The Informed Vision: Essays on Learning and Human Nature

by David Hawkins

An education classic is back in print. 15 essays on how children learn. David Hawkins led a long and respected career as an educator and as a scholar of how we learn. A must read for educators, and all who are concerned with schools and the relationships between teachers and children.

256 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1974

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads database.

David Hawkins received a B.A. in 1934 and an M.A. in 1936 from Stanford University, and a Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley in 1940.
He was primarely interested in the philosophy of science and in ethics.
Together with his wife, Francis (née Pockman) he founded the CU campus-based Mountain View Center for Environmental Education.

Reviews

[Jamie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Hawkins was a philosopher who stepped down from teaching philosophy for a time to research best practices for teaching children science in the 1960s and 1970s. He and a colleague set up a lab school in Massachusetts where children and their teachers explored science concepts through hands-on "play." This book is a collection of his essays, reports, and transcribed speeches he gave on the topic of science education in early childhood and how open explorations in a carefully planned environment leads to more broad and deeper understanding and less boredom in the classroom. Hawkins is very critical of the "ladder" approach to education of the United States (and Great Britain), where teachers are to recite a curriculum from a book and keep students on a single, upward path. Instead he promotes carefully planned classrooms where students explore freely, with only occasional direction from a teacher, so that their explorations and understandings branch out like trees. As students learn and process information, they learn from the teacher and from each other, creating many inter-related networks of knowledge, rather than all students only understanding the same rungs on a ladder.

I mostly found it very interesting that Hawkins's perspective mirrors my own an entire generation (or two) later.