody who's interested in thinking and learning, or the Logo programming language that Papert developed.

thread

itronitronJun 2021

Just want to mention that I recommend the book "Rethinking School" by Susan Wise Bauer. It's a book I recently read that I wish I had heard about several years ago as it discusses the futility of trying to fit a round peg (child) into a square hole (traditional k-12 system) and discusses various strategies for working around that.

The author and colleagues have set up a related website (welltrainedmind I think?) and forum which seems to be fairly active and with a diverse set of viewpoints.

thread

tokenadultSep 2009

Piaget didn't prove that no child can be genuinely gifted over the course of childhood compared to some "average" child--he didn't have a data set adequate to prove such a proposition at all. It's not clear yet that his proposed stages of development are as invariant as some readers of his books, think, either. MIT professor Seymour Papert actually studied with Piaget when Piaget was still alive, and this is what Papert says about how little Piaget's developmental hypothesis constrains profound giftedness: "The case [of Jean Piaget] has a mild irony in that this man, so often quoted as the authority on what children cannot do because they are not at appropriate stages of development, published his first scientific article at age eleven!" -- Seymour Papert, The Children's Machine: Rethinking School in the Age of the Computer (1993).

thread