Getting
it wrong from the beginning:
Our
progressivist inheritance from Herbert Spencer, John Dewey, and Jean Piaget.
(New
Haven: Yale University Press, 2002.)
&
How to educate people
(New
Haven: Yale University Press, forthcoming. [Though it does need to be written
first.])
For a couple of years I thought I was writing
a new book, which I was going to call "Getting it Wrong from the
Beginning". But I was having a hard time of it, and I had become
interested in Herbert Spencer and the largely forgotten degree of his influence
in the forming of Progressivism. I strugggled to contain the growing amount of
material on Spencer and the problems of Progressivism until it became clear
that I was writing two related books rather than one. This made it much easier
to get ahead with both. On The Educated Mind page, I
suggest that a book should not be considered as some authoritative text but
rather as a start of a conversation about the issues it deals with. In this
case, one might use the possibilities of the WWW to consider the books in
process as a conversation starter. I will put draft sections up as I go along.
I tend to work by slamming down a rough outline and re-writing and refining--I
hope--later. I would value comments, suggestions, etc. on any of the texts
below. I'm not offering a cut of the royalties here, but I will for sure acknowledge
all contributions in the published text itself.
If you would like to see some of the bits so
far drafted, please click below. I'll keep updating these as I go along. Sorry
about the titles--I can't resist these modest claims for what the books
contain.
As Getting it Wrong is now published,
I’Äôll remove the draft below, leaving the Introduction and the chapter titles
to give some sense of what the book is about.
Getting it wrong from the
beginning
Ch. 1: The strange case of Herbert Spencer
Ch. 2: Learning according to nature's plan
Ch. 3: Development, progress and the
biologized mind
Ch. 4: The useful curriculum
Ch. 5: Research has shown that . . .
How to educate people
Introduction
Please use the form in Discussion / Suggestions
below to send comments, suggestions for revision, etc. Though you might prefer
just to use your regular e-mail, as one or two people have said they find
the form a bit inhibiting.