Overview
Radical in its implications, this original and important work may change forever the views we hold about the nature of learning. In The Power of Mindful Learning, Ellen Langer uses her innovative theory of mindulness, introduced in her influential earlier book, to dramatically enhance the way we learn.In business, sports, laboratories, or at home, our learning is hobbled by certain antiquated and pervasive misconceptions. In this pithy, liberating, and delightful book she gives us a fresh, new view of learning in the broadest sense. Such familiar notions as delayed gratification, ”the basics”, or even ”right answers”, are all incapacitating myths which Langer explodes one by one. She replaces them with her concept of mindful or conditional learning which she demonstrates, with fascinating examples from her research, to be extraordinarily effective. Mindful learning takes place with an awareness of context and of the ever-changing nature of information. Learning without this awareness, as Langer shows convincingly, has severely limited uses and often sets on up for failure.With stunning applications to skills as diverse as paying attention, CPR, investment analysis, psychotherapy, or playing a musical instrument, The Power of Mindful Learning is for all who are curious and intellectually adventurous.
Editorials
Edith Kaplan
Like Freud, Piaget, Werner, and Vygotsky, Langer is well on her way to constructing a grand theory of human functioning with important implications for such diverse areas as education and learning, development and aging, proof relations, and psycho-and neural- pathology.— Contemporary Psychology
Kirkus Reviews
A wonderfully thoughtful and thought-provoking follow-up to the author's earlier study Mindfulness (1989), this time exploring the ill effects of mindlessness in education.After long and careful research, Langer (Psychology/Harvard Univ.) has distilled the basic philosophy of our current, flawed educational system into seven commonly held myths: The basics must be learned so well that they become second nature; paying attention means being focused on one thing at a time; delaying gratification is important; rote memorization is necessary; forgetting is a problem; intelligence is knowing "what's out there"; and there are right and wrong answers. Showing how many of the problems with education today can be traced to the seven myths and teachers' efforts to mold students with them, Langer counters with five principles of her own, the basis of what she calls "sideways learning": openness to novelty; alertness to distinction; sensitivity to different contexts; implicit, if not explicit, awareness of multiple perspectives; and orientation in the present. She offers alternative approaches based on her five principles, with startling results. For example, when Langer and her colleagues rewrote a chapter from a standard text on finance so that facts were presented as conditional rather than absolute, students who were tested on their creative use of the material did significantly better, and enjoyed the reading more, than those using the original text. Langer's arguments are extremely persuasive and supported with meticulous research. While it's not always clear how to implement her findings, especially for the individual who has been trained in the seven-myth method, this is still an invaluable first step to solving many of the problems of our educational system today.
An excellent introduction to what might be (and certainly should be) the next paradigm shift in education.