The Intellectual Lives of Children

The Intellectual Lives of Children PDF Author: Susan Engel
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674988035
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 241

Get Book

Book Description
A look inside the minds of young children shows how we can better nurture their abilities to think and grow. Adults easily recognize children’s imagination at work as they play. Yet most of us know little about what really goes on inside their heads as they encounter the problems and complexities of the world around them. In The Intellectual Lives of Children, Susan Engel brings together an extraordinary body of research to explain how toddlers, preschoolers, and elementary-aged children think. By understanding the science behind how children observe their world, explain new phenomena, and solve problems, parents and teachers will be better equipped to guide the next generation to become perceptive and insightful thinkers. The activities that engross kids can seem frivolous, but they can teach us a great deal about cognitive development. A young girl’s bug collection reveals important lessons about how children ask questions and organize information. Watching a young boy scoop mud can illuminate the process of invention. When a child ponders the mystery of death, we witness how children build ideas. But adults shouldn’t just stand around watching. When parents are creative, it can rub off on their children. Engel shows how parents and teachers can stimulate children’s curiosity by presenting them with mysteries to solve. Unfortunately, in our homes and schools, we too often train children to behave rather than nurture their rich and active minds. This focus is misguided, since it is with their first inquiries and inventions—and the adult world’s response to them—that children lay the foundation for a lifetime of learning and good thinking. Engel offers readers a scientifically based approach that will encourage children’s intellectual growth and set them on the path of inquiry, invention, and ideas.

The Intellectual Lives of Children

The Intellectual Lives of Children PDF Author: Susan Engel
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674988035
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 241

Get Book

Book Description
A look inside the minds of young children shows how we can better nurture their abilities to think and grow. Adults easily recognize children’s imagination at work as they play. Yet most of us know little about what really goes on inside their heads as they encounter the problems and complexities of the world around them. In The Intellectual Lives of Children, Susan Engel brings together an extraordinary body of research to explain how toddlers, preschoolers, and elementary-aged children think. By understanding the science behind how children observe their world, explain new phenomena, and solve problems, parents and teachers will be better equipped to guide the next generation to become perceptive and insightful thinkers. The activities that engross kids can seem frivolous, but they can teach us a great deal about cognitive development. A young girl’s bug collection reveals important lessons about how children ask questions and organize information. Watching a young boy scoop mud can illuminate the process of invention. When a child ponders the mystery of death, we witness how children build ideas. But adults shouldn’t just stand around watching. When parents are creative, it can rub off on their children. Engel shows how parents and teachers can stimulate children’s curiosity by presenting them with mysteries to solve. Unfortunately, in our homes and schools, we too often train children to behave rather than nurture their rich and active minds. This focus is misguided, since it is with their first inquiries and inventions—and the adult world’s response to them—that children lay the foundation for a lifetime of learning and good thinking. Engel offers readers a scientifically based approach that will encourage children’s intellectual growth and set them on the path of inquiry, invention, and ideas.

Labor's Mind

Labor's Mind PDF Author: Tobias Higbie
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252051092
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 208

Get Book

Book Description
Business leaders, conservative ideologues, and even some radicals of the early twentieth century dismissed working people's intellect as stunted, twisted, or altogether missing. They compared workers toiling in America's sprawling factories to animals, children, and robots. Working people regularly defied these expectations, cultivating the knowledge of experience and embracing a vibrant subculture of self-education and reading. Labor's Mind uses diaries and personal correspondence, labor college records, and a range of print and visual media to recover this social history of the working-class mind. As Higbie shows, networks of working-class learners and their middle-class allies formed nothing less than a shadow labor movement. Dispersed across the industrial landscape, this movement helped bridge conflicts within radical and progressive politics even as it trained workers for the transformative new unionism of the 1930s. Revelatory and sympathetic, Labor's Mind reclaims a forgotten chapter in working-class intellectual life while mapping present-day possibilities for labor, higher education, and digitally enabled self-study.

The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes

The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes PDF Author: Jonathan Rose
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300148356
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 713

Get Book

Book Description
Which books did the British working classes read--and how did they read them? How did they respond to canonical authors, penny dreadfuls, classical music, school stories, Shakespeare, Marx, Hollywood movies, imperialist propaganda, the Bible, the BBC, the Bloomsbury Group? What was the quality of their classroom education? How did they educate themselves? What was their level of cultural literacy: how much did they know about politics, science, history, philosophy, poetry, and sexuality? Who were the proletarian intellectuals, and why did they pursue the life of the mind? These intriguing questions, which until recently historians considered unanswerable, are addressed in this book. Using innovative research techniques and a vast range of unexpected sources, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes tracks the rise and decline of the British autodidact from the pre-industrial era to the twentieth century. It offers a new method for cultural historians--an "audience history" that recovers the responses of readers, students, theatergoers, filmgoers, and radio listeners. Jonathan Rose provides an intellectual history of people who were not expected to think for themselves, told from their perspective. He draws on workers’ memoirs, oral history, social surveys, opinion polls, school records, library registers, and newspapers. Through its novel and challenging approach to literary history, the book gains access to politics, ideology, popular culture, and social relationships across two centuries of British working-class experience.

The Intellectual Life

The Intellectual Life PDF Author: Philip Gilbert Hamerton
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Culture
Languages : en
Pages : 524

Get Book

Book Description


Museums and American Intellectual Life, 1876-1926

Museums and American Intellectual Life, 1876-1926 PDF Author: Steven Conn
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226114934
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 318

Get Book

Book Description
Conn's study includes familiar places like the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Academy of Natural Sciences, but he also draws attention to forgotten ones, like the Philadelphia Commercial Museum, once the repository for objects from many turn-of-the-century world's fairs. What emerges from Conn's analysis is that museums of all kinds shared a belief that knowledge resided in the objects themselves. Using what Conn has termed "object-based epistemology," museums of the late nineteenth century were on the cutting edge of American intellectual life. By the first quarter of the twentieth century, however, museums had largely been replaced by research-oriented universities as places where new knowledge was produced. According to Conn, not only did this mean a change in the way knowledge was conceived, but also, and perhaps more importantly, who would have access to it.

Ways of Knowing

Ways of Knowing PDF Author: Kay E. Vandergrift
Publisher: School Librarianship Series; 1
ISBN:
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 438

Get Book

Book Description
Provides a forum in which teachers, librarians, academics, and researchers discuss the power that literature has in the intellectual development of children.

Parents with Intellectual Disabilities

Parents with Intellectual Disabilities PDF Author: Gwynnyth Llewellyn
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 9780470660409
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 290

Get Book

Book Description
The first international, cross-disciplinary book to explore and understand the lives of parents with intellectual disabilities, their children, and the systems and services they encounter Presents a unique, pan-disciplinary overview of this growing field of study Offers a human rights approach to disability and family life Informed by the newly adopted UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (2006) Provides comprehensive research-based knowledge from leading figures in the field of intellectual disability

The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes

The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes PDF Author: Jonathan Rose
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300257848
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 557

Get Book

Book Description
This is a landmark intellectual history of Britain's working classes from the preindustrial era to the twentieth century. Drawing on workers' memoirs, social surveys, library registers, and more, Jonathan Rose uncovers which books people read, how they educated themselves, and what they knew. A new preface addresses the continuing relevance of the book amidst the upheavals of the present day. "An astonishing book."--Ian Sansom, The Guardian "A passionate work of history. . . . Rose has written a work of staggering ambition."--Daniel Akst, Wall Street Journal Winner of the SHARP Book History Prize, the American Philosophical Society's Jacques Barzun Prize, and the British Council Prize cowinner of the Longman-History Today Book of the Year Prize for 2001; named one of the finest books of 2001 by The Economist.

Trusting What You’re Told

Trusting What You’re Told PDF Author: Paul L. Harris
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674069846
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 318

Get Book

Book Description
If children were little scientists who learn best through firsthand observations and mini-experiments, as conventional wisdom holds, how would a child discover that the earth is round—never mind conceive of heaven as a place someone might go after death? Overturning both cognitive and commonplace theories about how children learn, Trusting What You’re Told begins by reminding us of a basic truth: Most of what we know we learned from others. Children recognize early on that other people are an excellent source of information. And so they ask questions. But youngsters are also remarkably discriminating as they weigh the responses they elicit. And how much they trust what they are told has a lot to do with their assessment of its source. Trusting What You’re Told opens a window into the moral reasoning of elementary school vegetarians, the preschooler’s ability to distinguish historical narrative from fiction, and the six-year-old’s nuanced stance toward magic: skeptical, while still open to miracles. Paul Harris shares striking cross-cultural findings, too, such as that children in religious communities in rural Central America resemble Bostonian children in being more confident about the existence of germs and oxygen than they are about souls and God. We are biologically designed to learn from one another, Harris demonstrates, and this greediness for explanation marks a key difference between human beings and our primate cousins. Even Kanzi, a genius among bonobos, never uses his keyboard to ask for information: he only asks for treats.

Why the Wild Things Are

Why the Wild Things Are PDF Author: Gail F. Melson
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674040929
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 249

Get Book

Book Description
This is the first book to examine children's many connections to animals and to explore their developmental significance. Gail Melson looks not only at the therapeutic power of pet-owning for children with emotional or physical handicaps, but also the ways in which zoo and farm animals, and even certain television characters, become confidants or teachers for children--and sometimes, tragically, their victims.