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Volume 9 |
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Designing Units & Courses |
The very optimistic outlook resulting from our research on the development of basic qualitative notions, which ought to constitute the foundation of elementary instruction in the sciences, would seem to suggest that a fairly far-reaching reform in this area would help answer societies need for scientists. But this depends on certain conditions that are doubtless those of all intellectual training, although they seem to be particularly important in the various branches of scientific training.
The first of these conditions is, of course, the use of active methods which give broad scope to the spontaneous research of the child or adolescent and require every new truth be learned be rediscovered or at least reconstructed by the student, and not simply imparted to him. Two common misunderstandings, however, have diminished the value of the efforts made in this field up to now. The first is the fear (and sometimes the hope) that the teacher would have no role to play in these experiments and that their success would depend on leaving the student entirely free to work or play as they will. It is obvious that the teacher as organizer remains indispensable in order to create the situations and construct the initial devices which present useful problems to the child. Secondly, he is needed to provide counter-examples that compel reflection and reconsideration of over-hasty solutions. What is desired is that the teacher cease being a lecturer, satisfied with transmitting ready-made solutions; his role should rather be that of a mentor stimulating initiative and research.
In physics and the natural sciences the incredible failing of traditional schools till very recently has been to have almost systematically neglected to train pupils in experimentation. It is not the experiments the teacher may demonstrate before them, or those they carry out themselves according to a pre-established procedure, that will teach students the general rules of scientific experimentation---such as the variation of one factor when the others have been neutralized (ceteris paribus), or the dissociation of fortuitous fluctuations and regular variations. In this context more than in any other, the methods of the future will have to give more and more scope to the activity and the groups of students as well as to the spontaneous handling of devices intended to confirm or refute the hypothesis they have formed to explain a given elementary phenomenon. In other words, if there is any area in which active methods will probably become imperative in the full sense of the term, it is that in which experimental procedures are learned, for an experiment not carried out by the individual himself with all freedom of initiative is by definition not an experiment but mere drill with no educational value: the details of the successive steps are not adequately understood.
In short, the basic principle of active methods will have to draw its inspiration from the history of science and may be expressed as follows: to understand is to discover, or reconstruct by rediscovery, and such conditions must be complied with if the future individuals are to be formed who are capable of production and creativity and not simply repetition. (Excerpted from J. Piaget, To Understand is to Invent (New York: Viking, 1973), pp. 15-20. Used with permission of Penguin Books USA, Inc.)