Coloring Outside the Lines: Raising a smarter kid by breaking all the rules, Roger Schank
This was the first book I every read on the field of education, back when I was contemplating changing my career to this field – well before even my daughter was born. It helped me to break away from the traditional mode of thinking about schools and education. He starts the book with the sentence – “I am writing this book because I’m horrified by what schools are doing to children”. His emphasis on developing the “life-long passion for learning” in children and what parents and teachers can do to develop it, has lived with me through this day as I struggle to be a good parent for my daughter. He gives very practical tips about how educational theory can be applied to “personal, everyday situations”.
Smart Schools: Better Thinking and Learning for Every Child, David Perkins
I read this book for one of my courses at Harvard and it introduced me to what is important to teach children and some of the methods of teaching them. This book is about how we should move away from teaching “fragile knowledge” and move towards teaching crucial skills like critical thinking, problem solving, creativity, meta-cognition and so on. For, if we teach children these skills, not only will robust knowledge be automatically developed, but skills crucial to navigating this world and making a difference in it will become ingrained in their brains.
Parents who are not familiar with the field of education may find some of the language in this book somewhat “deep”. But overall this book is quite easy to read and I would say that it is good for us parents to really become familiar with this “deep” language in order to understand our children and their learning, better.
How children learn, John Holt
How children fail, John Holt
I have read only parts of these two books, but they are probably the most down-to-earth books that parents can read to understand their children’s cognitive development. In fact, many of the instances that Holt describes in this book are related to his parenting.
Overall, I would say that all these books drive home the message again and again, that it is not knowledge and facts that we should teach our children, but it is the skills to acquire this knowledge, think critically, problem solve, be creative and so on. And that they should be done in a way that they develop a life long passion for learning and NOT for rewards.
