The Having of Wonderful Ideas cover

The Having of Wonderful Ideas

by Eleanor Duckworth

The having of wonderful ideas. That's the whole point of education.

For you if

you want the philosophical and scientific foundation for inquiry-based learning from the woman who translated Piaget and spent a career proving his ideas work in real classrooms

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Duckworth was a student of Jean Piaget — she translated his work into English and worked with him directly — and spent her career asking what his developmental psychology meant for classroom practice. Her central argument: the having of wonderful ideas is the essence of intellectual development, and the job of education is to create the conditions where wonderful ideas can happen. Not to transmit knowledge. Not to cover the curriculum. To provoke genuine inquiry in minds that are already hungry for it. The most intellectually rigorous constructivist education book ever written for a general audience — the one that connects Piaget's research on how children actually develop understanding to the specific things teachers and parents can do to support rather than undermine that process. Duckworth taught at Harvard for decades and spent those decades watching what happens when learners of any age are given time, materials, and genuine problems to think about. What happens is that they think. Brilliantly. Without being told to.

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The best case for project-based learning, with caveats.

A year inside High Tech High, a San Diego charter school built entirely around project-based learning instead of standardized instruction, following two classes of ninth graders.

Why it’s here: Makes the most vivid case in documentary form for project-based learning over the standard model — but its history of how American schooling got this way has been disputed by actual education historians, and its producers have their own stake in the reform it's arguing for. Worth watching with that critique alongside it, not instead of it.

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