American author & educator (1930- )
When common sense sees a puzzling phenomenon it looks for a causal agent. When it sees organization it looks for an organizer. This works amazingly well for purposes ranging from the diagnosis of diseases to the creation of governments. But it cannot account for emergence ... the appearance of complex phenomena not predictable from the basic elements and processes alone.
CARL BEREITER
Education and Mind in the Knowledge Age
The endless story that we construct to make sense of our lives must inevitably include the author as actor, object, observer, and setting, and there is only so much coherence you can expect from a story like that.
CARL BEREITER
Education and Mind in the Knowledge Age
The mind is not some organ that does the sense-making. That role belongs to the brain. The mind is a product of our sense-making activity. It is what our sense-making postulates when it tries to make sense of itself.
CARL BEREITER
Education and Mind in the Knowledge Age
In the traditional view, the mind is like a filing cabinet. Items get added to it or removed from time to time, through learning and forgetting. Otherwise, the knowledge just sits there until an occasion arises for particular items of it to be taken out and used. So long as that view is retained, it is impossible to understand the centrality of knowledge in expertise. If knowledge is just items in a mental filing cabinet, then it is easy to acknowledge that an expert must have a well-stocked filing cabinet.
CARL BEREITER
Surpassing Ourselves