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Originally Posted by Xenophon
Neko -- Can you make some specific recommendations, preferably with links? Some time ago I tried looking for good practical stuff in the academic literature on Education -- and wound up over in Psych rather than Education. The bulk of what I found in education journals was... I'll politely say "seriously deficient" in terms of connection with any reality that I recognized.
EDIT: I was looking into English as a second language at the time, which may have skewed what I found.
Please note: this doesn't mean that all education research is lousy, but rather that the stuff I happen to have found was lousy.
I'd be very interested in readings that are actually useful or insightful or even well-supported by research. Better still if they're accessible to interested scientifically trained non-specialists as well.
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I'll see what I can turn up. I think Nel Noddings is very readable, but again, she's more on the philosophical than practical end of things (though she backs up her theories with observational studies). Rogoff isn't quite so accessible.
I would suggest starting with Stephen Jay Gould's
The Mismeasure of Man. It is not directly about education, but it is about how the idea of "intelligence" has been abused to maintain existing social structures. And Gould knows his stuff about statistics.
I suppose it might be the case that American culture values the outlier over the statistical norm, but that hasn't been my experience as an outlier.
(How's that for a "not my experience" statement? How ironic. Or it would be if there were a study backing up the idea that Americans are more likely to value the outlier...
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